The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States: 2025 finds that approximately 6.6 million American adults started a new business in 2025 – a return to pre-pandemic formation levels driven in significant part by immigrant entrepreneurs. The report, a 30-year longitudinal analysis, also surfaces two persistent structural gaps: a larger share of new entrepreneurs are still launching out of necessity rather than opportunity compared to 2019 levels, and the gender disparity in new business formation has remained nearly unchanged since 1996. Together, those findings complicate the headline recovery figure for policymakers and business support organizations tracking who benefits from entrepreneurial growth.

Report scope and what the 30-year data shows

The Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation constructed the report using the Kauffman Early-Stage Entrepreneurship Index, which evaluates early-stage activity from 1996 through 2026 across four equally weighted indicators: rate of new entrepreneurs, opportunity share of new entrepreneurs, startup early job creation, and startup early survival rate. The Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship are a primary national and state-level source of data on new business creation, and this edition represents the most comprehensive longitudinal analysis of U.S. early-stage entrepreneurship conducted under a consistent methodology. The four-indicator framework allows year-over-year comparisons that isolate specific dimensions of formation health rather than collapsing everything into a single business-application count.

Formation volume returns to pre-Covid levels, with immigrants driving an outsized share

Of the 6.6 million businesses started in 2025, immigrants accounted for 2.3 million – a formation rate twice that of native-born Americans, according to the report. Latino Americans started roughly 2 million businesses, Black Americans launched 1.1 million, and white Americans opened approximately 4 million. Those figures reflect a meaningful compositional shift: immigrant-founded businesses have become a structural pillar of the post-pandemic recovery in formation volume, not a marginal contributor.

Earlier Kauffman research, cited in 2014 congressional testimony, established that virtually all net new jobs in the U.S. economy originate from new and young firms – which means early-stage formation rates function as a leading indicator for employment growth, not merely a count of new entities. That context makes the immigrant-driven rebound consequential beyond the raw startup numbers. For additional data benchmarking the current formation environment against prior years, B2C’s 2026 small business statistics roundup provides parallel trend data from multiple institutional sources.

Necessity-driven entrepreneurship and survival rates signal incomplete recovery

The opportunity share of new entrepreneurs – the percentage who started a business by choice rather than economic necessity – stood at 83.3% in 2025. That figure represents a significant recovery from the 69.8% recorded in 2020 but remains below the 86.9% reading from 2019, meaning a larger fraction of new founders are entering entrepreneurship under financial pressure than before the pandemic disrupted labor markets. The gap between 83.3% and the pre-pandemic benchmark is small in percentage terms but represents hundreds of thousands of businesses launched without the capital reserves, market validation, or optionality that opportunity-driven founders typically bring.

The startup early survival rate reinforces that concern. The 2025 rate of 77.9% came in slightly below the 2024 rate of 79.4% – a year-over-year decline that, while modest, runs counter to what a full recovery narrative would predict. Federal and Kauffman-aligned research has consistently found that roughly half of new businesses survive past year five and only about one-third past year ten, which means the early survival metric in this report captures the most vulnerable window. The report’s authors noted directly that “launching and maintaining a business in the U.S. is challenging,” a characterization the survival data supports.

“It is critical that resources to support entrepreneurs at all stages meet them where they are.” – Kauffman Foundation researchers, National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States: 2025

That framing positions the survival and necessity findings not as anomalies but as a structural argument for targeted support infrastructure – particularly for founders who entered entrepreneurship without a primary-income alternative.

Three decades of gender data reveal a gap that policy has not closed

The report’s most structurally significant long-run finding concerns gender. In 1996, the rate of new entrepreneurship was 0.26% for women and 0.38% for men. In 2025, those figures were 0.28% for women and 0.44% for men – an absolute gap that has widened by 0.04 percentage points over 30 years. Both rates are above pre-pandemic levels, but the gender disparity has remained essentially fixed despite three decades of policy attention, expanded access-to-capital programs, and demographic shifts in educational attainment and workforce participation.

Prior Kauffman analysis estimated that if women started employer firms at the same rate as men, the U.S. would see approximately 1.7 million additional firms – a figure that translates the abstract gap into a concrete foregone contribution to job creation and GDP. NFIB sentiment data tracked in B2C’s coverage of recent NFIB optimism surveys has similarly flagged persistent structural headwinds that may disproportionately affect under-resourced founders, adding a sentiment dimension to the formation data the Kauffman report surfaces.

  • Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship – 2026 annual update – The Foundation publishes updated indicator data annually; the next edition will show whether the opportunity share continues its post-2020 recovery toward the 86.9% pre-pandemic benchmark or stalls, and whether the startup early survival rate reverses its 2025 dip.
  • U.S. Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics (BFS) – The Census BFS tracks weekly business applications and high-propensity application counts, providing higher-frequency data between Kauffman annual releases that can signal whether 2025’s 6.6 million formation figure holds or softens under current economic conditions.
  • SBA Office of Advocacy small business data releases – The SBA publishes annual employer firm counts and survival data segmented by owner demographics; tracking minority- and women-owned employer firm growth will reveal whether rising formation rates are translating into scaled businesses or remaining concentrated at solo-operator levels.
  • Federal immigration and visa policy developments – Given that immigrants started businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans in 2025, legislative or regulatory changes affecting work authorization, entrepreneur visas, or deportation enforcement could materially shift formation rates in the next Kauffman cycle.
  • NFIB Small Business Optimism Index monthly readings – The NFIB index, currently below its historical average of 100, tracks capital expenditure plans and hiring intentions among existing small businesses; sustained readings below 95 would suggest the operating environment for new entrants remains constrained even if gross formation counts hold.