Here are the local business statistics that actually matter in 2026, from a database of 210,289,792 local business records across 245 countries and territories. The United States accounts for 18.4 million of those records. The SBA counts 36.2 million US small businesses with a different lens. And 42.9% of US local businesses have no website at all. Every number in this report comes from a query I ran in September 2026 or from an official source like the Census Bureau, the SBA, or the BLS, with dates on everything.
Why does this page exist? Because I got burned by second-hand stats.
In 2022, I planned an outreach program for a client expanding beyond the DACH region. I assumed email coverage everywhere looked like the US. Then the India pilot list came back, and only a sliver of records had an email attached. The campaign math collapsed in one afternoon. So now I check the real distributions first, and I’m publishing them so you can too. Cite any number here with a link back, and use them freely in your decks.
Local Business Statistics: The Key Numbers
Short on time? These are the headline local business statistics for 2026, each one self-contained and citable:
- There are 210,289,792 local business records worldwide in the CUFinder database, spanning 245 countries and territories (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- India holds the most map-visible local businesses (35.98 million records, 17.1% of the global total), ahead of China (23.38 million) and the United States (18.4 million).
- The SBA counts 36,207,130 small businesses in the US; 99.9% of U.S. businesses are small businesses (SBA Office of Advocacy, February 2026).
- The Census Bureau counts 8,361,342 US employer establishments with 139.8 million employees (County Business Patterns 2023).
- 42.9% of US local businesses have no website: that is 7,891,313 businesses (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- Only 31% of US local business records include a verified email, while 83.5% include a phone number (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- Toll-free numbers front 599,321 US local businesses, almost double the 331,766 that publish a definitively mobile number (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- TikTok is still niche for local business: 1.9% of records worldwide link a TikTok profile, against 12.2% for Facebook (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- Rated US local businesses average 4.36 stars, and 56.7% hold a 4.5-star average or better (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- Pharmacies are the worst-reviewed common local business category in the US at 3.74 stars on average (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- Full-service restaurants are the single biggest industry code on Earth: NAICS 722511 covers 13.9 million records, 6.6% of everything (CUFinder query, September 2026).
- About 5.6 million new US business applications were filed in 2025 (Census Business Formation Statistics).
- 67.7% of new US employer establishments survive at least two years; 49.2% survive five (BLS Business Employment Dynamics, 1994 to 2022 average, via SBA).
Now let’s unpack where each number comes from, because that part matters more than people think.
Where These Numbers Come From
Every first-party figure on this page comes from the CUFinder local business database, queried in September 2026. A record here is a map-visible business location: a place with a name, an address, a category, and whatever contact channels we can verify, from phone numbers to emails to social profiles. Each record carries SIC and NAICS industry codes. Across the full database, that is 6,050 industry categories mapped to 804 SIC codes and 1,049 NAICS codes.
And here’s what this count is NOT. It is not a count of tax registrations. A freelancer with an LLC and no public listing won’t appear. A registered firm that never claimed a listing won’t appear either. Official sources like the SBA count those; map-visible data cannot. That’s why our US count and the SBA’s count differ by design, and I break that reconciliation down fully in a companion piece later in this article.
I also want to name the quirks, because honest methodology beats tidy marketing:
- Map data includes non-commercial places. Churches, parks, schools, and government offices all have listings. US churches alone account for 229,735 records.
- Puerto Rico runs high. The territory ranks fifth among US states and territories in our records, partly a density-of-listings effect. I flag it in the state table.
- A few review scores were junk. Exactly 13 US records carried scores above the 5-point scale. I excluded them from every review stat.
- Shares are approximate. Records refresh continuously, so treat percentages as close, not carved in stone.
- One snapshot, no trends. This is September 2026 data. I won’t claim year-over-year changes our data can’t support.
Two housekeeping rules I follow throughout. Tables show exact queried figures; prose rounds them for readability (210 million, 18.4 million, 43%). And official statistics are never blended into our tables. An SBA number lives in a sentence with the SBA’s name on it, so you always know whose lens you’re looking through.
When I first ran the category query and saw churches out-counting restaurants in the US, I laughed out loud. Then I wrote it down, because that’s exactly the kind of thing a stats page should tell you.
🔍 Did You Know? There are more churches (229,735) than restaurants (212,617) among US records in our database. Map-visible data counts every listed place, not just the commercial ones. Always ask what a business count includes before you build on it.
So that’s the lens. Now let’s look through it.
How Many Local Businesses Are There Worldwide?
