This Is the Worst State in America to Start a Business

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Worst State in America to Start a Business

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To identify the worst state in which to start a business, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from WalletHub, which ranked each state across three key dimensions: business environment, access to resources and business costs. WalletHub used 28 metrics, like average business revenue growth for the business environment, human capital availability for access to resources and office space affordability for business costs. 24/7 Wall St. added seasonally adjusted estimates for June 2021 unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The BLS puts the failure rate at 65% over the first 10 years after a start-up. The reasons for failure range from inadequate capital to poor management and poor ideas. The size of start-ups varies widely too. Some are one-person operations. Others have the backing of large venture capital firms and have millions of dollars in the bank on their first day.

The worst state to start a business in is New Jersey. Here are some details:

  • Overall score: 41.07
  • Best ranking feature for business: access to resources
  • Unemployment rate in June 2021: 7.3% (seventh highest)

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New Jersey is the 11th largest state, based on a population of 9,288,994. It is one of the slower growing. The increase in population between 2010 and 2020 was only 5.7%. The state’s economy is dominated by New York City, which is the nation’s largest metropolitan area by far with a population of 20,140,470. The metro area covers parts of New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Interestingly enough, New York ranks 22nd on the best states to start a business, with a score of 51.30.

Click here to see all the best and worst states in which to start a business.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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