New business activity in the United States is running well above its pre-pandemic level, and the South is doing more of the lifting than any other region. About 1.72 million of the applications filed in the 12 months to June are the ones the U.S. Census Bureau judges most likely to hire and open premises, roughly 31% above 2019, and the South accounts for 45% of all new applications and 43.4% of that likely-employer pipeline.
The breakdown comes from an analysis of Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics by Mandoe Media, a digital signage platform for hospitality and retail. It lands in a city like New Orleans as a familiar pattern, where new food and retail spots open constantly and have to find an audience fast.
The likely-employer measure, which the Census Bureau calls high-propensity applications, leans on consumer-facing sectors. Accommodation and food services and retail are among the industries that qualify an application, so the count reflects restaurants, cafes, shops and similar businesses rather than paper companies.
There is a caveat worth stating plainly. The raw number of applications of every kind has surged, to about 6.02 million over the year, but the share that looks likely to become a staffed business has narrowed, from 37.6% in 2019 to 28.6% now. Much of the wider boom is in filings less likely to end in an open door. The 1.72 million is the figure that tracks actual storefronts.
“The South is carrying much of this, and New Orleans is exactly the kind of place where new food and retail spots open and immediately have to stand out,” said Paul Madden at Mandoe Media. “For a lot of these owners the sign in the window is the first conversation they have with a customer.”
The pipeline has not slowed. Likely-employer applications rose 2.3% on the prior 12 months, so the wave is still building.
Mandoe Media compiled the study from public Census Bureau data retrieved through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, with no private data involved. One limit is built into the source: the Census Bureau reports industry detail nationally and geographic detail only as a total across all industries, so there is no clean state-by-sector ranking of restaurants or shops to be had from it. The honest read is a national and regional one.
The figures draw on the Census Bureau’s high-propensity applications series, its Business Formation Statistics methodology and its current monthly release.