There are 210,289,792 local business records worldwide across 245 countries and territories, as of September 2026. The top 12 countries hold 66.2% of all records. And the ranking will surprise you if you’ve only ever seen US-centric numbers.
| Rank | Country | Business records | Share of global | Email fill | Phone fill |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | India | 35,982,618 | 17.1% | 2.8% | 43.9% |
| 2 | China | 23,377,010 | 11.1% | 1.0% | 32.4% |
| 3 | United States | 18,400,261 | 8.7% | 31.0% | 83.5% |
| 4 | Indonesia | 14,685,225 | 7.0% | 1.7% | 54.1% |
| 5 | Brazil | 10,608,516 | 5.0% | 6.8% | 70.2% |
| 6 | Japan | 7,616,459 | 3.6% | 15.9% | 69.9% |
| 7 | Mexico | 6,173,682 | 2.9% | 5.4% | 58.0% |
| 8 | Germany | 5,472,994 | 2.6% | 34.7% | 79.7% |
| 9 | France | 4,714,053 | 2.2% | 23.7% | 76.4% |
| 10 | Italy | 4,265,679 | 2.0% | 20.2% | 76.1% |
| 11 | United Kingdom | 4,017,355 | 1.9% | 33.4% | 77.9% |
| 12 | Vietnam | 3,808,848 | 1.8% | 4.4% | 59.8% |
Top 10 countries by local business records
Source: CUFinder Local Business Database, 210M+ records, September 2026.
Source: CUFinder local business database, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
Three findings jump out of this table.
First, India and China together hold more than a quarter of the world’s map-visible local businesses. The US sits third at 8.7%. If your mental model of “local business” is an American strip mall, the global picture looks very different.
Second, contactability inverts the ranking. Counts tell you size. They don’t tell you who you can reach. Fill rates do. The US pairs its 18.4 million records with 31% email fill and 83.5% phone fill. India’s 36 million records carry 2.8% email fill. China’s email fill is 1%. Among larger markets, the Netherlands (39.8%), Canada (37.4%), and Germany (34.7%) lead email coverage in our data.
Third, phone beats email everywhere. In every single country in the table, phone fill runs far ahead of email fill. Local businesses answer calls. They don’t all publish inboxes.
The second tier is worth a note too. Turkey (3.38 million records) and Spain (3.34 million) nearly match Vietnam in size. Canada holds 1.84 million records with a strong 37.4% email fill, Australia 1.67 million at 32.1%, and the Netherlands 1.40 million at 39.8%, the best email coverage of any market in our data. Smaller, wealthier markets punch far above their weight on reachability.
📌 Example: India has 35,982,618 business records, but a 2.8% email fill means roughly 1 million emailable businesses. Germany has 5,472,994 records and 34.7% email fill, which is about 1.9 million emailable businesses. The "smaller" market is nearly twice as reachable by email.
That example is the 2022 lesson I mentioned. I sized a campaign by record counts and got humbled by fill rates. Pick markets by reachable businesses, not raw totals.
That’s the world map. Now let’s zoom into the US.
US Local Business Statistics
The US holds 18,400,261 local business records across 13,988 cities, as of September 2026. Official counts frame the same economy differently. The SBA’s answer: there are 36.2 million small businesses in the United States as of 2026, counting every registered firm. The Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns counts 8,361,342 employer establishments for 2023. Three lenses, three honest numbers, and I reconcile them a few sections down.
Here’s how those 18.4 million records spread across the states:
| Rank | State | Business records | Share of US | Has a website |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 1,801,748 | 9.8% | 59.3% |
| 2 | Florida | 1,629,491 | 8.9% | 51.7% |
| 3 | Texas | 1,484,886 | 8.1% | 58.9% |
| 4 | New York | 977,289 | 5.3% | 57.6% |
| 5 | Puerto Rico (US territory) | 736,556 | 4.0% | 30.6% |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 674,354 | 3.7% | 58.8% |
| 7 | Illinois | 636,372 | 3.5% | 60.5% |
| 8 | North Carolina | 574,834 | 3.1% | 58.6% |
| 9 | Ohio | 574,443 | 3.1% | 60.9% |
| 10 | Georgia | 564,242 | 3.1% | 58.6% |
| 11 | Michigan | 508,968 | 2.8% | 62.1% |
| 12 | New Jersey | 456,283 | 2.5% | 60.4% |
| 13 | Virginia | 420,147 | 2.3% | 61.6% |
| 14 | Washington | 399,038 | 2.2% | 62.0% |
| 15 | Tennessee | 388,941 | 2.1% | 54.4% |
Source: CUFinder local business database, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
California, Florida, and Texas alone hold 26.7% of all US records. No shock for the three most populous states, and worth remembering when someone quotes raw state counts as “opportunity” without adjusting for population. And the official data agrees on the podium: the SBA’s 2025 state profiles count 4.34 million small businesses in California, 3.52 million in Texas, and 3.49 million in Florida. Interesting detail: in our map-visible records, Florida edges Texas for second place. Storefront density and tourism listings push Florida up when you count places instead of registrations.
