2017 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity : Metropolitan Area and City Trends

The Startup Activity Index is a comprehensive indicator of new business creation in the United States, integrating several high-quality sources of timely entrepreneurship information into one composite indicator of startup activity. The Index captures business activity in all industries and is based on both a nationally representative sample size of more than a half-million observations each year and on the universe of all employer businesses in the United States — which covers approximately five million companies. This allows us to look at both entrepreneurs and the startups they create. This report presents trends in startup activity for the forty largest metropolitan areas in the United States and analyzes trends for these locations. Data on each metro is benchmarked against the national average, with further details available for states in the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity: State Trends and trends and demographics at the national level in the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity: National Trends. After two years of large increases, startup activity rose slightly in 2016, continuing an upward trend started in 2014. Only three years ago, the Startup Activity Index was at its lowest point in the last twenty years. Today it has gone up three years in a row, reaching close to the peak before the Great Recession drop. As with last year's index, a principal driver of this year's uptick is the growth of opportunity entrepreneurship, which is covered in the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity: National Trends. High-performing states in this startup surge include perennial favorites such as California, Texas, and Colorado, as well as some less-highlighted places, such as Florida, Montana, and Nevada, which are covered in the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity: State Trends. In this report, we focus on startup activity at the metropolitan area and city levels