Arkansas Small Business Statistics: Full 2026 Breakdown

One of every five manufacturing jobs in Arkansas is in poultry processing, and the companies behind the state’s numbers are overwhelmingly small: 292,728 of them, 99.3% of all Arkansas businesses, with 501,512 people on payroll. Their 46.1% share of state employment beat the national small business share in 2022, per the SBA’s own callout, down from 47.5% a year earlier.

Formation filings follow a jagged line: a series high of 41,697 new business applications in 2021, dips in 2022 and 2024, then a 2025 rebound to about 39,512, still roughly 55% above 2019. Meanwhile private employment rose 1.4% in 2024.

The sourcing is strictly primary, SBA and BLS through to Arkansas’s own agencies, with the full link list gathered in the final section.

The Arkansas Small Business Headcount

The SBA’s 2025 Arkansas profile puts the count at 292,728 small businesses, 99.3% of roughly 295,000 companies in the state and about 12,000 more than the 2024 edition recorded.

• 51,109 small employer firms make up 96.2% of all Arkansas employers and covered a $21.9 billion payroll in 2022, 38.7% of the state’s total.
• Running alone, 241,619 nonemployer businesses took in $12.65 billion of receipts in 2022; 88.4% of them are sole proprietorships.
• The BLS counts 99,464 private establishments statewide for 2024, 103,755 with government locations included.
• By firm count including solo ventures, construction leads at 38,786, then other services (38,489), administrative and waste services (29,528) and professional services (27,930).

Arkansas’s Largest Private Sectors and Their Paychecks

Health care and social assistance employs the most Arkansans, 185,032 people, about 16.9% of private jobs, and added 6,018 more in 2024, the most of any sector. Manufacturing sits second at 161,999 jobs, 14.8% of private employment, and lost the most that same year, 834, a 0.5% dip: weight and wobble in one line. Retail is third at 143,656 jobs, accommodation and food services fourth at 115,352 on the state’s lowest average pay. No government dataset ranks companies by name; the pay cells carry that story.

• Management of companies pays $167,015 on average, 184% above the state’s $58,721 private norm; the sector holds just 3.6% of private jobs yet 10.3% of all private wages.
• Utilities follow at $110,340, then wholesale trade at $89,823.
• The low end: accommodation and food services at $22,090, arts and recreation at $31,231, retail at $35,990.

Even in a state of big plants, small employers dominate manufacturing’s roster: 1,922 of them, 86.6% of the sector’s employers, with 41,497 workers, 25.7% of its employment (2022 data).

Arkansas Food Manufacturing, Down to the Poultry Line

Ask for Arkansas food industry statistics and the federal employment file answers in detail. Food manufacturing is the state’s largest manufacturing subsector: 332 establishments and 51,696 jobs at $50,776 average pay, up 1.9% in 2024. That is 31.9% of all Arkansas manufacturing employment, 3.2 times the runner-up, fabricated metal at 16,058 jobs.

Poultry is the core of it. Animal slaughtering and processing employs 34,611 people, and poultry processing alone runs 60 plants with 32,380 jobs at $45,937, one of every five manufacturing jobs in the state and 62.6% of food manufacturing.

• Washington County holds the largest county food manufacturing cell, 7,113 jobs (up 5.8%), ahead of Benton at 6,930 and Sebastian at 4,256.
• Beverage and tobacco manufacturing adds 85 establishments and 1,970 jobs, growing 4.2%.

Take poultry off the table and Arkansas manufacturing shrinks by a fifth.

The Four Economies Inside Arkansas

County rows here cover private employers; government weight gets its own mention. Pulaski County, seat of Little Rock and of the state government, carries 210,383 private jobs, about 19.2% of the statewide total, up 2.2% in 2024 at $61,092 average pay.

• Health care leads Pulaski at 39,842 jobs and finance and insurance pays $100,232 there.
• Roughly 51,200 government jobs, about 19.6% of county employment, come with the capital’s territory.

What the Other Three Counties Add

Benton County is the outlier of the four, and the gap is not subtle.

