C-Suite Wednesday – Small Businesses Make Up 62% of New Job Openings

November 3, 2021

Delaney Sexton
Contributing Editor

C-Suite Wednesday – Small Businesses Make Up 62% of New Job Openings

Today, the SBA Office of Advocacy released their annual Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business report for 2021. They gather the most up-to-date statistics about American small businesses and their contribution to the economy in a single document.

Here are the most important statistics from the publication:
•There are over 32.5 million small businesses in the United States. They make up 99.9% of all firms.
•Small businesses comprise 43.5% of gross domestic product and 31.6% of known export value ($460 billion) in the economy.
•From 1995 to 2020, small businesses created 12.7 million net new jobs, and large businesses only created 7.9 million. •Small businesses account for 62% of net new job creation since 1995.

New Small Business Statistics
•In 2019, 1.04 million small businesses opened, and 13% of these businesses were startups.
•An average of 67.6% of new small businesses survive at least two years. 48.9% of businesses survive for five years, and a third of businesses survive for ten years.

Minority-Owned Small Businesses
•In 2018, 18.3% of all employer firms were minority-owned, totaling around 1 million firms.
•Women represented about 20% of all employer firms with 1.1 million firms in 2018. They also owned 42% of all nonemployer firms.
•Veterans owned about 338,000 employer firms, representing 5.9% of all U.S. employers, and they owned 1.4 million nonemployer firms in 2017.
•Immigrants owned 18.6% of all employer firms in 2018. The two industries with the greatest share of immigrant owners were in accommodation and food services (37%) and retail trade (24%).

Small Business Financing
•In 2016, 64% of small businesses used their business earnings as their primary source of funding, and that number jumped to 77% of businesses using their earnings as their primary source of funding in 2019.
•By the end of 2020, around 73% of small single location employer firms received a PPP loan from the SBA.
•SBA awarded the highest share (80.18%) of contracting dollars to small businesses.

Source:
SBA Office of Advocacy FAQ