Business population counts

BDS publishes firm and establishment counts by supported geography, NAICS, reference year, and documented firm or establishment employment-size class. Counts are employer-population aggregates under BDS definitions and must not be summed across lower-level cells as unique national firms.

The non-contributory licensed Company Dataset full-file feed documents more than 70 million company profiles plus industry, size, and location fields. Counting rows under pinned industry, size, location, inclusion, deduplication, and vintage rules directly supplies a PDL-universe population measure, not an official census.

QCEW publishes quarterly and annual-average covered-establishment counts by area, industry, ownership, period, aggregation level, and documented employment-size band. This supplies the establishment-by-size component only, not legal-firm, nonemployer, unique-person, or complete all-business counts; preserve scope, classifications, period, disclosure, and release status.

For a selected July snapshot and buyer-defined area, industry, and size filters, the Scan API returns matching records and Insights returns filtered counts; the product documents one record per included operating business location and marks included snapshot records in business. This directly supports the operating-location or establishment-like count component, not a legal-firm count, exhaustive employer/nonemployer universe, or official population estimate.