The website column tells its own story. Michigan, Washington, and Virginia lead at around 62%. Florida lags at 51.7%, and Puerto Rico sits at 30.6%. If your product assumes every prospect has a website, whole regions quietly fall out of your funnel.
I used this exact state distribution in 2024 to split an Austin-based client’s two field reps into fair territories. The record counts made the split obvious in an hour. The Puerto Rico row also taught me to annotate territories before a rep asks why their patch looks inflated. If you’d rather pull public counts yourself, my tour of free local business database sources walks through registries and Census tools that get you partway there.
So where do all these businesses cluster by trade? Let’s talk industries.
Local Businesses by Industry
Globally, services and retail dominate local business. Here’s the distribution of all 210.3 million records across our industry categories:
| Industry category | Records worldwide | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Other services | 40,379,188 | 19.2% |
| Retail (general) | 34,141,722 | 16.2% |
| Food & beverage (dining) | 17,815,833 | 8.5% |
| Automotive services | 13,039,052 | 6.2% |
| Government & community | 11,488,834 | 5.5% |
| Healthcare & medical | 9,345,517 | 4.4% |
| Education & training | 8,938,907 | 4.3% |
| Beauty & personal care | 8,138,374 | 3.9% |
| Retail (fashion & clothing) | 7,607,404 | 3.6% |
| Manufacturing & industrial supply | 7,175,333 | 3.4% |
| Health, wellness & sports | 5,699,443 | 2.7% |
| Construction & heavy contractors | 4,935,150 | 2.3% |
| Food & beverage (retail & production) | 4,753,617 | 2.3% |
| Hospitality & travel | 4,707,089 | 2.2% |
| Retail (home & garden) | 4,159,107 | 2.0% |
| All other categories (9) | 27,778,769 | 13.2% |
Source: CUFinder local business database, September 2026. About 186,000 records (under 0.1%) carry no category label and are excluded. Shares are approximate.
Dining alone is 8.5% of the planet’s local businesses. Add food retail and production, and eating-related businesses pass 10%. Humans really like food. Who knew?
The industry codes make this sharper. Because every record carries SIC and NAICS codes, we can rank the most common codes on Earth:
| NAICS code | What it means | Records worldwide | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 722511 | Full-service restaurants | 13,922,054 | 6.6% |
| 445110 | Supermarkets & grocery stores | 10,297,817 | 4.9% |
| 813110 | Religious organizations | 7,280,855 | 3.5% |
| 611110 | Elementary & secondary schools | 5,530,780 | 2.6% |
| 551114 | Corporate & regional managing offices | 4,575,057 | 2.2% |
| 812112 | Beauty salons | 4,299,469 | 2.0% |
| 448140 | Family clothing stores | 4,018,705 | 1.9% |
| 531110 | Lessors of residential buildings | 3,595,045 | 1.7% |
| 722513 | Limited-service restaurants | 3,255,224 | 1.5% |
| 621111 | Offices of physicians | 2,907,283 | 1.4% |
Source: CUFinder local business database, September 2026. NAICS labels follow the official Census NAICS titles, lightly shortened.
On the SIC side, the picture is even more concentrated. SIC 5812, eating places, covers 19,778,668 records. That is 9.4% of every local business record on the planet under one four-digit code. Miscellaneous retail (5999) and grocery stores (5411) follow at 4.3% and 3.8%.
🧠 Fun Fact: If you picked a random local business anywhere on Earth, there's nearly a 1 in 10 chance it serves food under SIC 5812. Restaurants are the closest thing the local economy has to a universal business.
And this is where codes earn their keep. Category labels differ by platform and language. Codes don’t. If you’re segmenting a market, my guide to how you can build a business list by industry with SIC and NAICS codes shows the workflow step by step.
Counts and categories done. Next question: how digital are these businesses, really?
