Small Business Statistics Across Mississippi in 2026

Mississippi counts 294,768 small businesses, 99.4% of all the firms in the state, and 251,172 of them, about six in seven, run with no employees at all. Together the small firms employ 444,113 people, 47.0% of the state’s workers, a share the SBA says exceeded the national small business employment share in 2022.

In the latest year small firms added a net 5,426 jobs while the state’s larger employers, on balance, shed more than they hired; private employment as a whole edged up 0.5% in 2024. New business applications climbed 12.1% in 2025 after several cooler years off the pandemic peak. And the tax code these firms operate under is mid-change, with a flat income tax scheduled to keep falling.

Federal and Mississippi state records sit behind every figure here; the full list closes the page.

Mostly Small, Mostly Solo

By the SBA’s 2025 Mississippi profile, those 294,768 small businesses are 99.4% of the state’s firms, and 251,172 of them, 85.2%, are nonemployers with no staff on the books.

• The 43,596 small firms that do employ people carry a $18.2 billion payroll (SUSB 2022).
• By count, the biggest small-business industries lean toward services and trades: other services 44,194, construction 35,448, administrative and support 35,135, health care 28,100, retail 26,133.
• Only 5,002 small firms are in manufacturing and 4,873 in agriculture, forestry and fishing, both sectors where a few large operations, not small ones, carry the jobs.

Who Employs Mississippi, and at What Pay

Health care and social assistance is the largest private employer, 141,999 jobs, up 3.3% in 2024. Manufacturing is close behind at 141,366, a plant-heavy sector where large operations dominate. Retail follows at 138,774, and accommodation and food at 125,370, the lowest-paying of the big sectors at $22,250. No employer is named here; the industry cells do the describing.

• The best-paying private sectors are management of companies ($102,470), utilities ($98,783) and mining ($90,188).
• Finance ($76,025), wholesale ($75,973) and professional and technical services ($73,166) sit in the next tier.
• At the bottom are accommodation and food ($22,250), arts and recreation ($22,747) and retail ($33,285); the statewide private average is $50,272.

A Factory Base of Ships and Poultry

Transportation-equipment manufacturing is the state’s largest factory subsector, 27,587 jobs at $73,507, and it splits in two. A Gulf-coast ship and boat building cluster holds 12,444 of those jobs, about 45%, and grew 1.7% in 2024; an inland auto cluster, assembly plus parts plus bodies, accounts for roughly 13,457 more. A small aerospace cell of 1,464 jobs grew the fastest, up 10.7%.

Food manufacturing is the second-largest factory subsector, 24,354 jobs, and it is mostly poultry: animal slaughtering and processing alone is 18,125 jobs, nearly three-quarters of the sector, with seafood and catfish packing adding another 1,983. North Mississippi’s furniture belt shows up as 14,195 jobs, down 4.5% in 2024.

Manufacturing is the state’s second-biggest private employer and about 15% of its economy, yet small firms hold under three in ten of those factory jobs; it is a base built on plants the data counts but never names.

A Tour of Mississippi’s Job Centers

What follows runs county by county, private employers only; government sits outside these cells, and in Mississippi it is large, with local government alone at 150,262 jobs. Hinds County, the capital around Jackson, is the largest of the profiled counties at 76,985 private jobs, health-care led and visibly government-heavy, its all-ownership count of 109,172 running far above the private one.

• Harrison County, on the Gulf coast around Gulfport and Biloxi, is the one place accommodation and food leads, 22,027 jobs, the casino-coast texture.
• Jackson County, at Pascagoula, pays the most, $59,778, on a shipbuilding manufacturing cluster of 14,171 jobs; the shipyard sub-cells are confidential at county level, so only the total shows, and no yard is named.
• DeSoto County, in the Memphis suburbs, is led by transportation and warehousing, 16,548 jobs, and grew the fastest of the profiled counties, up 2.2%.
• Rankin and Madison, the Jackson suburbs, split retail and auto-assembly manufacturing (Madison’s factories are 7,838 jobs).

Furniture Country Around Tupelo

In Lee County, around Tupelo, manufacturing is 10,103 jobs, and the north-Mississippi furniture cell is visible at the county level, 3,382 jobs at $42,870, the upholstered-furniture belt in the data with no factory named.

The Sectors That Moved in 2024

Private employment rose 0.5% in 2024 across the state, a net gain that hid a clear split by sector.

• The steepest rise was in arts and recreation, up 7.0%, the coast’s entertainment cell.
• Construction added jobs at 4.3%, professional and technical services at 4.1%, and health care, the biggest employer, at 3.3%.

The pullback landed on goods and back-office work: manufacturing fell 2.4%, its furniture cell off 4.5% among the sharpest; administrative and support work was down 2.8%, information down 4.7%, and mining down 5.9%.

New Applications Past Their 2021 High

New business applications in Mississippi tell a different story from the states still setting records. Summed from monthly Census data, and so best read as estimates, they ran near 30,358 in 2018, surged to a peak of 66,384 in 2021, cooled to 46,805 by 2024, and rebounded to 52,467 in 2025, up 12.1% on the year but still short of the pandemic high. The likely-to-hire subset, a cleaner startup gauge, reached 14,086 in 2025, about 45% above its 2018 level.

Underneath, establishments barely moved: 7,444 opened against 7,621 that closed in the year to March 2024, a net loss of 177. Yet small firms added 5,426 jobs on net over the same window against the whole economy’s 1,148, so the state’s net hiring came entirely from small businesses while larger employers shed on balance.

It is a formation curve that ran hot in the pandemic and has since settled into a higher-than-before but no-longer-climbing groove, even as the small firms that survived kept adding workers.

The Loans Small Firms Take, the Exports They Don’t

Two federal data threads cross here. In one, small-business borrowing, Mississippi firms show up in force; in the other, exports, they mostly do not.

