The SBA has released their updated small business statistics. Here are a few of the highlights:
- Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
- Employ about half of all private sector employees.
- Pay more than 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
- Have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade.
- Create more than half of nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
- Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers).
- Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
- Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 28.6 percent of the known export value in FY 2004.
- Small innovative firms produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms, and their patents
are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
The number of new small businesses has grown steadily over the past few years. In 2002 there were about 570,000 new small firms. That number grew to almost 650,000 new businesses in 2006.
The new stricter bankruptcy laws have clearly had an impact. Bankruptcies in small businesses had been 34,000 - 39,000 per year for several years, but dropped to 19,000 in 2006.
Even with our growing dependence on small business in the US economy, the regulatory costs for small businesses continues to grow. The average employer with 20 employees pays about $7, 647 per employee in regulatory costs ($1,304 of this is tax compliance). The average cost per employee for large firms is about $5,282.