Digital Presence Statistics: The No-Website Economy
42.9% of US local businesses have no website, which is 7,891,313 businesses as of September 2026. Globally, the gap is far wider: only 27.8% of all records include a website, while 58.9% include a phone number. Email sits at 11.5% worldwide, Facebook at 12.2%, Instagram and LinkedIn at 9.5% each. And TikTok, the channel everyone asks me about, links to just 1.9% of records worldwide (4,019,001 businesses), with YouTube at 6.0% and X at 6.1%.
Here’s the full US channel picture:
| Channel | US records with it | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Phone number | 15,371,693 | 83.5% |
| Website | 10,508,948 | 57.1% |
| No website | 7,891,313 | 42.9% |
| Facebook profile | 6,106,345 | 33.2% |
| Email address | 5,700,491 | 31.0% |
| LinkedIn profile | 5,437,438 | 29.6% |
| Instagram profile | 4,533,165 | 24.6% |
The no-website economy: channel presence of 18.4M US businesses
Source: CUFinder Local Business Database, 210M+ records, September 2026.
Source: CUFinder local business database, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
What Kind of Phone Numbers Do US Businesses Publish?
Most US local businesses publish a standard geographic number, 599,321 answer on a toll-free line, and only 331,766 list a number our parser can prove is mobile. Since phone is the dominant channel at 83.5% fill, the type of number matters as much as having one. Here’s the full phone-type distribution across all 18.4 million US records:
| Phone number type | US records | Share of US records |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed line or mobile (US format hides which) | 14,038,511 | 76.3% |
| Toll-free (800, 888, and similar) | 599,321 | 3.3% |
| Definitively mobile | 331,766 | 1.8% |
| Definitively fixed line | 136,841 | 0.7% |
| VoIP | 10,316 | 0.1% |
| Other classified types | 6,972 | Under 0.1% |
| No classifiable number on record | 3,276,534 | 17.8% |
Source: CUFinder local business database, US records, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
Two practical reads. First, the giant 76.3% bucket exists because the North American numbering plan assigns mobile and landline numbers from the same area codes, so a US number alone can’t tell you whether it takes texts. If your campaign depends on SMS, you need carrier-level verification, not just a phone column. Second, the toll-free share is a useful tell: a 1-800 line usually means a chain, a franchise headquarters, or a routed call center rather than an owner picking up. Nearly twice as many US businesses front a toll-free line as publish a provably mobile one, which says a lot about who actually answers local business phones.
But the averages hide the real story. Digital presence is wildly uneven by industry. Look at this:
| US industry | Records | Has website | No website | Has email | Has Instagram |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | 212,617 | 50.4% | 49.6% | 22.2% | 22.7% |
| Dentists | 199,971 | 54.5% | 45.5% | 25.2% | 17.3% |
| Auto repair shops | 178,734 | 42.8% | 57.2% | 20.0% | 9.5% |
| Beauty salons | 163,149 | 37.1% | 62.9% | 12.5% | 14.9% |
| Insurance agencies | 147,708 | 76.4% | 23.6% | 45.6% | 35.7% |
| Real estate agencies | 142,060 | 70.8% | 29.2% | 46.3% | 21.8% |
| Pharmacies | 105,285 | 65.8% | 34.2% | 16.3% | 48.9% |
| Grocery stores | 101,671 | 38.2% | 61.8% | 18.9% | 20.2% |
| General contractors | 89,404 | 53.1% | 46.9% | 33.0% | 10.6% |
| Coffee shops | 75,109 | 72.6% | 27.4% | 22.4% | 56.6% |
| Landscapers | 65,060 | 53.8% | 46.2% | 27.5% | 11.3% |
| Electricians | 64,590 | 49.0% | 51.0% | 28.9% | 6.9% |
| Gyms | 60,434 | 61.0% | 39.0% | 31.6% | 42.2% |
| Plumbers | 58,587 | 50.3% | 49.7% | 28.9% | 10.0% |
| HVAC contractors | 43,716 | 70.8% | 29.2% | 40.9% | 14.9% |
| Law firms | 30,597 | 79.2% | 20.8% | 62.7% | 12.2% |
Source: CUFinder local business database, US records, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
Read that table twice. It’s the most useful one on this page.
62.9% of US beauty salons have no website. Same story for grocery stores (61.8%) and auto repair shops (57.2%). Meanwhile law firms (79.2% with websites, 62.7% with emails) and insurance agencies (76.4% with websites) live online. The spread between the most and least digital common industries is more than 40 points.
