Kauffman Index of Startup Activity : Metropolitan and City Area Trends 2016

The Kauffman Index of Startup Activity 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. Startup activity rose in 2016 — continuing an upward trend started in 2015. Only two years ago, the Startup Activity Index was at its lowest point in the last twenty years. Today, it has gone up two years in a row, reaching close to the peak before the Great Recession drop. A principal driver of this year's uptick is the growth of opportunity entrepreneurship, accompanied by an increase in the rate of new entrepreneurs among women — covered in the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity | National Trends. High-performing states on this startup surge include perennial favorites like California, Colorado, and Texas, as well as some less-highlighted places, such as Florida, Montana, and Nevada — covered in the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity | State Trends. In this report, we focus on startup activity at the metropolitan area and city level