Rural Dataverse

Census Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS)

Annual measures of establishment entry, exit, and job flows from 1978 to present, derived from longitudinal business records. One of the primary federal sources for tracking entrepreneurial dynamism, firm lifecycle, and the churn beneath aggregate employment levels.

DatasetEntrepreneurship

Mapping & Data Analytics Team 2026-09-02

Overview

The Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) track establishment births, deaths, and employment flows across the U.S. economy from 1978 to the present. While most labor market data answers “how many jobs exist,” BDS answers “where those jobs came from” — distinguishing new establishments from expansions, and closures from contractions. This granularity makes BDS one of the primary federal sources for studying entrepreneurial dynamism, firm lifecycle, and the underlying churn of a local economy. In short, BDS helps explain how the business and employment base is changing beneath the surface.

BDS is derived from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), which links IRS employer records, Social Security Administration payroll data, and Economic Census information to track individual firms and establishments over time. The longitudinal linkage makes it possible to measure establishment age and distinguish new firms from establishments associated with existing firms — an important capability for county-level analysis that sets BDS apart from most other federal business data sources.

NOTE

Firm vs. establishment: A firm is a business organization that may operate at one or more locations. An establishment is a single physical business location. BDS tracks both, allowing users to distinguish business formation from the opening, closing, or expansion of individual locations.

What this data tells us about rural America

BDS provides a window into the entrepreneurial vitality of local economies that employment headcounts alone cannot offer. By tracking establishment entry, exit, and survival alongside job creation and destruction at the county level, BDS reveals whether a community’s business base is renewing itself, contracting, or consolidating — dynamics that have significant implications for long-run economic resilience.

Rural communities tend to have smaller and more concentrated business ecosystems than their nonrural counterparts, which makes BDS particularly informative. In communities where a small number of establishments account for a large share of employment, business exit can be consequential in ways that aggregate county-level employment data absorbs only with a lag. BDS makes the churning process beneath the headline visible: a community holding steady employment while losing established firms and gaining new ones is in a fundamentally different position than one where the same employers have persisted for decades.

Young establishments that range from 1 to 5 years old account for a disproportionate share of job creation relative to more tenured establishments. This pattern is visible in rural communities as well. Examining job creation by establishment age helps researchers understand whether new and young businesses are contributing meaningfully to local employment growth, and whether that contribution is changing over time.

Coverage

  • Geography:
    • County, State, National
  • Time range:
    • 1978 – present
  • Update frequency:
    • Annual (typically released approximately 18 months after the reference year)
  • Universe:
    • U.S. employer businesses — firms and establishments with paid employees. Does not cover the nonemployer universe (self-employed with no employees).
NOTE

Notable exclusions: BDS covers employer businesses only and does not include self-employed individuals or non-employer businesses. Sector coverage is not uniform across all industries. See the BDS methodology page for the full coverage description.

Key variables

BDS separates business dynamics from employment dynamics, allowing users to distinguish changes in the number of establishments from changes in the number of jobs — and to decompose both into what came from new, expanding, contracting, and closing establishments.

Business dynamics (get_business_dynamics())

  • establishments — total establishment count
  • estab_entries, estab_entry_rate — new establishments opening
  • estab_exits, estab_exit_rate — establishments closing
  • firms, firm_deaths — firm counts and closures

Employment dynamics (get_employment_dynamics())

  • employees — total employment
  • job_creation, job_creation_births, job_creation_continuers — gross jobs added (from new and expanding establishments)
  • job_destruction, job_destruction_deaths, job_destruction_continuers — gross jobs lost (from closing and contracting establishments)
  • job_creation_rate, job_destruction_rate, net_job_creation_rate — rates relative to average employment

Dimensional breakdowns

Three mutually exclusive breakdowns are available via _by_sector, _by_age, and _by_size function variants:

  • By sector (NAICS) — identifies where business dynamism is occurring; 20 major 2-digit sectors at county level, finer detail at state and national level (i.e., 4- or 6-digit)

  • By establishment age — distinguishes startup and young-firm dynamics from mature-firm dynamics; age 0 through 26+ years

  • By firm size — reveals whether dynamics are concentrated among smaller or larger employers; three mutually exclusive categories: 1–19, 20–499, and 500+ employees

NOTE

Mind the suppression. BDS protects the confidentiality of individual businesses, so some county-level estimates may be suppressed — particularly for small industries or geographies. Suppression can affect comparisons and trend analysis in very small rural communities. Unlike ACS, BDS is not a sample survey; suppression reflects confidentiality protection, not sampling uncertainty.

Accessing the data

Via CORI R package

The cori.data.bds package provides tidy access to BDS at the county, state, and national level across all available years.

library(cori.data.bds)

# Aggregate business dynamics — county level
get_business_dynamics(geography = "county", years = 2018:2023)

# Employment dynamics by establishment age
get_employment_dynamics_by_age(geography = "county", years = 2018:2023)

# Business dynamics by sector — state level
get_business_dynamics_by_sector(geography = "state", years = 2018:2023)

Direct from source

Annual CSV files are available from the BDS data page. Data are also accessible via the Census API. See the BDS methodology page for full documentation of concepts, variable definitions, and coverage.

  • Package: cori.data.bds — CORI’s tidy access layer with sector, age, and size breakdowns
  • Package: cori.data — meta-package including cori.data.bds
  • Dataset: Census Business Formation Statistics — EIN application counts provide a more timely signal of business formation activity; BDS provides the observed establishment entry and subsequent job dynamics
  • Dataset: QCEW Employment & Wages — provides current quarterly employment and wage levels; BDS explains how the business and employment base is changing beneath those levels
  • Project: Rural Economic Outlook — BDS is a core input to CORI’s multi-dataset economic analysis