• Benton’s private pay averages $84,195, 43.4% above the state’s, and the county grew quickest of the four profiled, up 3.8%; retail is its largest sector (14,148 jobs) and wholesale trade pays $118,791, nearly a third above the statewide wholesale average.
• Government work is just 7.5% of Benton’s employment, the lowest share of the four; two county cells, management of companies and administrative services, are suppressed for confidentiality, so the headquarters pay story stays on the statewide line.

Washington County, with Fayetteville and Springdale, adds 101,549 private jobs (up 2.1%), led by health care and carrying that big food manufacturing cell; its management of companies line pays $153,384, and about 15.8% of its employment is government, the university’s footprint. Sebastian County around Fort Smith is the factory county: manufacturing is its largest sector, 12,904 jobs, 21.4% of county private employment. Benton and Washington together form the northwest corridor, 235,289 private jobs, about 21.4% of the state.

The four counties sum to 46.1% of Arkansas’s private employment in the 2024 file; flip that around and a 53.9% majority of the state’s private paychecks are written somewhere smaller.

What Grew and What Shrank in Arkansas in 2024

Arkansas’s private economy added 15,343 jobs in 2024, a 1.4% gain. What follows is bookkeeping, not advice: the sectors that hired, then the ones that thinned.

• Construction grew fastest among sizeable sectors, up 5.6% (3,537 jobs).
• Arts and recreation rose 4.8%, management of companies 4.1%, utilities 3.7%.
• Health care’s 3.4% climb delivered 6,018 jobs, the biggest absolute gain; professional services matched the rate with 1,681.

The shrinking list is shorter. Information fell hardest in percentage terms, down 4.0% and 513 jobs, agriculture lost 3.3%, and manufacturing’s 0.5% slip cost 834 positions, the most of any sector, while finance, transportation and administrative services each eased by less than a point.

A Filing Boom That Left a High Floor

Yearly totals below are added up from monthly Census releases, so treat them as close counts rather than official ones. Arkansas ran near 25,500 new business applications a year in 2018 and 2019, jumped 26.9% in 2020, and hit its series high of 41,697 in 2021. Nothing since has matched it: 37,751 in 2022, 38,933 in 2023, 36,365 in 2024, then a rebound to 39,512 in 2025. The floor moved anyway; the latest year sits about 55% above 2019.

Between March 2023 and March 2024, 10,446 establishments opened and 9,538 closed, temporary closures counted, for a net gain of 908. The jobs math: 118,458 added, 102,091 lost, net plus 16,367, with small businesses supplying 14,245 of those, 87.0%.

A Down Year for SBA Loans, a Better One for Exports

Arkansas firms drew less through the 7(a) window in FY2024; the state’s small exporters, counted separately by the Census, sold more.

The 7(a) Pullback in the Numbers

Lenders approved 286 7(a) loans worth $143.9 million in fiscal 2024; all programs combined placed about 301 loans and $162.2 million.

• Fiscal 2023 posted 306 loans and $199.5 million; the 7(a) program alone fell 6.5% in count and 27.8% in dollars from there.
• The 504 program held its ground at 15 loans and $18.3 million, dollars actually up 3.5%; microloans eased to 46.
• Central Arkansas, district AR-02, took the most dollars, $42.7 million; the northwest’s AR-03 wrote the most loans, 91.
• Community Reinvestment Act data adds the bank picture: $1.1 billion in new loans to Arkansas firms with revenues of $1 million or less in 2023, just below 2022’s $1.2 billion.

Small Exporters Gained Ground

Census trade data identified 2,167 Arkansas exporters in 2023 shipping $5.5 billion in goods, up from $5.3 billion. Small firms took a larger slice of it: 1,681 of the exporters, 77.6%, were small, and their $1.3 billion came to 24.3% of the value, up from 22.9% a year earlier. A quiet double improvement, reported without explanation.

Arkansas’s Rural Ownership Streak

Rural addresses account for 40.1% of classifiable Arkansas businesses, 100,747 of them against 150,269 urban, in the 2022 Census ownership files.

