Founder Data ReportFour in Five Professional-Services Workplaces Run on Fewer Than Five People. In Restaurants It Is Fewer Than One in Three.
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Everyone repeats that most businesses are small. Almost nobody asks where. The government sorts every private workplace in the country by payroll size once a year, and the answer turns out to depend enormously on what business you are in.
Everybody knows most American businesses are small. What almost nobody looks at is how unevenly that smallness is spread. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts every private workplace in the country and, once a year, sorts them by the size of the payroll. Do that by industry and the answer stops being one number and becomes a range: 79.9% of professional, scientific and technical services workplaces run on fewer than five people, against 32.0% in accommodation and food services. Same economy, 2.5 times the concentration of very small workplaces.
- 67.1% of all private US workplaces have fewer than five people on the payroll.
- By industry that runs from 79.9% (Professional, scientific and technical services) down to 32.0% (Accommodation and food services).
- Eleven of the nineteen sectors sit above 60%. Only four sit below half.
- The biggest absolute concentration is health care and social assistance: 1,511,184 workplaces under five people.
- Being tiny is the norm in most of the economy — but in food service, retail and manufacturing it makes you the exception.
The range is enormous, and it is not random
Nineteen sectors, ordered by the share of workplaces with fewer than five people on the payroll. The top of the list is professional services, real estate and information — work that one qualified person can sell on their own. The bottom is accommodation and food, retail and manufacturing — work that needs a room full of people to happen at all. The national average, 67.1%, sits closer to the top than the middle, because the industries built out of tiny workplaces are also the ones with the most workplaces.
On a 0-100% axis. Orange marks the two ends of the range. Unclassified establishments (225,086 of them, 98.1% under five people) are carried in every total on this page but are charted nowhere — they are a filing category, not an industry.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, private ownership, United States, first quarter 2025, by establishment size class, retrieved from the open CEW data API on September 20, 2026. QCEW counts establishments — single physical locations — not firms, and covers employers only.
What the two ends actually look like
Put the most and the least concentrated sectors side by side across all nine size classes and the difference is not a shifted average — it is a different shape. In professional, scientific and technical services, 79.9% of workplaces are under five people and the whole rest of the distribution is a thin tail. In accommodation and food services, the mass sits in the 10-to-49 band: 44.2% of workplaces, against 8.9% in professional services.
Both sides share one scale so the bars can be read against each other. Percentages are each sector’s own workplaces and each column sums to 100%. The five size classes above 99 employees are combined into one row: separately they are all under 1.3% on both sides and a bar that short carries no readable information.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, private ownership, United States, first quarter 2025, by establishment size class, retrieved from the open CEW data API on September 20, 2026. QCEW counts establishments — single physical locations — not firms, and covers employers only.
In most of the economy, being tiny is the default. In some of it, being tiny makes you the exception.
Where the small workplaces actually are
Share and count are different questions, and the second one is the one that decides who your competitors look like. Health care and social assistance has a lower under-five share than professional services (74.6% against 79.9%) but more tiny workplaces in absolute terms than any other sector — 1,511,184 of them, driven by social assistance and single-clinician practices. Between them, health care and professional services hold more than a third of every under-five workplace in the country.
Counts, not shares — the bar length is relative to the largest. These eight sectors hold 76.0% of all under-five workplaces in the country.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, private ownership, United States, first quarter 2025, by establishment size class, retrieved from the open CEW data API on September 20, 2026. QCEW counts establishments — single physical locations — not firms, and covers employers only.
Go one level finer and the split sharpens
Sector averages hide the real extremes. Drop to three-digit subsectors with at least twenty thousand workplaces and the range widens from 32.0%-to-79.9% to 24.9%-to-97.7%. The pattern holds: work sold by one person’s expertise clusters at the top, work that needs a staffed floor clusters at the bottom.
Orange is the five most concentrated subsectors, slate the five least, out of every three-digit subsector with at least 20,000 workplaces. Private households is a payroll filing category for domestic employment rather than a conventional industry.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, private ownership, United States, first quarter 2025, by establishment size class, retrieved from the open CEW data API on September 20, 2026. QCEW counts establishments — single physical locations — not firms, and covers employers only.
Three limits worth stating. QCEW counts establishments, not companies: a 400-branch chain is 400 workplaces here, so a low under-five share can mean genuinely large workplaces or one large firm with many ordinary-sized sites. It covers employers only, so the millions of businesses with no payroll at all are outside the frame entirely — the true floor of the economy is smaller than anything on this page. And size-class detail is published for the first quarter only, so this is a March-quarter snapshot rather than an annual average. None of that moves the ranking, which is wide enough to survive any of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What share of US workplaces have fewer than five employees?
67.1%. In the first quarter of 2025 the United States had 11,657,676 private workplaces and 7,826,020 of them had fewer than five people on the payroll, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
Which industry has the most very small workplaces?
By share, professional, scientific and technical services: 79.9% of its workplaces have fewer than five employees. By count, health care and social assistance, with 1,511,184 workplaces under five people — more than any other sector.
Which industry has the fewest very small workplaces?
Accommodation and food services, at 32.0%. Restaurants, bars and hotels need a staffed floor to open the doors, so the distribution sits in the 10-to-49 band instead: 44.2% of the sector's workplaces.
Does this count businesses or locations?
Locations. QCEW counts establishments — single physical sites — not firms, so a company running forty branches appears as forty workplaces. It also covers employers only, so businesses with no payroll are not in these figures at all.
Why does the size of a typical workplace in my industry matter?
Because it sets what normal looks like. In an industry where four in five workplaces run on fewer than five people, being small is the default and your competitors face the same constraints you do. In one where two thirds of workplaces are bigger than that, being small is a structural position you are choosing to hold — and it needs to be a deliberate choice rather than an accident.
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This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional financial or legal advice.