2025 National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States

Author: Robert Fairlie, Professor of Public Policy and Economics, UCLA

Suggested citation: Fairlie, Robert (2026). National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States: 2025, Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation: Kansas City.

This is a report published by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation utilizing content and data from multiple sources and external contributors. Every effort has been made to verify the accuracy of the information contained in this report, and it is believed to be correct as of the publication date. Nonetheless, this material is for informational purposes, and you are solely responsible for validating the applicability and accuracy of the information in any use you make of it.

The Kauffman Indicators of Early-Stage Entrepreneurship is a set of measures that represents new business creation in the United States, integrating several high-quality, timely sources of information on early-stage entrepreneurship.

This report presents four indicators tracking early-stage entrepreneurship for the years 1996–2021: rate of new entrepreneurs reflects the number of new entrepreneurs in a given month, opportunity share of new entrepreneurs is the percentage of new entrepreneurs who created their businesses out of opportunity instead of necessity, startup early job creation is the total number of jobs created by startups per capita, and startup early survival rate is the one-year average survival rate for new firms. National trends for the four indicators as well as some demographic trends for the rate of new entrepreneurs and opportunity share of new entrepreneurs are reported.

The rate of new entrepreneurs in 2025 was 0.36 percent, meaning that an average of 360 out of every 100,000 adults became new entrepreneurs in a given month in the United States. The rate of new entrepreneurs increased in 2025 and remained higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The opportunity share of new entrepreneurs increased to 83.3 percent in 2025 from its low of 69.8 percent in 2020, but remained lower than its pre-pandemic level of 86.9 percent in 2019. The decline from 2019 to 2020 during the first year of the pandemic was 17.1 percentage points, which is much larger than the one-year decline of 6.9 percentage points from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession.
Startup early job creation in 2025 was 5.3 jobs per 1,000 people, remaining at the same level as the previous year. Startup job creation dropped in the pandemic but is now above pre-pandemic levels.
The startup early survival rate was 77.9 percent in 2025, which is slightly lower than the previous year and lower than pre-pandemic levels.
The overall KESE Index – an equally-weighted composite of the four indicators – was 1.2 in 2025. The index is normalized at zero based on a two-decade average. The KESE Index increased in 2025 from the previous year and returned to levels found just prior to the pandemic. The index dropped from 1.2 in 2019 to 0.2 in 2020. This drop in the KESE Index was the largest drop since the Great Recession.

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