The U.S. Census Bureau recently announced its release of its report on 2003 County Business Patterns, which is chock full of data on a "variety of information on businesses in more than 1,000 industries from the national level down to states and more than 3,100 counties."
The dynamic table below presents the top ten counties in the U.S. according to the number of business establishments contained within their boundaries. You may select any of the column headings below to rearrange the presented data according to their rank according to the column category. The categories include number of business establishments, number of employees, annual payroll and the average payroll per employee.
| Top U.S. Counties for Business Establishments |
|---|
| State - County | Business Establishments | Employees (as of March 12, 2003) | Annual Payroll ($1000 USD) | Average Payroll per Employee ($USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CA - Los Angeles | 235085 | 3806184 | 147357105 | 38715 |
| IL - Cook | 127727 | 2356581 | 102208068 | 43371 |
| NY - New York | 103313 | 2022669 | 147720341 | 73032 |
| TX - Harris | 85528 | 1707646 | 70345122 | 41194 |
| CA - Orange | 83164 | 1412657 | 57025051 | 40367 |
| AZ - Maricopa | 76629 | 1380697 | 47848314 | 34655 |
| CA - San Diego | 72564 | 1122335 | 42274388 | 37666 |
| FL - Miami-Dade | 70687 | 829774 | 27763891 | 33460 |
| TX - Dallas | 62223 | 1321071 | 58336365 | 44158 |
| WA - King | 59521 | 1046681 | 51739093 | 49432 |
It would take a little more data mining, but an interesting statistic might be found in the ratio of businesses to metropolitan population for each of these counties.