Data sources / Federal statistics

Census County Business Patterns

Published statistics on business establishments with paid employees, organized by geography, industry and employment-size class within the program's coverage rules. An establishment is a location, not necessarily a separate company.

Last reviewed 14 October 2026 · report an error

Publisher: U.S. Census Bureau
Access: Free
Coverage: Published statistics on business establishments with paid employees, organized by geography, industry and employment-size class within the program's coverage rules. An establishment is a location, not necessarily a separate company.
Identifiers: NAICS code and vintage; Geography code; Reference year
Freshness: Annual reference periods; publication follows the period measured.
Official URL: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html

What it can establish

Use Census County Business Patterns for a defined acquisition-research question. Match each record to the right entity using its identifiers (NAICS code and vintage, Geography code, Reference year) before accepting its contents, and keep U.S. Census Bureau's own scope and attribution on the finding.

A published establishment, employment or payroll measure for a defined geography, industry classification and reference year.
Context for assessing the geographic spread of an industry and the boundaries of a market-mapping exercise.

What it cannot establish

The identities of individual businesses behind a statistical cell, their owners, or which operators are independently acquirable.
The number of targets missed by a list without reconciling branches, employer coverage, industry definitions and the list's date.

A search that returns nothing in Census County Business Patterns describes the search performed. Coverage here is published statistics on business establishments with paid employees, organized by geography, industry and employment-size class within the program's coverage rules, so a missing record becomes a negative finding only where that coverage reaches the company in question and the evidence standard supports the inference. Otherwise the question stays open.

How Docket uses it

Your acquisition criteria become the agents' questions. Census County Business Patterns can support some of them and leave others unanswered; its freshness (annual reference periods; publication follows the period measured) is weighed answer by answer and it receives no blanket reliability score.

Triage. Keeps population statistics separate from target identities so establishments do not become duplicate company records.
Scout. Collects the cell definition, reference year and disclosure qualifications alongside a market-context value.
Audit. Checks that any comparison uses compatible units and does not turn establishment counts into firm counts.

Scout records typed answers from a fixed list with verbatim quotations from retained pages. Audit reviews only the retained material, with every fetch tool denied. It settles supported contradictions, strikes unquotable answers and leaves gaps visible. See the research-agent method and screening criteria guide for the surrounding workflow.

Pitfalls and review questions

Suppressed or qualified cells need their accompanying flags; an unavailable value is not zero.
A service niche can cross industry codes. Record inclusions and exclusions before using the table as a coverage benchmark.

What the series measures

County Business Patterns reports the number of establishments, employment during the week of March 12, first-quarter payroll and annual payroll, by industry, county and employment size of establishment. It is built mainly from administrative records and Census Bureau surveys. It covers most employer establishments and excludes self-employed people, most agricultural production, railroads and most government employees, as the methodology page lists.

The unit is the establishment, a single physical location of a business, not the firm. A company with eight sites is counted eight times, once in each county where it has a site. This is the correct unit for local capacity and the wrong one for counting companies, which is why the firm-based Statistics of U.S. Businesses series exists alongside it.

Disclosure rules and how to read the tables

To protect confidentiality the Census Bureau applies noise infusion to the data and withholds some cells, publishing employment size classes where exact numbers would reveal a business. Small counties and narrow industries often show flags in place of numbers. The methodology describes the treatment, and users should read it before comparing cells or summing across them, because published subtotals do not always equal the sum of published parts.

Industry codes are those of the North American Industry Classification System and change between editions. When comparing years, check the edition. When using it to count targets, treat the establishment count as an upper bound on independent operators in the area, since chains, franchises and branches are included.

Illustration (fictional)

A team wants to know how many commercial landscaping establishments serve a metropolitan area. County Business Patterns gives establishment counts by size class for the counties. The researcher sums the counties, notes suppressed cells, and states a range. Local business registrations and licence data then test whether the range is plausible, and entity resolution reduces the count of establishments to a count of distinct firms.

Federal statistics

Census Statistics of U.S. Businesses

The published distribution of covered business activity across enterprise-size categories for a specified reference period.

Federal statistics

BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages

Employment, wage and establishment measures for the specified covered population, industry, geography and period.

Licensing and regulatory

State contractor licensing boards

The license holder, class, published status and associated dates shown by the responsible authority.

Sources and further reading

County Business Patterns Methodology, U.S. Census Bureau. Scope, source files, and the disclosure treatment applied to the published tables.
County Business Patterns (CBP), U.S. Census Bureau. Establishment counts, employment and payroll by NAICS code and county. The spine of any honest market map.
Economic Census: NAICS Codes & Understanding Industry Classification Systems, U.S. Census Bureau. How NAICS is built, how an establishment gets its code and why codes are assigned by activity.
Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB), U.S. Census Bureau. Firm counts and employment by enterprise size, which is how you size the population of buyable companies.

These links identify research contexts to investigate, rather than conclusions about sector attractiveness. Ask how Census County Business Patterns would be used on your list or return to the complete source directory.

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