Veteran-Owned Businesses and Their Owners: Data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners

Summary of report: Veteran-Owned Businesses and Their Owners: Data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners

Joseph Sobota, April 2017

Purpose

Businesses owned by veterans and by service-disabled veterans have been a research priority of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy since the enactment of the Veterans Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Act of 1999.  This report continues Advocacy’s ongoing veteran entrepreneurship research program and features data on veteran-owned businesses and their owners. Advocacy believes that good policy requires good information, and the information in this report is intended to help government policymakers and other stakeholders make informed decisions. The report is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners (SBO), conducted once every five years. The current report is for data year 2012, for which data were released in December 2015 and February 2016.

Overall Findings

Census estimated that in 2012:

• 2.52 million businesses were majority-owned by veterans.
• Of this total, 442,485 were employers, and 2.08 mil­lion were non-employers.
• Almost all of veteran-owned businesses (99.9 percent) were small businesses.
• Veteran-owned firms had receipts of $1.14 trillion, employed 5.03 million people, and had annual payroll of $195 billion.
• Veteran-owned firms represented 9.1 percent of all U.S. firms.
• 10.3 percent of all owners of SBO-respondent firms were veterans.
• 7.3 percent of all SBO-respondent veteran owners had service-connected disabilities.