US new business survival rate: years 1, 2, 5 and 10

New business sites open across the United States all the time. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics follows each year's group, called a cohort, and counts how many are still open as the years pass. This clip uses the group that opened in March 2013 and follows it for ten years, to March 2023.

That group started with 628,840 private-sector business sites. A year later, 500,434 were still open, which is about 80 of every 100. The first year is the hardest: 20 of every 100 new sites were gone before their first birthday. No later single year comes close to that loss.

After two years, about 69 of every 100 were still open. After five years, the count was 318,339, or about 51 of every 100. In other words, roughly half of new sites do not reach year five. The chart shows the year-ten count last, so you can compare your own guess with the real figure.

It helps to know what is being counted. The BLS tracks establishments, which are single business locations, not whole companies. A new branch of a chain counts as a new opening, and it is tracked on its own. A company with many sites can lose one and keep going.

Survival here also does not mean success or failure in the everyday sense. A site counts as gone when it has no employees in the March count. Some of those sites are not failures: the BLS notes that some businesses pause, for example while being remodeled, and later reopen. Others may close for reasons that have nothing to do with how well they did.

The numbers on screen are rounded to whole sites per 100, so they are close to, but not exactly, the published percentages. The full table for every opening year is on the BLS website, and the SBA Office of Advocacy publishes a similar summary built from the same data. A fair way to use these figures is as a rough guide to how often a new location lasts, not as a prediction for any one business.