Report: Florida leads nation in new business formations

Florida remains a hotspot nationwide when it comes to people launching new businesses, and not only because the population continues to surge. 

This from a new report from research and analytics site Switch on Business. It analyzed 2024 U.S. Census Bureau Formation data for all 3,156 counties and found Florida was No. 3 in business applications compared to local population, with 2,714 new businesses per 100,000 people in 2024. That’s behind only Wyoming, which had 10,133 new businesses per 100,000 people in 2024 and Delaware, with 5,484 new businesses per 100,000 people in 2024. West Virginia, meanwhile, was No. 50, with 855 new businesses per 100,000 people in 2024. 

Like in Florida, new business applications on a national scale have been somewhat booming, the report found. The last four years saw a record 21 million new businesses launched in the U.S., for example, at a rate more than 90% faster than pre-pandemic levels. During this period, the SBA paid over $450 billion in loans and grants to small businesses, Switch on Business found. In 2023 alone, some 1.8 million of the 5.5 million new businesses launched with plans to hire. 

The report contends part of the reason for the increase is innovation amid challenging times. “Entrepreneurs solve problems,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Director of Workforce & International Labor Policy Stephanie Ferguson Melhorn says in the statement, “and when America experienced huge problems in a concentrated time frame during the pandemic, entrepreneurs rose to the occasion. New economic needs and changing consumer preferences created more circumstances for new businesses to start.”

Some of the Florida nuggets from the report include:

• There were 52,860 monthly applications for new businesses in 2024. (634,320 for the year.) That’s 72 per hour or one every 50 seconds. 
• Even at No. 3 in the country, that’s down -4.8% from 2023.
• Three Florida counties are on the Top 15 national list of counties with the most new business applications per 10,000 residents in 2024. Those counties are Miami-Dade at No. 6 with 532 new businesses; Broward at No. 11 with 418; and Orange County at No. 15 with 359.