Does no website mean no digital presence? No. Many of these businesses run entirely on a Google Business Profile: the listing is the homepage, the reviews are the testimonials, and the phone number is the checkout. A salon with full appointment books has no reason to pay for a site. That’s a rational choice, not a failure.
And notice the channel personalities. Coffee shops are Instagram-first: 56.6% have a profile, more than double the US average. Pharmacies surprisingly post too (48.9%). But electricians? 6.9% Instagram, 95.7% phone. The trades answer calls, not DMs.
Facebook skews differently again. Coffee shops (58.6%), pharmacies (55.8%), and insurance agencies (54.5%) all beat the 33.2% US average there, while auto repair shops sit at 19.7% and beauty salons at 17.7%. Same businesses, completely different social map. There is no single “local businesses are on X” truth.
Social Media Adoption by Industry Category
Zoom out from individual industries to our 24 broad US categories and the social map sharpens further. Facebook leads in every single category, LinkedIn quietly beats Instagram in the B2B-leaning ones, and TikTok splits the economy into haves and have-nots. Here are the largest categories:
| US category | Records | TikTok | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other services | 4,464,895 | 21.3% | 29.6% | 3.4% | 28.8% |
| Retail (general) | 1,722,728 | 31.0% | 37.0% | 12.1% | 31.8% |
| Automotive services | 1,568,119 | 25.7% | 34.8% | 3.8% | 30.1% |
| Healthcare & medical | 1,016,389 | 26.8% | 37.5% | 6.7% | 36.0% |
| Government & community | 1,006,670 | 19.4% | 30.9% | 2.0% | 21.4% |
| Food & beverage (dining) | 984,488 | 34.0% | 40.9% | 12.3% | 31.8% |
| Construction & heavy contractors | 833,193 | 15.2% | 25.1% | 1.5% | 25.0% |
| Beauty & personal care | 743,280 | 23.3% | 26.8% | 7.3% | 16.7% |
| Health, wellness & sports | 720,566 | 25.9% | 32.2% | 6.3% | 27.2% |
| Financial & legal services | 700,201 | 26.8% | 42.0% | 5.0% | 45.5% |
| Home services & maintenance | 679,908 | 16.0% | 25.9% | 3.9% | 19.6% |
| Manufacturing & industrial supply | 513,485 | 20.7% | 34.0% | 2.3% | 42.7% |
| Education & training | 503,517 | 33.3% | 43.1% | 5.5% | 36.6% |
| Retail (fashion & clothing) | 331,148 | 34.8% | 38.0% | 15.0% | 31.3% |
Social media adoption by US industry category
Source: CUFinder Local Business Database, 210M+ records, September 2026.
Source: CUFinder local business database, US records with social profile links, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
The TikTok column is the one you won’t find published anywhere else. Fashion retail leads the country at 15.0%, with dining (12.3%) and general retail (12.1%) close behind. At the other end, construction contractors sit at 1.5% and agriculture at 1.6%. Across the remaining categories, hospitality & travel (11.2%) is the only other double-digit TikTok vertical, while event planning, real estate, and IT all hover near 3%. The pattern is simple: businesses that sell something visual to consumers post; businesses that sell labor or B2B services don’t.
Now read the LinkedIn column against it. Financial & legal services (45.5%) and manufacturing (42.7%) post LinkedIn adoption rates that triple their TikTok numbers, and transportation & logistics reaches 39.0%. For any B2B campaign targeting local firms, LinkedIn coverage is far deeper than most people assume, and often deeper than Instagram in the same category.
🔍 Did You Know? Only 1.5% of US construction contractors link a TikTok profile, but 25.0% are on LinkedIn. Same trade, 17x difference by platform. Check the category's own social profile before you budget a channel.
What does this mean for your outreach? Match the channel to the vertical. Email works for law firms and insurance agencies. Phone and direct mail carry salons, garages, and grocery stores. And whatever channel you pick, verify contacts before sending, because bad records burn domains and budgets alike. The numbers in my roundup of B2B data quality statistics show just how expensive stale data gets.
Counts, categories, channels. Now for the part everyone secretly checks first: the stars.
Local Business Review Statistics
Rated US local businesses average 4.36 stars, and 56.7% hold a 4.5-star average or better. In total, 10,203,401 US records carry a review score, which is 55.5% of all US records. The average rated business has 38 reviews.
