Census County Business Patterns (CBP)
The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns is an annual series on the number of
business establishments, employment, and payroll, broken out by industry, for
counties, metros, states, and ZIP codes. It is the source of the business-and-
establishment counts in this Commons.
Coverage
Base Data Commons graph
Source & License
- Publisher: U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns program.
- Access: Published at census.gov/cbp; served into this Commons through the Google Data Commons base graph.
- License: Public domain. A work of the U.S. Government, free to use and redistribute with attribution to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Methodology
- Administrative basis: CBP is built from the Census Bureau's Business Register, drawing on tax and survey records, so it is a near-complete count of employer establishments rather than a sample.
- Establishment, not firm: the unit is the establishment (a single physical location), so a multi-site company is counted once per location.
- Reference: counts reflect the week of March 12 each year; payroll is annual.
Coverage & caveats
- Geographies: counties, metros, states, and ZIP codes.
- Disclosure suppression: to protect individual businesses, employment and payroll are suppressed (shown as ranges or withheld) for industries with very few establishments in an area.
- Scope: covers employer establishments; most government, farm, and self-employed activity is out of scope.
Variables (1)
| Variable | Source table |
|---|
|
Business establishments
Count of uscestablishment.
Population uscestablishmentMeasured countStatistic measured value
|
County Business Patterns |