Most states will tell you how many businesses registered last year. Almost none will tell you how many of them still exist.
That gap matters if you’re sizing a market, because raw formation counts systematically overstate how many real businesses appeared. A meaningful share of new entities never trade at all — they’re name reservations, holding vehicles, restructures, or shells formed by owners in another state entirely.
What the public numbers actually measure
The most-cited national figure comes from the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics, which tracks applications for an Employer Identification Number. It’s a genuinely good dataset, released monthly with state-level detail, and it’s free.
It is also not a registry count. An EIN application isn’t a Secretary of State filing — plenty of sole proprietors get an EIN without forming an entity, and plenty of new LLCs don’t apply for one immediately. If you see a vendor quoting BFS numbers as “new LLCs filed,” they’ve conflated two different things.
Registry counts have the opposite problem. They’re an exact count of filings, and filings include a great deal that isn’t a business.
Why the survival question is hard
States differ enormously in how aggressively they clear out dead entities, which makes cross-state comparison close to meaningless.
Minnesota requires a free annual renewal and administratively dissolves entities that skip it, so its active register is comparatively honest. Idaho does much the same. At the other end, Ohio requires no annual report from most LLCs and Missouri and South Carolina don’t either — an entity can sit on the register indefinitely having never done anything.
So a state with a large active register might have a vigorous economy, or a lax housekeeping policy. From the outside, both look identical.
A better way to read a state
Three questions get you closer than a headline count.
What share is formed by agents? In Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada, incorporation is itself an export product. High filing counts there describe a legal services industry more than a local economy.
Does the state enforce reporting? Where renewal is mandatory and enforced, the active count means something. Where it isn’t, treat the register as cumulative rather than current.
How many filings carry a real address? An entity with a genuine principal address is dramatically more likely to be a going concern than one whose only address belongs to its agent. This is the most useful single filter available, and it’s the one we apply before delivery — see the piece on agent addresses.
What we publish, and what we don’t
We deliberately don’t put dissolution counts or survival rates on our state pages, because we’d be estimating and the estimates would be presented as facts. What we can tell you is what each registry publishes and how it behaves, which is the part that actually affects whether you can sell into it.
If you want the underlying detail on what a filing contains, this breakdown goes field by field.
Pick your states. See tomorrow’s companies tomorrow.
Two days free, no card. Agent-formed entities are stripped before your first file lands.
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