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Data sources & vintages

Every figure traces to one of the public datasets below. Each is keyless, free, and reproducible.

Used for	Source	Geography	Cadence	Link
Establishments by ZIP & industry	U.S. Census ZIP Code Business Patterns (ZBP)	ZIP × NAICS, 2023	Annual, ~2-year lag	source
Population by ZIP (ZCTA)	U.S. Census American Community Survey 5-year, table B01003	ZCTA, 2024	Annual release, 5-year window	source
Recent county employment & wages	BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW)	County × industry, quarterly (9 of 16 industries)	Quarterly, ~5-month lag	source
County payroll by industry (fallback)	U.S. Census County Business Patterns (CBP)	County × NAICS, 2023 (all 16 industries)	Annual, ~2-year lag	source
ZIP annual payroll (all industries)	U.S. Census ZIP Code Business Patterns (ZBP) totals	ZIP, 2023	Annual, ~2-year lag	source
County population & components	U.S. Census Population Estimates Program (PEP)	County, 2020–2024	Annual, ~1-year lag, revised	source
ZIP population change	U.S. Census American Community Survey 5-year, table B01003 (two windows)	ZCTA, 2015–2019 vs 2020–2024	Annual release, 5-year windows	source
Jobs by workplace and home ZIP	U.S. Census LEHD LODES 8 (WAC + RAC)	Block → ZCTA/county, 2019 & latest available (2022; 2021 for MI, no WAC for AK)	Annual, ~2-year lag	source
County-to-county migration	IRS Statistics of Income migration data	County, tax years 2021–2022	Annual, ~2-year lag	source
Nonemployer businesses & receipts	U.S. Census Nonemployer Statistics (NES)	County × NAICS, 2024	Annual, ~2-year lag	source
ZIP boundaries (maps)	U.S. Census TIGERweb ZCTA + Cartographic Boundary files	ZCTA geometry	Annual	source
Base map tiles (dark)	OpenFreeMap (OpenMapTiles schema, OpenStreetMap data)	Vector tiles	Continuous	source
Individual shop locations (map dots)	OpenStreetMap points of interest via OpenMapTiles	Point locations	Continuous, crowd-sourced	source
Aerial imagery (optional)	USGS The National Map — public domain	Raster tiles	Continuous	source

Scroll the table sideways to see all columns.

Notes & known limits

ZBP counts establishments with paid employees. Businesses without employees come from Census NES, are shown separately on each report, and are never added to the density index.
NES uses a newer NAICS version than ZBP. NES 2024 uses NAICS 2022, ZBP 2023 uses the prior version. Nonemployer figures are shown only where the industry definition is identical; otherwise the report says "not published". NES is county-level only — there is no ZIP detail.
NAICS stops at 6 digits. Some everyday categories share one code (each report spells out what is bundled).
ZCTA ≠ USPS ZIP. ZCTAs are Census statistical areas that approximate ZIP codes; boundaries and coverage differ slightly.
QCEW is county-level only here — it confirms recent direction but cannot be joined to a ZIP. It also publishes only some of these industries as a clean 6-digit series, so the other reports cite CBP instead, labelled as annual.
Payroll is not profit or a wage quote. ZBP payroll is the ZIP's annual total across all industries; dividing by employees mixes full-time, part-time, seasonal, and owner pay. CBP payroll is the county total for one industry and includes bonuses and exercised stock options. Neither is a typical wage for a new business.
PEP, LODES, and IRS cover different years and geographies. PEP is county-level population (2020–2024); LODES is jobs by block, aggregated to ZIP and county (2019 and the latest usable year, 2022 except Michigan and Alaska); IRS is county-to-county moves of tax filers (2021–2022). They are never summed together.
LODES excludes the self-employed and military and counts jobs, not unique people. A person with two jobs appears twice.
IRS migration data cover matched returns only. Counts are exemptions, not a population count, and the files lag about two years.
Map dots come from OpenStreetMap. Individual shop locations are crowd-sourced, appear only at street-level zoom, and vary in completeness by area. OpenStreetMap tags do not map one-to-one onto NAICS, so dots are approximate category matches. A dot is not proof a business is open, and dots are never used to compute the saturation index.
Suppression. Very small counts can be withheld in the source data; we show what is published and never fill gaps with estimates.

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BizGapMap — free, no-login small-business saturation reports for major U.S. counties. Built entirely from public U.S. Census, BLS, and IRS data (ZBP 2023, ACS 2024 5-year, PEP 2024, LODES, QCEW, IRS SOI). No forecasts, no revenue guesses — withheld cells are marked, and the few derived counts are labelled as estimates.

Data sources &amp; vintages

Notes & known limits

Data sources & vintages