Business Statistics

If you are interested in business statistics, the Census Bureau’s web site is the place to start. In the Census Bureau’s web site you can link to the State & County QuickFacts, which has business information at the national, state and county level. 

Once you select State and QuickFacts, a map gives you the option of selecting a State or “View more USA QuickFacts”. For example, let’s take a look at business in North Carolina. Type in North Carolina and hit ”Go”. The business QuickFacts section will be in the middle of the page.

Here you see some basic facts about business in North Carolina. To get more data for the businesses in North Carolina, we scroll up to the top of the page and click on “Browse more data sets for North Carolina”.

Once we select “Browse more data sets for North Carolina” we get the North Carolina QuickLinks page.

This page is divided into four sections, People, Business, Geography and Other QuickLinks. Scroll down to Business QuickLinks.

As you can see, you have many choices for data available. In our case, we want information on Hispanic businesses, so we select the “Minority-and women-owned business” data set.

The table will open showing the minority and women-owned business statistics for North Carolina.  If we want to narrow our search and find out the number of Hispanic businesses in Carteret County, NC, we need to select that county and then click “Go”.

This is the table for minority and women owned businesses in Carteret County, NC. Notice that it shows that there are a total 103 Hispanic-owned firms in Carteret County, N.C., and that there are 13 firms with paid employees.

In the same way, if you are interested in economic information for a place, find the place in the pull down list and click “Go”. In this case we highlighted New Bern, and this is the information for it. If you are interested in more demographic and economic data on Hispanics, there are other areas you should look at. Let’s go back to the Census Bureau’s home page.

Here you will find links to the “Survey of Business Owners” and “Minority Links”. Let’s double-click on “Survey of Business Owners” first.

Towards the bottom of the page you will see, “Preliminary Estimates of Business Ownership by Gender, Hispanic or Latino Origin and Race”. You have two options, data by kind of business or data by state, click on data by state.

You will get national demographic and economic data on businesses owned by Hispanics or Latino by gender. If you want to refine your search for a particular state, all you have to do is select the state and click “Go”. Let’s return to the Census Bureau’s home page.

We have already looked at the “Survey of Business Owners”, let’s now look at the “Minority Links”. Let’s double-click on “Minority Links”.

On this page you have access to various links with the latest data on racial and ethnic populations in the United States. Here you have links to all the minority groups: Hispanic and Latino, Black or African Americans, Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Island population and American Indian and Alaska Native Population. Click on the top one, “Facts on the Hispanic or Latino Population”.

You will find this same format for all the minority groups on the front page. Notice that there are demographic and economic links, as well as the American Communities Survey, Census 2000, Profiles, News releases and additional resources. Finally, our last stop is the Business section. Let’s return to the Census Bureau home page.

Click on “Business”. Once there you will find information such as the latest economic indicators including Current Press Release (in Excel and PDF); Building Permits by State, Metropolitan Areas, County and Place Data and Annual Characteristics of New Housing for US and Regions.

This link also breaks down economic statistics by geography (i.e., U.S., States, Metro areas, Counties, Places and Zip codes), Sector (according to NAICS) and Frequency (i.e., 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004 – depending on the survey). 

NAICS (pronounced Nakes) is a system for classifying business used by US statistical agencies.  The NAICS web site includes 1,170 industries of which 565 are service-based industries.  It also includes 358 new industries, 250 of which are services producing industries and 20 sectors, 16 of which are services related. Click on the Economic Census for 2002 and you will see economic data by NAICS sector.

This is the summary statistics table for the United States from the 2002 Economic Census by NAICS sector. These are drill down tables. If you click on “more” for any sector you get more detailed information. Click on the “More” label to the left of Mining, sector 21.

As you can see, you get data on mining at the sub-sector and industry level. Data is available for all sectors of the economy.

You can also view other statistics such as multi-sector, monthly, sector-specific and quarterly data.

For example, if we want to obtain the latest number of Construction firms engaged in Single-family housing construction in Dubois, Indiana we can go to the 2003 County Business Patterns.

Now, choose Indiana from the pull down screen and click “Go”.

You are now in the 2003 County Business Patterns (NAICS) homepage. We now select “Dubois, IN” and click “Submit”.

A table opens that has all the industries sectors.  To select “Construction” industry only, we “click” on “Detail” next to “Construction” and we will get data from the 2-digit NAICS Sector to the 6-digit National NAICS for Dubois County, IN.

A new page opens that shows that Dubois, IN, has 38 establishments engaged in Single-family housing construction:

As we scroll down on the table, we see a different organization of the data. In this table, the establishments are organized by the number of employees.  We note that of the 38 Single-family housing construction establishments in Dubois, IN, 29 have 1-4 employees and none have over 50 employees.

At the bottom of the table you can save this table as a Text file or as an Excel file (by choosing “Save as csv. File”) or you can “Change Geographic Area”:

Once we choose “Save as csv. File”, a window opens to give us the opportunity to “Save File” – we save it as “dubois single fam const.csv”. 

We then open the table in Excel, the file contains all the items from the original, and we can edit it to fit our needs.

Note that as you scroll down you see the data for each Industry organized by the number of establishments by employment size just like the original.  For example, we see that 29 single family housing construction companies have 1-4 employees.

Where to go for more help?

Help with statistics is available via telephone, e-mail, or mail:

Call 301-763-INFO

“Ask the Experts” website http://www.census.gov/main/www/ask.html connects you to several sources of information.

Find services and resources where you can get all the help you need in using the Census Bureau’s products and data by going to http://www.census.gov/main/contacts.html

Write to Customer Services, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC 20233-0800

Help regarding starting or expanding your business is available at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) http://www.sba.gov/. You can also contact the SBA Answer Desk at 1-800-8-ASK-SBA (1- 800-827-5722)