Oklahoma Small Business Statistics: the 2026 Picture

Oklahoma’s reputation was built on oil and gas, but its payroll belongs to small businesses: 395,520 of them, 99.4% of every company in the state, employing 706,906 people. That workforce share, 50.8%, ran ahead of the national small business employment share in 2022, a point the SBA’s own profile singles out.

New business applications peaked at 57,932 in 2021 and have zig-zagged since, landing at about 56,855 in 2025, roughly 39% above their 2019 level. Beneath the filing noise, private employment grew 0.9% in 2024.

Everything cited here comes out of six primary offices, federal and state, each linked in the closing sources.

Oklahoma’s Small Business Share, in Full

The 2025 Oklahoma profile from the SBA’s Office of Advocacy counts 395,520 small businesses, about 12,600 more than the 2024 edition reported. Two very different halves make up that total.

• On the employer side, 72,456 small firms account for 96.8% of every Oklahoma employer and met a $32.8 billion payroll in 2022, 44.6% of the state’s total.
• On the solo side sit 323,064 nonemployer businesses with $18.5 billion of receipts that year, about 86.5% of them sole proprietorships.
• Construction leads the small business count at 49,414 firms, ahead of other services (46,695) and professional, scientific and technical services (44,310).
• Administrative, support and waste services number 39,125, with real estate close behind at 35,813.

Twelve lines down that same table sit 12,352 small firms in mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, the energy business at small scale rather than corporate scale. The BLS adds the establishment view: 123,123 private locations statewide in 2024.

Oklahoma’s Employment Heavyweights and What They Pay

Rank the major industries of Oklahoma by headcount and the list starts in the hospital corridor, not the oil field. Health care and social assistance runs 221,633 private jobs, about 16.3% of the state’s private total; retail trade follows at 185,098, accommodation and food services at 162,747, and manufacturing fourth at 140,777, paying $70,892, roughly 21.5% above the private norm. The state’s largest manufacturers appear in federal data only as payroll cells, never as ranked company names.

• Professional, scientific and technical services runs the most locations, 18,169, at $81,679 a year.
• Management of companies pays best, $126,598, then energy at $119,139 and utilities at $108,712.
• At the other end sit accommodation and food services at $22,224, retail at $36,725 and arts and recreation at $38,248.
• The statewide private average lands at $58,364.

Manufacturing itself leans small at the employer level: 90.7% of the sector’s employers, 2,649 firms, sat under the small business line in 2022, and their 50,235 employees made up 40.1% of its workforce.

Oklahoma Oil and Gas: High Pay, Shrinking Payroll

The state’s signature industry employs 30,294 people across 2,738 private establishments, just 2.2% of Oklahoma’s private jobs. The money reads differently: $119,139 in average annual pay, roughly double the state’s private norm, and $3.6 billion in wages. The same 2024 file records the direction of travel, 966 jobs gone in a year, a 3.1% decline.

Ownership in the sector skews small: 1,935 of its employers, 96.3%, are small firms carrying 61.4% of its jobs (2022 data).

• In Oklahoma County, the industry’s average pay reaches $183,825, about 185% above the county norm, the kind of figure a headquarters cluster writes into a payroll cell.
• Out west in Canadian County, the same sector grew 8.7% in 2024, running against its own statewide tide.

Double the pay and nearly a thousand fewer jobs: Oklahoma’s energy sector managed both in the same year, and neither fact cancels the other.

The Sectors Adding Jobs in Oklahoma

Private employment statewide rose 0.9% in 2024, a net 12,711 jobs, and the gains gathered in a recognizable set of sectors. The list below records what grew, nothing more.

• Educational services grew fastest in percentage terms, up 6.3% (1,170 jobs).
• Arts, entertainment and recreation rose 6.1% and management of companies 5.3%.
• Health care added 9,177 jobs, the largest absolute gain of any sector, a 4.3% climb.
• Construction advanced 4.0% (3,350 jobs) and finance and insurance 2.4%.

The other column belonged to administrative and waste services, down 4,597 jobs or 4.4%, the steepest absolute drop; information also fell 4.4%, transportation and warehousing lost 3.6%, mining 3.1% and retail 0.5%.

Oklahoma City and Tulsa Against the Rest of the State

County lines below count private employers only; government weight is called out where it matters. Oklahoma County, the seat of Oklahoma City, holds 415,101 jobs, about 30.6% of the state’s private employment, grew 1.7% in 2024, and pays the most of the four counties profiled here, $64,584 on average.

Tulsa County answers with 333,584 jobs, about 24.6% of the state, up 1.2% at $63,938. Put the two metro counties together and they hold roughly 55.2% of Oklahoma’s private employment.

• In Oklahoma County, health care is the biggest employer, 76,371 jobs, up 5.1%; professional services pay $86,528 across 33,551 positions; and roughly 79,900 government jobs, about 16.1% of the county’s total, mark it as a capital city.
• In Tulsa County, manufacturing is the second-largest employer, 40,519 jobs at $76,661, up 3.3%, the aerospace concentration expressed through payroll cells rather than names; health care tops its table at 57,643 jobs, and management of companies pays a county-best $149,834.

Norman Cools While Canadian County Accelerates

Cleveland County, home of Norman, was the only profiled county to shrink in 2024, down 2.0% to 69,213 private jobs at $46,134 average pay; about 24.2% of its total employment is government work, the weight of a university town. Canadian County, the western edge of the OKC metro around Yukon, Mustang and El Reno, went the other way: private jobs up 5.0%, the quickest of the four profiled, with manufacturing growing 6.0% and health care up 7.2%.

