Americans filed 534,947 applications to start a business in September 2026, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. These pages follow that monthly count and turn it into statistics, charts and a lookup that anyone can use, cite and link to.
Updated 31 October 2026. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Formation Statistics. Figures are refreshed with each monthly release.
534,947 business applications were filed in the United States in September 2026, according to the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics, +0.5% from August 2026 and +4.4% from a year earlier. That is about 82% above the monthly average for 2019, before the pandemic.
Monthly figures since 2004, a line chart and the full seasonally adjusted series as a CSV.
38 key figures on new business applications, each with its own link, plus yearly totals from 2005 to 2025.
Copy-ready citations, two CSV files and a downloadable bar chart.
Enter any month or year since July 2004 to see how many applications to start a business were filed, how that compares with today and where it ranks.
The latest figure is 534,947 applications, for September 2026.
All files are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with credit to CorporaWire and the U.S. Census Bureau, Business Formation Statistics.
A dated snapshot of the monthly series from 2004 is archived as a research dataset with a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23762527. Use it when you need a fixed version for a paper or report; the tracker above always has the latest month.
Please credit "CorporaWire / U.S. Census Bureau, Business Formation Statistics" and link to the page you used. Each statistic and table row has its own anchor, so you can link straight to the figure you quote.
