New Business Applications

Not every application becomes a business, and Census scores each one on how likely it is to hire. That share has fallen for two decades — from 62% when the series begins in 2004 to 28.0% over the trailing twelve months, through expansions and recessions alike. It was 37.6% in 2019. Applications with planned wages — the strictest cut, where the filer gives a first wage date — fell from 13.6% to 7.0% over the same stretch.

The 2020–21 surge is often read as an entrepreneurship revival. It did not bend this line: the employer-likelihood share kept sliding straight through it, which is the part a headline count of applications cannot show you.

The gap between those two facts is the whole point. Applications are running +77.3% against their 2019 average while the high-propensity subset is +32.1%. A record number of people are filing; the number likely to employ anyone has barely moved.

The headline count says how many. Census also publishes the same applications split across nineteen NAICS sectors, which says what kind — and the mix has moved. Over the trailing twelve months retail trade took 20.2% of all applications against 14.8% in 2019 (+5.4pp), while construction gave up 2.0pp.

Share is the honest way to read this: applications are up across almost every sector, so a rising count says little on its own. What changes the picture is which sectors are taking a larger slice of a growing pie, and which are being crowded out of it.