SBA Lending in the 2024 Fiscal Year

Across fiscal 2024, SBA-backed lenders approved 358 7(a) loans worth $166.1 million for Mississippi businesses, an average near $464,000 and an estimated 3,390 jobs. The loan count rose 8.8% over the prior year even as the dollars fell 20.6%, a year of more but smaller 7(a) loans. The 504 program, which finances fixed assets, ran to 10 loans and $19.0 million, single-digit counts best read straight rather than as a percentage.

• By count, the 7(a) loans concentrated in Harrison (30), Hinds (27), Rankin (25) and DeSoto (23) counties, nearly all processed through the Mississippi district office.
• Poultry production (NAICS 112) took 25 of the 358 7(a) loans, with restaurants and freight trucking the other leaders, the farm economy showing up directly in the lending mix.
• On a separate, bank-reporting track, Community Reinvestment Act lenders made $871.6 million in loans to Mississippi firms under $1 million in revenue in 2023.

Where the Export Dollars Concentrate

Exports run the other way. In 2023, 1,932 Mississippi firms exported $13.3 billion in goods, but only 16.0% of that value, $2.1 billion, came from the 1,454 small exporters among them. The big dollars come from the large firms, not the small ones, the mirror image of the lending picture.

Ownership, and the Line Between Solo and Staffed

Women own 47.1% of Mississippi businesses, 125,015 in all, of which 8,015 have employees. The state’s owners split almost evenly between rural and urban addresses, 125,864 against 129,899 in 2022.

• Black-owned businesses number 95,416, but only 2,416 of them, about 2.5%, have any employees; the rest are one-person firms, a structural feature of the Mississippi base.
• Veterans own 7.0% of businesses (18,395, of which 2,395 employ staff); Hispanic owners hold 7,931 (731 with employees).
• White-owned businesses number 180,862, 31,862 of them with employees, the largest employer-firm group.

The $165 Billion Question

Mississippi’s economy was worth $165.1 billion in 2025 at current prices, some $6.9 billion above its 2024 level. Measured in real terms, stripping out inflation, it grew about 1.6% in 2025 after 3.3% in 2024, by the BEA’s accounts.

Where does that money come from? Private industry is 84.5% of it. The largest private-industry slice is manufacturing at 15.3%, all but level with government’s 15.5%, and real estate is 12.7%. Agriculture, for all the state’s farm identity, is 2.5% by value added, its weight sitting more in the food-processing and forestry supply chains than in the fields.

Tourism as the Fourth-Largest Industry

Visit Mississippi, the state tourism office, put 2024 at a record, in a report prepared by Tourism Economics.

• 44.2 million visitors spent $11.9 billion directly in 2024.
• Counting the multiplier, tourism’s total economic impact was $18.1 billion, and it supported about 136,094 jobs, roughly one in 13.
• The office ranks tourism the state’s fourth-largest industry.

It is a $165 billion economy that earns its living in factories and hospitals more than on farms, and that is now trying to leave more of the proceeds with the people who make them, by cutting the taxes on them.

The Taxes Mississippi Is Cutting

Mississippi is doing something few states are: taking apart a tax it already collects.

An Income Tax on the Way Down

The state taxes personal income at a single flat rate on earnings above $10,000, the lower brackets having been removed by the 2022 Tax Freedom Act, and that rate is set to keep dropping: 4.4% in 2025, 4.0% in 2026, and 3.0% by 2030 under the 2025 Build Up Mississippi Act. Cuts toward zero after that are written into the law but tied to the state’s revenue growth, so Mississippi has not eliminated its income tax; it is stepping it down.

• The general sales tax is 7%, and the tax on groceries was cut from 7% to 5% on July 1, 2025.
• The corporate franchise tax is being phased out and disappears entirely on January 1, 2028.
• Property tax is set and collected locally, not by the state; the minimum wage is the federal $7.25, since Mississippi sets no floor of its own, with a tipped cash wage of $2.13.

The Free Annual Report Behind the $50 Certificate

Starting a Mississippi LLC means filing a Certificate of Formation, not Articles of Organization, online with the Secretary of State for $50, with a name reservation beforehand costing $25. What is unusual is the yearly upkeep: the annual report is free, $0, but it is still mandatory and must be filed online by April 15 to keep the company in good standing, and a lapse costs $50 to undo. From choosing a name to that first filing, our walkthrough of starting an LLC in Mississippi covers what to file and when.

Every Mississippi LLC also has to keep a registered agent and office in the state under Title 79 of the Mississippi Code. For owners weighing that choice, our roundup compares the registered agent services in Mississippi side by side on price and service.

Owners who want the whole thing handled can pick from our best LLC services in Mississippi ranking, weighed on price and speed.

What Owners Ask About Doing Business Here

Sources

• For the firm counts, ownership, business dynamics and export totals, the source is the SBA Office of Advocacy’s 2025 Mississippi Small Business Profile.
• Employment and wages by industry and county for 2024 come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
• New-business applications come from the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics, the nonemployer counts from its Nonemployer Statistics.
• Fiscal 2024 loan figures were tallied from the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan-level files.
• The nominal and real output figures are the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s regional accounts.
• LLC fees are the Mississippi Secretary of State’s published business filing fee schedule.
• The income-tax schedule, the grocery-tax cut and the franchise-tax phase-out are set by the 2025 Build Up Mississippi Act (House Bill 1); the tax authority is the Mississippi Department of Revenue, and the LLC Act is Title 79, Chapter 29 of the Mississippi Code.
• The minimum wage is the federal floor under the Fair Labor Standards Act (U.S. Department of Labor).
• The 2024 visitor figures are Visit Mississippi‘s tourism economic-contribution report.