Formation Trends That Beat The QCEW Lag.
Monthly formation, dissolution, and net-formation aggregates by county and NAICS sector — sourced directly from state SOS filings. Built for economic development offices and researchers who need current-quarter signal, not year-old BLS data.
The Problem
Public small-business statistics lag the filing record by months to years:
- BLS QCEW data is excellent but lags filings by 6+ months — too slow for current-quarter policy memos
- Census Business Dynamics Statistics are annual; you need monthly granularity for grant deliverables
- Per-state SOS portals are manual, paginated, and inconsistent — building your own scraper is a six-month detour from your research
- Economic-development board reports rely on stale year-over-year comparisons rather than rolling-twelve trends
What You Can Do
Track Monthly Formation + Closure Trends
Pull formations_count, closures_count, and net_formation by state, county, and month. Build the trailing-twelve-month rolling baseline that the published BLS series can't deliver until next year, and feed it into research dashboards and grant memos.
Compare Counties + Sectors Side-by-Side
The market-signals aggregate is rolled by (state, county, naics_2digit, period_month). Pull every Polk-County NAICS sector against a peer county or roll multiple counties up against the state baseline. The CSV export drops straight into R / Python / Excel.
Surface Closure-Rate Spikes for Policy Triage
When closure rate accelerates in a target county or NAICS, the policy intervention conversation has to start before the QCEW data confirms it 9 months later. Monthly aggregates surface the inflection point in time for research office to brief stakeholders.
Build Longitudinal Datasets for Academic Work
The entity-level data feeds longitudinal survival studies. Pull formations from a baseline cohort, track dissolution events forward, compute Kaplan-Meier curves by NAICS or geography. The 500-row export tier is sized for cohort sampling work; upgrade to Lender for full-population longitudinal pulls.
Sample Insight
Trailing twelve formation rate +6.3% YoY · closure rate +11.4% YoY · net formation rate up 1.8 / 1K businesses
Iowa formation activity outpaced closure growth on the trailing twelve, driven primarily by NAICS 54 (Professional Services) and 23 (Construction). Two outlier counties show closure rates running > 1.5σ above the state mean — worth a closer look in the next research office briefing.
Action: export the per-county aggregate for the trailing twelve, drop it into the research dashboard, and surface the two outlier counties for the policy team. CSV export is a one-click workflow on the Analyst plan.
Illustrative only. Live numbers populate as the nightly SOS scrapers + monthly aggregator pass complete a baseline.
Recommended Plan
The Analyst plan is sized for research workflows — formation and closure trends, monthly aggregates, dashboard exploration, and a 500-row CSV export per month for cohort sampling.
- LLC + corporation formation and dissolution records
- 2 states at launch (IA, TX — additional states quarterly)
- Monthly trend summaries (formations, closures, net formation, rates)
- Dashboard with county and NAICS filters
- CSV export: 500 rows/month
- Email support
- 7-day free trial, cancel anytime
Need full-population pulls, NAICS slicing, or API access for a longitudinal study? Compare all plans