Here’s the full score distribution:
| Average score band | US businesses | Share of rated |
|---|---|---|
| 4.8 to 5.0 stars | 3,846,363 | 37.7% |
| 4.5 to 4.79 stars | 1,940,115 | 19.0% |
| 4.0 to 4.49 stars | 2,349,473 | 23.0% |
| 3.5 to 3.99 stars | 990,149 | 9.7% |
| 3.0 to 3.49 stars | 618,560 | 6.1% |
| Below 3.0 stars | 458,741 | 4.5% |
Where US review scores actually land (share of rated businesses)
Source: CUFinder Local Business Database, 210M+ records, September 2026.
Source: CUFinder local business database, US rated records on a 5-point scale, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
Nearly 8 in 10 rated businesses sit at 4.0 or above. Which means a 4.2-star business is not “good”. It’s below average in most categories. Grade inflation is real, and it lives on your map app.
And look at that top band. More than a third of all rated US businesses (37.7%) sit between 4.8 and 5.0 stars. Many of those are near-perfect scores built on a handful of reviews from regulars, which is exactly why score alone tells you so little. A perfect average on 4 reviews and a 4.6 on 400 reviews are not the same signal, even though the first one “wins” on stars.
But averages differ sharply by industry:
| US industry | Rated businesses | Average score | At 4.5+ stars | Avg reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beauty salons | 122,498 | 4.66 | 78.7% | 22 |
| HVAC contractors | 32,989 | 4.64 | 77.6% | 29 |
| Gyms | 43,546 | 4.56 | 68.6% | 43 |
| Dentists | 101,777 | 4.56 | 73.0% | 37 |
| Insurance agencies | 92,909 | 4.53 | 70.7% | 22 |
| Auto repair shops | 142,063 | 4.52 | 68.3% | 34 |
| Electricians | 36,714 | 4.51 | 67.7% | 18 |
| Plumbers | 42,624 | 4.46 | 65.6% | 26 |
| Real estate agencies | 70,048 | 4.40 | 62.9% | 18 |
| Law firms | 19,459 | 4.39 | 59.0% | 19 |
| Landscapers | 34,680 | 4.38 | 60.9% | 16 |
| General contractors | 40,710 | 4.36 | 60.4% | 16 |
| Restaurants | 168,115 | 4.29 | 44.8% | 79 |
| Coffee shops | 64,282 | 4.29 | 43.9% | 84 |
| Grocery stores | 77,626 | 4.29 | 35.6% | 76 |
| Pharmacies | 71,246 | 3.74 | 27.5% | 22 |
Source: CUFinder local business database, US rated records, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
One more distribution note before the industry cuts. 44.5% of US records carry no review score at all. Some are new, some are quiet categories like offices, and some are ghosts: closed businesses whose listings linger. If a business has zero reviews AND no website AND no phone, treat the record with suspicion before you spend outreach budget on it.
Two patterns worth stealing for your next analysis.
Pattern one: personal service scores high, volume scores low. Beauty salons top the chart at 4.66 on a modest 22 reviews. Restaurants, coffee shops, and grocery stores all land at 4.29 while collecting 76 to 84 reviews each. More strangers means more one-star drive-bys. So a 4.3-star restaurant is normal, not failing.
Pattern two: pharmacies are the outlier. At 3.74 average, they’re the only common category under 4.0, and just 27.5% reach 4.5 stars. Long waits and insurance friction show up in the stars. If you sell anything that fixes pharmacy workflows, that number is your cold-open slide.
I learned pattern one the expensive way. A client once insisted we only contact restaurants rated 4.5 or higher. That single filter cut his reachable market by more than half, because only 44.8% of restaurants clear that bar. We were filtering out perfectly good businesses for scoring like restaurants do.
💡 Pro Tip: Never filter a list on rating alone. Pair the score with review count and the industry's own average. A 4.4-star restaurant with 200 reviews is a stronger signal than a 5.0-star shop with 3 reviews.
The Review-Count Landscape: Most Businesses Are Nearly Invisible
Review volume follows a power law: 44.5% of US local business records have no reviews at all, and only 3.5% have crossed 100. Here’s how all 18.4 million US records split by review count:
| Review count | US businesses | Share of all US records |
|---|---|---|
| 0 reviews | 8,196,289 | 44.5% |
| 1 to 9 reviews | 2,921,705 | 15.9% |
| 10 to 99 reviews | 6,641,726 | 36.1% |
| 100+ reviews | 640,541 | 3.5% |
The review-count landscape at a glance
Source: CUFinder Local Business Database, 210M+ records, September 2026.
Source: CUFinder local business database, US records, September 2026. Shares are approximate.