• Women own 45.8% of Arkansas businesses; 9,495 employer firms are female-owned and 7,926 more are owned equally with men.
• Veterans hold 7.7% of businesses against 5.0% of the workforce: 18,784 in all, 2,784 with employees.
• 35,998 businesses are Black-owned, and 97.2% of them run without employees (998 employer firms); Asian-owned businesses number 9,577 (2,577 employer) and Hispanic owners hold 6.8% (18,737 in all).

Arkansas’s Economy at Full Scale

Arkansas’s output reached $198.4 billion in 2025 in current dollars, from $188.3 billion in 2024. Real growth, calculated in inflation-adjusted chained dollars, works out to roughly 2.2%, per the BEA’s regional accounts.

Tourism’s 2024 Tally, Food and Drink First

The state tourism department’s 2024 impact study, released in July 2025, leads with a category that fits this page: food and beverage, the largest slice of visitor spending at $3 billion, up 6.5%.

• 52 million visitors came in 2024, 2.6% more than the year before.
• They spent $10.3 billion, up 4.0%; with supply-chain and induced effects, the agency puts the total impact at $17.4 billion.
• Tourism supported 71,633 direct jobs, 3.9% of Arkansas jobs, one in every 18 statewide by the agency’s own count.
• Visitor retail spending rose 5.8% and recreation 4%.

What an Arkansas LLC Owes the State, and When

Start with the date: May 1. That is when every Arkansas LLC’s $150 franchise tax falls due each year, and the state grants no extensions. Getting in, by contrast, costs $45.

The Secretary of State’s LLC Fee Schedule

A domestic LLC files its Certificate of Organization, form LL-01, for $45 online or $50 on paper with the Secretary of State’s Business and Commercial Services Division. Reserving a name runs $22.50 online, and a registered LLC that trades under another name files a fictitious name, form DN-18, for the same $22.50, the filing behind most Arkansas DBA questions. The order of operations is laid out in our guide to starting an LLC in Arkansas, step by step from the name search to the first franchise tax report.

The franchise tax itself is flat: $150, owed by every LLC, domestic or foreign, payable to the Secretary of State online (a $5 card fee applies) or by mail without one. File late and the balance grows, a $25 penalty plus daily interest, and unpaid years block any further filings with the state.

Every company also names a registered agent at an Arkansas street address, never a P.O. box; owners who prefer to delegate can weigh the registered agent services in Arkansas we have compared before choosing one.

Those who want the whole thing handled can start from our ranking of the best LLC services in Arkansas, which grades the full formation offer.

Arkansas Tax Rates After the Recent Cuts

Business income mostly lands on personal returns, and the personal rate keeps falling: the top rate is 3.9% for tax year 2025 under Act 1 of 2024’s second extraordinary session, per the state income tax instructions, and the DFA’s withholding tables for 2026 already print a 3.70% top bracket. Pass-through entities can elect to pay at the entity level instead, and corporations top out at 4.3%.

• Sales tax runs 6.5% at the state level; local additions bring Little Rock to about 8.625%, Bentonville and Fort Smith to 9.5%, and Fayetteville to 9.75% (combined figures computed from the DFA’s local rate table).
• The state grocery sales tax fell to zero on January 1, 2026, from the 0.125% rate in place since 2019; local food levies are separate.
• The minimum wage is $11.00, set by a voter-passed initiative and in effect since 2021, with a $2.63 cash wage for tipped staff; it sits well above the federal floor.

Forty-five dollars to get in, one hundred fifty a year to stay, and a single date to remember: the Arkansas checklist is short, but May 1 does not move.

Arkansas Questions the Data Can Settle

Sources

• Business counts, dynamics, ownership, exports and CRA lending figures are drawn from the SBA Office of Advocacy’s 2025 Arkansas Small Business Profile.
• Sector, subsector and county numbers for 2024 are read straight out of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Application numbers month by month live in the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics; its Nonemployer Statistics cover the solo businesses.
• The fiscal 2024 lending figures come from the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 FOIA datasets.
• Both GDP measures are published in the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional accounts.
• Every formation fee and the $150 franchise tax appear on the Arkansas Secretary of State’s LLC forms and fees pages.
• Tax rates, including the grocery-rate change, are printed by the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration.
• The 2024 visitor figures were announced in the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism’s release of its economic impact report.