Founder Data ReportFour-Person Firms and Forty-Person Firms Call Themselves Excellent at the Same Rate. The Gap Is All at the Bottom.
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Census asks owners to grade their own business. Being bigger does not raise your chance of a top mark — it lowers your chance of a bad one.
Every fortnight the Census Bureau asks American business owners to grade their own business: excellent, above average, average, below average or poor. It is the softest question on the survey and the most revealing, because the answer is the owner’s verdict on themselves. Sorted by headcount it does something you would not expect. The share calling the business excellent barely moves across every size class below fifty people — 14.3% at one to four employees, 14.5% at twenty to forty-nine. The share calling it poor runs 4.8% at one to four and 0.8% at 250 or more.
- 14.3% of firms with 1-4 employees call their current performance excellent; 14.5% of firms with 20-49 do.
- “Average” is the most common answer in every single size class, from 46.2% at the smallest to 41.5% at the largest.
- 20.8% of the smallest firms rate themselves below average or poor, against 7.3% of firms with 250 or more employees.
- Neither “below average” nor “poor” falls cleanly on its own; added together they fall at every single step.
- Scale does not raise the ceiling on how an owner sees the business. It thins the floor.
The top of the scale does not know how big you are
Take the four smallest size classes — everything from a one-person payroll up to forty-nine employees — and the share calling the business excellent is 14.3%, 14.8%, 14.7% and 14.5%. Those are not a trend. They are the same number four times, and none of the differences between them survives the survey’s own margin of error. Whatever it is that makes an owner call their business excellent, adding staff does not supply it.
On a common 0-25% axis, shared with the next chart so the two can be read against each other. Orange is the one-to-four-employee class, slate every larger class. The four bars below fifty employees are statistically indistinguishable from one another; the step up at fifty and above is real.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey, cycle 202618, reference period August 10-23, 2026, published September 10, 2026; downloaded from census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/ on September 19, 2026. Estimates are shares of responding employer firms, cut by employment size class.
The bottom of the scale knows exactly how big you are
Now the other end. Adding “below average” to “poor” gives the share of owners who think the business is currently underperforming: 20.8% at one to four employees, falling at every step to 7.3% at 250 or more. Neither half of it declines cleanly by itself — each ticks back up once along the way — but the two together fall at every step. The extreme is starker still — 4.8% of the smallest firms call the business outright poor against 0.8% of the largest, six times as many.
Same 0-25% axis and same colour rule as the chart above, so the flat series and the falling one are directly comparable. “Poor” on its own is not charted here because it does not fall cleanly: the fifty-to-ninety-nine class reads 0.6%, below both larger classes. The combined bottom-two share does fall at every step, which is why it is the one drawn.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey, cycle 202618, reference period August 10-23, 2026, published September 10, 2026; downloaded from census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/ on September 19, 2026. Estimates are shares of responding employer firms, cut by employment size class.
Size is not an upgrade. It is insurance.
The middle never moves
Put all five ratings side by side for the smallest and largest firms and the shape of the difference is clear. “Average” is the most common answer at every size on the survey, and at 46.2% against 41.5% it is statistically the same at both ends. What changes is which side of it the rest of the firms fall on. Small firms hold roughly the same share at the top and carry a heavier tail at the bottom; large firms move that tail into “above average”, which climbs from 18.7% to 31.7%.
Each row is one rating on a common 0-50% track. The orange dot is firms with one to four employees, the slate dot firms with 250 or more, and the bar between them is the difference that rating makes. Measured in points the shortest bars are poor, average and excellent — though poor’s four-point bar is a six-fold difference, because it starts so near zero. The two longest are above average and below average.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey, cycle 202618, reference period August 10-23, 2026, published September 10, 2026; downloaded from census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/ on September 19, 2026. Estimates are shares of responding employer firms, cut by employment size class.
What the grade is measuring
This is a self-assessment, not a set of accounts, and that is the point rather than the weakness. Nobody audits the answer. What the owner of a four-person business is reporting is how the business feels from the inside on the day the form arrives — and the thing that makes it feel poor is rarely an absent ceiling. It is the absence of a floor: one slow fortnight, one late payer, one person off sick, with nothing underneath to absorb it.
All from the same fortnight. The top and middle comparisons are pairs the survey cannot distinguish; the bottom one it can, by a wide margin.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey, cycle 202618, reference period August 10-23, 2026, published September 10, 2026; downloaded from census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/ on September 19, 2026. Estimates are shares of responding employer firms, cut by employment size class.
Two limits. This is one fortnight and must not be read as a trend: Census redraws the survey’s sample once a year, and this question steps several points at the changeover — the “excellent” series alone moves 3.7 points at one boundary for the smallest firms, larger than any ordinary fortnightly move. Cross-sections like this one are unaffected; time series across a sample year are not. And the survey covers employer businesses, so the roughly eighty per cent of American businesses with no payroll at all are outside it entirely — the true smallest firms are not in this chart.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do small business owners rate their own business?
In the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey for the fortnight ending August 23, 2026, owners of firms with one to four employees rated current performance excellent 14.3% of the time, above average 18.7%, average 46.2%, below average 16.0% and poor 4.8%. Average was the most common answer, as it was in every size class.
Do bigger businesses think they are doing better?
Only at the bottom of the scale. The share calling performance excellent is 14.3% at one to four employees and 14.5% at twenty to forty-nine — a gap of 0.2 points that the survey cannot distinguish from zero. The share calling it below average or poor falls from 20.8% to 7.3% across the full size range, which it can.
What share of small businesses say they are performing poorly?
20.8% of firms with one to four employees rated performance below average or poor, of which 4.8% chose poor outright. Among firms with 250 or more employees the combined figure was 7.3%. Nationally across all employer firms, 14.8% answered below average and 3.9% poor.
Is this survey measuring actual performance or how owners feel?
How owners assess their own business. The question asks the respondent to describe current performance on a five-point scale and nothing in the survey verifies the answer against accounts. That makes it a measure of the view from inside the business, which is why the pattern across company sizes is worth reading rather than the level in any one class.
Why does business performance feel worse at a smaller company?
The data does not say why, but the shape is suggestive: the top of the rating scale is flat across size while the bottom is not, so what larger firms appear to buy is not a better best case but a less frequent worst one. A small firm absorbs a slow fortnight, a late payment or an absence with no reserve behind it, and the rating reflects that exposure.
Published by The Lonely Entrepreneur — the community and coaching platform for entrepreneurs who are building alone. lonelyentrepreneur.com
This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional financial or legal advice.