Sit with that bottom row for a second. The businesses with 100 or more reviews, the ones that dominate every “best of” search and shape how the map feels, are 640,541 places, about 1 in 29 US records. Meanwhile 28.6% of businesses that have any reviews at all still have fewer than 10. The 38-review average I quoted earlier is real, but it’s dragged upward by a small crowd of high-volume restaurants and stores; the typical reviewed business lives far below it.
For list builders, the zero-review majority is the actionable part. Some of those 8.2 million silent records are brand new, some are quiet office categories, and some are ghosts. That’s why I pair review count with the other columns before spending outreach budget: zero reviews plus no website plus no phone is my strongest skip signal, while zero reviews on a business with a fresh website is often a newly opened prospect worth calling first.
So our data covers places, channels, and reputation. How does it line up with the official statistics? Let’s put the lenses side by side.
Local Business Counts vs Official Statistics
Official US counts and database counts measure different things, and all of them are right. The SBA counts firms. From its February 2026 FAQ:
“There are 36,207,130 small businesses in the U.S.”
SBA Office of Advocacy, Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, February 2026
Of those, 82.3% have no employees at all. The Census Bureau’s newer figures count 30,427,808 nonemployer establishments for 2023. Meanwhile County Business Patterns counts only employer establishments: 8,361,342 locations with paid staff in 2023, employing 139.8 million people.
And our 18.4 million US records? They sit between those numbers on purpose. A map-visible database counts every listed location with a public footprint, including solo operators with storefronts, but excluding the millions of home-based firms that exist only in tax filings. One lens per job:
→ Market sizing for a report → SBA and Census counts → Building an outreach list → map-visible records with contacts
The full reconciliation, including why a 12-location dental group counts as 1 firm, 12 establishments, and 12 records, lives in my companion answer to how many small businesses are in the US. If you quote one US business count this year, read that first.
Small Business Employment and Economic Statistics
Small businesses employ 62.3 million Americans, which is 45.9% of all private sector workers. That answers a question I hear constantly: do small businesses employ half the country? Not quite half, but close. And the economic footprint goes well beyond headcount. From the SBA’s February 2026 FAQ:
- 45.9% of private sector employees work at a small business (62.3 million people).
- 43.5% of US gross domestic product comes from small businesses.
- 38.7% of private sector payroll flows through them, about $3.5 trillion.
- 61% of net new jobs since 1995 came from small businesses: 20.7 million versus 13.2 million from large firms.
- 97.2% of all exporting firms are small businesses (270,014 exporters), carrying 33% of known export value.
- Only 21,041 US businesses are large by the SBA’s 500-employee bar. Everyone else is small.
Geography shifts the weight further. In rural America, 4.3 million small business establishments make up 96.5% of all establishments outside metro areas and provide 56.6% of rural jobs, versus 47.5% in metro areas. Montana leads the nation with 66.3% of its workers employed by small businesses, followed by Wyoming and Vermont. The smaller the town, the more the local economy IS small business.
Ownership keeps broadening too. Women owned 14 million US businesses in 2022, which is 40.4% of all classifiable firms, and minority-owned businesses totaled 13 million. Match those official shares against the digital-presence gaps earlier in this page and you see the opportunity: tens of millions of owners, most of them running lean operations without a website, all still reachable by phone.
One more framing stat, because decks love it. Small businesses are 99.7% of all firms with paid employees, not just 99.9% of firms overall. Strip out every solo operation in the country and the share barely moves. Small is not a niche. Small is the economy.
Business Formation and Survival Statistics
The local business population never sits still. Americans filed about 5.6 million new business applications in 2025, according to Census Business Formation Statistics, and applications have topped 5 million every year since 2021. Actual establishment openings run lower: 1.3 million opened in 2023 while 1.2 million closed, per BLS Business Employment Dynamics figures cited by the SBA. An application is a form, not a storefront.
Survival follows a long, well-documented curve:
“From 1994-2022, an average of 67.7 percent of new employer establishments survived at least two years. During the same period, the five-year survival rate was 49.2 percent.”
SBA Office of Advocacy, citing BLS Business Employment Dynamics, February 2026
Startups keep climbing as a share of the economy, too. New establishments made up 14.2% of all US business establishments in 2023, up from 12.5% in 2019, per the same SBA FAQ. The post-2020 formation wave was not a blip; it reset the baseline.
