Austin placed third in WalletHub's best large city to start a small business ranking in 2025, across three different qualifications: business environment, access to resources, and business costs.
Business Environment
This was scored by 8 different metrics:
- Length of average work week
- Average growth in number of small businesses
- Startups per capita
- Average growth of business revenues
- 5-year business-survival rates
- Industry variety
- Entrepreneurship index
- Job growth in 2023 vs. 2019
Austin ranked second across these metrics.
Access to Resources
This was scored by 7 different metrics:
- Financing accessibility
- Venture investment amount per capita
- Prevalence of investors
- Human-capital availability
- Higher-education assets
- Share of college-educated population
- Working-age population growth
Austin ranked fourth across these metrics.
Business Costs
This was scored by 4 different metrics:
- Office-space affordability
- Labor costs
- Corporate taxes
- Cost of living
Austin ranked eighty-first across these metrics.
From the February 16, 2026 Issue
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