See where aspiring entrepreneurs are showing the most interest in starting a business, ranked
A shopper walks through Santee Alley in downtown Los Angeles on July 28, 2026.
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images US Census Bureau data shows the number of business applications filed in 2025 by county.
Overall, the US saw an 8% increase in 2025, possibly fueled by layoffs and the AI boom.
Most were in places with big cities, though a small county in Wyoming made the top 20.
Los Angeles County and Sheridan County, Wyoming, don't share many similarities, except for one main area: a high volume of business applications.
That's one of several findings from the US Census Bureau's most recent business application data release in June.
The data track applications for Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) submitted to the Internal Revenue Service.
Business Insider sorted the data by which US counties saw the most EIN applications and calculated the percent change compared to 2024 data, while also cross-referencing with the agency's 2025 county population dataset to determine the rate of applications per 1,000 residents.
These applications did not necessarily result in a business being formed.
Overall, the US saw a roughly 8% increase in business applications in 2025, rising to 5.6 million from 5.2 million in 2024.
That could be loosely tied to an economic shift during President Donald Trump's first year of his non-consecutive second term, including a weaker labor market that may have pushed some laid-off or out-of-work Americans toward entrepreneurship.
The boom in artificial intelligence, too, has torn down some obstacles that previously barred entrepreneurs from starting and running a business, ushering in an AI startup golden age .
While most of the top counties include large metropolitan areas like Philadelphia and Miami, a small county called Sheridan in the US' least-populated state, Wyoming, ranked 16th, with 47,787 business applications in 2025; its population is just 33,241 residents.
That's more than half of the state's 79,024 applications overall.
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