By year ten, about a third remain (33.9%). Stack that against the 14.2% startup share and the picture is clear: every business list is a moving target, gaining new entries and shedding closures all year. For anyone who works with lists, that churn is the whole game. It’s also why fresh openings are such good prospects; my playbook on how to find newly opened businesses covers the registries and signals that surface them first.
How to Use These Local Business Statistics
Numbers are only useful when they change a decision. Here are the three ways I actually use this data, and you can copy all of them.
- Market sizing: pair an official count (SBA or Census) with our density tables to say “the market is X firms, and Y of them are reachable today.” Two numbers, clearly labeled, no arguments in the meeting.
- Territory planning: split regions by record counts per state or city, like my 2024 Austin two-rep split. Fair patches in an hour instead of a week of guessing.
- Channel planning: read the no-website and fill-rate columns before picking email, phone, or mail for a vertical. Salons get calls. Law firms get emails.
- Competitive and franchise mapping: compare category density across states or cities to spot underserved areas. A franchise team I worked with used exactly this kind of density read to shortlist expansion metros before commissioning a single custom study.
If you want the same numbers for your own niche, this is literally what a local business database actually is for: filter by country, state, city, industry, or SIC/NAICS code and read the counts before you spend a cent on outreach. The queries behind this page ran on the local business database behind these tables, which has a free tier if you want to poke at your own vertical. That’s the one product note in this article, and now back to the data.
FAQ: Local Business Statistics
How many local businesses are there in the US?
Our database holds 18,400,261 map-visible US local business records as of September 2026, while the SBA counts 36.2 million small businesses. The gap comes from what each source counts: listed locations versus every registered firm, including home-based nonemployers. Both numbers are correct for their own purpose.
What percentage of local businesses have a website?
57.1% of US local businesses have a website, so 42.9% have none. Globally, website coverage drops to 27.8% of records. The rate swings hard by industry: 79.2% of US law firms have a site, but only 37.1% of beauty salons do.
What is the average review rating for a local business?
Rated US local businesses average 4.36 stars in our September 2026 data, and 56.7% hold 4.5 stars or better. Averages vary by category: beauty salons lead at 4.66, restaurants sit at 4.29, and pharmacies trail at 3.74.
Which industries have the lowest digital adoption?
Beauty salons (62.9% without a website), grocery stores (61.8%), and auto repair shops (57.2%) show the lowest website adoption among big US categories. These verticals run on phone calls and walk-ins, so phone outreach and direct mail reach them better than email.
Which US state has the most local businesses?
California leads with 1,801,748 records in our data, 9.8% of the US total, and the SBA’s state profiles agree with 4.34 million small businesses. Florida and Texas follow in our records, while SBA registration counts put Texas slightly ahead of Florida.
How many local businesses are there worldwide?
Our database counts 210,289,792 local business records across 245 countries and territories as of September 2026. India (17.1%), China (11.1%), and the United States (8.7%) hold the largest shares. There is no single official global count, so database totals are the practical proxy.
How many new businesses open each year in the US?
Americans filed about 5.6 million new business applications in 2025 per Census data, but only 1.3 million employer establishments actually opened in 2023 per BLS figures. Applications measure intent and closings offset openings, so treat the two numbers as different metrics, not a contradiction.
Do small businesses really make up 99.9% of US businesses?
Yes. The SBA defines small as under 500 employees, and by that bar only 21,041 US firms are large. Divide 36.2 million small firms by all 36.2 million firms and you get 99.9%. The statistic is true, just less dramatic once you see the definition.
It’s Time to Put These Numbers to Work
You now have numbers nobody else can give you, because nobody else ran the queries. Use them.
→ Size the market with official counts → check reachability with fill rates → plan channels with the no-website table → filter smart with review benchmarks
The three numbers I reuse in every single deck: 42.9% of US local businesses have no website, 31% have an email, and 4.36 stars is average. Those three reframe almost any local outreach conversation in under a minute.
Which stat surprised you most? Tell me in the comments. And if you cite these numbers in an article, a deck, or a data story, link back so your readers can check the methodology and the as-of dates for themselves. Every data report we publish lives in the CUFinder statistics library, all query dated the same way. Then go build something with them. You’ve got this!
References
- SBA Office of Advocacy: Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, February 2026 (PDF)
- SBA Office of Advocacy: 2025 Small Business Profiles for the States, Territories, and Nation
- US Census Bureau: County Business Patterns
- US Census Bureau: Census Bureau Data Tell the Small Business Story (May 2026)
- US Census Bureau: Business Formation Statistics
- US Census Bureau: NAICS
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: Business Employment Dynamics
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