Business Benchmarks Methodology

Data Standards

Sources come in a strict order of preference: official government and regulatory data first (the US Small Business Administration, Census Bureau, IRS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, ISED Canada, and the Australian Taxation Office), then franchise disclosure documents labeled per brand, then industry association figures labeled clearly as association estimates. Nothing is invented, and no figure appears without a named source.

Every figure carries a source, a reference period or an explicit "vintage not stated" label together with the date we accessed it, and a clearly defined scope. When data exists only for a broader category than the business in question, the label says so in plain words: sector-level means the sector, not the specific business.

Definitions are kept apart on purpose. Revenue is not profit. Receipts are not income. SBA financing is not startup cost. Business density is not market saturation. Employer businesses and owner-operator businesses without employees are different populations and are never merged into one number.

Profiles start as unpublished drafts. A profile is published only after automated checks pass (complete source metadata on every metric, labeling rules, metadata length and uniqueness, and a similarity gate that blocks profiles too close to an existing one) and a human review approves it. Statistical thresholds are set before results are seen, for example a minimum of 50 loan records before any median is displayed.

If operator-contributed figures are collected in the future, they will be displayed in their own clearly separated section with sample sizes shown, and never blended into public-source figures.

Corrections are logged and published. If you spot an error on any profile, reach us through the site contact page and we will review it against the original source.

Primary sources. Every published figure traces to one of the sealed primary sources below, archived with excerpts at retrieval time:
Australian Taxation Office: Small business benchmarks
Coin Laundry Association: Industry Overview for investors
IRS Statistics of Income: Statistics of Income for nonfarm sole proprietorships
US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Business Employment Dynamics establishment age tables
US Census Bureau: Economic Census data API
US Census Bureau: County Business Patterns
US Census Bureau: Nonemployer Statistics
US Small Business Administration: Loan program FOIA datasets

All published figures live in the Business Revenue Benchmarks hub, where each card states its value, population, source and reference period.

Business data and benchmarks by BusinessNES.