Business Formation Statistics

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Business Formation Statistics (BFS) are a standard data product of the U.S. Census Bureau developed at the Center for Economic Studies in research collaboration with economists affiliated with Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, University of Maryland, and University of Notre Dame. BFS provide timely and high frequency information on new business applications and formations in the United States.

Latest Monthly Business Formation Statistics Report

Weekly Data

Release Schedule

Announcements

Notice: As of September 11, 2025, Monthly Puerto Rico Business Applications are no longer a separate experimental data product and are part of the Monthly standard data product.
Notice: The Census Bureau is releasing Annual Island Areas Business Applications as a standard data product. This new standard product provides a historical data series of annual business applications for American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and U.S. Virgin Islands, from 2005 to 2024 and will be published annually going forward.
Notice: The next annual update will be applied during the November 2025 monthly release, scheduled for December 12, 2025. During the annual update, the Formation series are updated annually to revise information on business formations (firm births) from the Business Dynamic Statistics (BDS) program. Also, seasonal factors are recomputed and applied during the annual update, resulting in revisions to our seasonally adjusted series.

During the annual update underlying NAICS codes are typically revised each year for the previous five years when more accurate and detailed NAICS codes may be available from administrative sources. Due to significant differences between 2017 NAICS and 2022 NAICS vintages, the entire time series will be restated to 2022 NAICS during this annual update. The November 2025 monthly data publication will be the first release using 2022 NAICS.
Notice: Beginning with the November 2025 monthly release, applications associated with internet sales will be excluded from the high-propensity (HBA) and corporation (CBA) application series. The HBA and CBA definitions will be updated for the entire time series. This update is associated with the periodic evaluation of the characteristics associated with high-propensity applications and their likelihood to turn into a business formation.
Notice: Annual Business Applications by County was released on June 11, 2025. The annual release adds data for 2024 and incorporates revisions for previously published 2023 and 2022 annual county counts.
Notice: The BFS visualizations will not be updated until further notice. Please see data in the Latest Monthly Business Formation Statistics Report.
Notice: Due to a scheduled outage of the Internal Revenue Service's online Employer Identification Number (EIN) Assistant from December 27, 2024 until January 2, 2025, applicants were unable to apply for an EIN through the web application. As a result, the Business Formation Statistics Monthly data for January 2025 and Weekly data for Week 1, 2025 are impacted.
Notice: Weekly Business Application data with industry detail, as classified by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), were released on February 5, 2025. This updated release adds data through 2024. It also incorporates revisions to the underlying NAICS code assignment methodology for previously published weekly BFS by industry data. The data are available on our Special Projects portion of our website.
Historical Announcements: See our Previous Announcements document for historical BFS announcements.

Business Formation Statistics

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