How we count

LLC Pulse counts new business entities registered with 12 state registries, week by week. Here is exactly what that means.

Source

Every number comes from RecordWire, which reads the business registries of Florida, New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts, Idaho, Wyoming, Missouri and Delaware and normalizes them into one record shape. We pull from RecordWire's public API once a day and publish counts only. We never show company names or officer names.

What counts as a new business

A record on a state registry with a formation date in the week. That includes domestic entities formed in the state and "foreign" entities formed elsewhere that registered to do business there. Weeks run Monday to Sunday by the formation date the state records, not the day the filing appeared online. Entity types use RecordWire's normalized types: LLC, corporation, limited partnership, general partnership, business trust and other.

Late filings

States sometimes publish a filing days after its formation date. Every day we recount the last 21 days in full, and add any older filing the moment it first appears. Recent weeks are marked as such and can rise slightly. Older weeks rarely change.

Cities

Cities come from the principal-office address on the filing, or the mailing address when that's the only one, and only addresses in the same state count toward a city. New York and Delaware publish no business address, so they have no city pages. Pennsylvania's address is the registered office, which is always in-state, so we don't show an out-of-state share there. Spellings are cleaned for case and spacing, and variants such as "St. Louis" and "St Louis" are merged. A city gets its own page once it has at least30 filings in the last 52 weeks, up to the top 100 per state.

Survival rate

The share of companies formed 12 to 24 months ago whose status is still active today. It is only shown for states that publish status and keep inactive companies on the registry: Florida, Colorado, Virginia and Connecticut. New York and Oregon list active entities only, Pennsylvania has no status field, and the other five states have no history before October 2026.

Formation-to-record time (a proxy)

The median number of days between a company's formation date and the day RecordWire first saw it on the public registry. It reflects state processing and publication delays, so treat it as a rough proxy, not an official approval time. It only uses companies formed since October 2026.

Not the same as Census Business Formation Statistics

The Census Bureau's BFS counts applications for an IRS employer ID number. That is a different event: sole proprietors apply for EINs without forming an entity, and many LLCs form without one. LLC Pulse counts registered entities from the state's own records, so the two series differ in level and timing.

What each state's data covers

LLC fees

State filing fees are collected by hand from each state's official fee schedule and linked on every row. They exclude registered-agent services, publication costs paid to newspapers, and local business licenses. Check the linked source before you file: states change fees.

Data from RecordWire.