Kauffman Index of Startup Activity: National 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.This report presents trends in startup activity over the past two decades for the United States. Two upcoming reports look at these same trends in all fifty states and the forty largest U.S. metropolitan areas. Trends in startup activity also are reported at the national level for specific demographic groups for some of the Index components, when available.