State Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States (2020)

The Kauffman Indicators of Early-Stage Entrepreneurship is a set of measures that represents new business creation in the United States, integrating several high-quality, timely sources of information on early-stage entrepreneurship.

This report represents four indicators that track early-stage entrepreneurship for the years 1996-2020: rate of new entrepreneurs reflects the number of new entrepreneurs in a given month, opportunity share of new entrepreneurs is the percentage of new entrepreneurs who created their businesses out of opportunity instead of necessity, startup early job creation is the total number of jobs created by startups per capita, and startup early survival rate is the one-year average survival rate for new firms. State level trends are reported for all four indicators.

Report Highlights:

The rate of new entrepreneurs in 2020 ranged from a low of 0.16% in Rhode Island to a high of 0.53% in Florida. The median for states in 2020 was 0.31%, reflecting 310 out of every 100,000 adults.
The opportunity share of new entrepreneurs ranged from a low of 66.0% in Massachusetts to 95.1% in North Dakota, with a median of 81.4%.
Startup early job creation in Washington, D.C., was 7.8 jobs per 1,000 people, compared with 2.9 jobs per 1,000 people in West Virginia, and a median of 4.5.
Startup early survival rate ranged from 63.4% in Washington to 81.8% in California, with a median of 77.9%.
The overall KESE Index – an equally-weighted composite of the four indicators – ranged from -7.8% in Washington to 5.2 in Florida, with a median of -0.1.