New York small business statistics, by county

The number that matters to a buyer

Every statistic about small business in New York counts the wrong thing for someone trying to buy one. Headline counts include corporate branches, large employers and franchise units that will never be sold to an individual. What a buyer wants is the size of the acquisition-scale universe: businesses small enough to finance with an SBA loan and run themselves.

That is computable, because Census publishes establishment counts by employment size class. Applying it to New York: 476,454 of 541,313 employer establishments — 88% — employ fewer than 20 people. Widen it to fewer than 50 and the figure is 516,536.

Set that against the handful of businesses visible on any public marketplace at a given moment and the point of the four-channel sourcing model becomes obvious. The listed market is a rounding error against the real one.

Where the acquisition-scale businesses are

Two things to read out of this rather than the raw ranking. First, density is not opportunity: New York County has the most establishments and also the most competition, the highest occupancy costs and the Commercial Rent Tax. Second, the pay column is a labour-cost signal — a business with the same revenue carries a very different payroll in Manhattan than in the Southern Tier, and that difference lands directly in SDE.

By sector, statewide

The share column is the useful one. A sector where 95% of establishments are under 20 employees is structurally a small-business sector — owner-operated, fragmented, and full of businesses that will eventually change hands. A sector where the share is lower is one where the establishments are mostly branches of something larger, and where an individual buyer has fewer realistic targets than the headline count suggests.

All 62 counties

How this was built, and what it does not say

Both files were downloaded and parsed directly rather than read from anyone’s summary. No figure on this page has been rounded, adjusted or estimated.

• Establishments, employment and size classes come from the Census County Business Patterns 2023 complete county file, filtered to New York (FIPS 36).^[1]
• Acquisition-scale means the sum of the published size classes for 1–4, 5–9 and 10–19 employees. That threshold is our editorial choice, not a Census category, and it is stated so you can disagree with it.
• Average annual pay is the BLS QCEW 2024 private-sector, all-industry average weekly wage multiplied by 52.^[2] BLS publishes the weekly figure; the annualisation is ours and is a simple multiplication, not a modelled annual earnings figure.

Four limits worth stating plainly:

1. Establishments are locations, not companies. A four-branch business appears four times. This inflates retail and food service relative to professional services.
2. Employer establishments only. Businesses with no payroll are excluded entirely. There are far more of them, and almost none are acquisition targets.
3. Census suppresses disclosive cells. For small county and industry combinations some size classes are withheld to protect individual employers, so size classes do not always sum to the total. Totals here use the published establishment field rather than a reconstruction.^[3]
4. Two vintages. CBP runs about two years behind; QCEW publishes sooner. They are labelled separately rather than blended, because presenting them as one year would be a small untruth that compounds.
5. 1,148 establishments appear in the CBP file under “county unknown or undefined.” They are included in the state total and excluded from the county table, which is why the county rows sum slightly below the state figure.

Use the data

The full dataset — all 62 counties, all 20 sectors, every size class — is available as JSON: ny-market.json. The underlying federal data is public domain. The arrangement here, and the acquisition-scale framing, are ours; attribution and a link are all we ask.

If you are using this to size a market rather than to cite a number, pair it with the regional guides, which cover what the counts do not: what it actually costs to operate in each market, and which licences and taxes attach there.