Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business 2026

Advocacy’s most popular publication, Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, gathers the most up-to-date statistics about American small businesses in one place.
Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business is a convenient place to find facts about the state of the small business economy, including the following:
- 99.9 percent of businesses are small.
- There are 36,207,130 small businesses in the United States.
- U.S. small businesses employ 62.3 million people, 45.9 percent of private sector workers.
- Economic activity from small businesses makes up 43.5 percent of GDP.
- Over 80 percent of the paperwork burden for small businesses comes from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alone
Small businesses pay 38.7 percent of total private sector payroll.