The four counties profiled here hold about 62.7% of Oklahoma’s private jobs; the remaining 37% is a reminder that the state also works far from either skyline.

The Zig-Zag in Oklahoma’s New Business Filings

Annual figures here add up monthly Census data, so treat them as close approximations. Oklahomans filed about 39,927 new business applications in 2018 and 41,032 in 2019. Then the line stopped behaving: 45,777 in 2020, a series high of 57,932 in 2021, a 4.5% slip in 2022, a 2023 total that missed the record by 28 filings, a 7.4% drop to 53,645 in 2024, and a 6.0% recovery to 56,855 in 2025.

The opening-and-closing math stayed favorable across the March 2023 to March 2024 window: 13,472 establishments opened against 11,896 closures, every size counted and temporary closures included, a net gain of 1,576. Small businesses supplied 16,295 of the 20,366 net new jobs, 80.0% of the total.

The Borrowing and Exporting Year Oklahoma Just Had

The two columns point in different directions: 7(a) dollars jumped while the smaller loan programs and the export totals both eased.

SBA Program Detail for FY2024

SBA lenders backed 477 7(a) loans worth $314.6 million in Oklahoma in fiscal 2024; all programs combined delivered roughly 500 loans and $335.0 million.

• Against fiscal 2023, that is 3.5% more 7(a) loans carrying 32.1% more dollars, a 7(a)-only comparison.
• The 504 program fell to 23 loans and $20.4 million from 35 and $33.6 million, and microloans slipped by about a third to 27.
• Tulsa’s district, OK-01, led the 7(a) table on both measures, 144 loans and $92.2 million; the Oklahoma City core, OK-05, followed at 128 and $63.1 million.
• Community Reinvestment Act reporting shows $1.1 billion in new bank loans to Oklahoma firms with revenues of $1 million or less in 2023, a shade under 2022’s $1.2 billion.

Oklahoma’s Export Sellers by Size

The Census identified 2,974 Oklahoma companies exporting goods in 2023, and 2,497 of them, 84.0%, were small firms. The value ran the other way: of the $6.1 billion shipped, small exporters accounted for $1.5 billion, a 24.8% share, down from 26.8% of 2022’s slightly larger $6.3 billion total.

Owner Data With an Oklahoma Signature

The 2022 Census ownership surveys count 38,325 American Indian and Alaska Native owned businesses in Oklahoma, 4,325 of them employer firms; no other minority-owner line in the state’s table runs that high.

• Women own 44.7% of Oklahoma businesses; 13,472 employer firms are female-owned and another 9,613 are owned equally with men.
• Veterans own 7.4% of businesses while making up 5.7% of workers: 25,091 businesses in all, 4,091 with employees.
• Owners of Hispanic origin hold 31,796 businesses, Black owners 25,748 and Asian owners 18,151.
• Geography splits the base 94,066 rural to 234,936 urban, about 28.6% of classifiable businesses on the rural side.

Oklahoma’s Output and Its Out-of-State Dollars

In current dollars, Oklahoma’s economy produced $274.4 billion in 2025, up from $263.7 billion a year earlier. Strip out inflation and real growth came to about 1.5%, per the BEA’s regional accounts.

Travel Spending’s 2022 High-Water Mark

The state tourism agency’s most recent economic-impact study covers calendar 2022, so every figure in this block carries that year. Travelers spent $11.8 billion in Oklahoma, 12.3% above the previous record of $10.5 billion set in 2021.

• 18.3 million visitors came in 2022, up 3.3% on the prior year.
• Travel generated $833 million in state and local tax revenue, an 8.4% increase, plus $2.9 billion in direct earnings.
• More than 100,000 jobs ran on tourism; the agency ranks it Oklahoma’s third-largest industry, second only to oil and gas at pulling in out-of-state dollars.
• $4.4 billion, about 38% of all travel spending, landed in Oklahoma and Tulsa counties, and 72% of visitor spending came from out-of-state travelers.

The Running Costs of an Oklahoma LLC

Get two labels right before filing anything here. Oklahoma’s recurring filing is an annual certificate, which is not the same thing as an annual report, and its income tax runs on a progressive schedule, not a flat rate.

Formation Papers and the $25 Anniversary Certificate

Formation runs through the Secretary of State, whose own filing procedures price each step; the full sequence, name search through Oklahoma Tax Commission registration, is mapped in our step-by-step Oklahoma LLC formation guide, in the order the state expects them.

• Articles of Organization: $100, filed by mail, in person or online; same-day service adds $25 and card payments carry a 4% charge.
• Name reservation: $10, holding the name for 60 days.
• Annual certificate: $25 every year, due on the company’s anniversary date.

The certificate doubles as the state’s quiet deadline: the Secretary of State sends the reminder only to the email address on record, and a stale inbox means the notice never lands.

Oklahoma also requires every LLC to keep a registered agent at a street address in the state, no P.O. boxes. Owners who outsource that role can compare registered agent services in Oklahoma before picking one. For the filing itself, the broader Oklahoma LLC service reviews rank the formation providers.

Oklahoma’s Tax Rules in Plain Terms

Oklahoma’s individual income tax is progressive and tops out at 4.75%, reached at $100,000 of taxable income, per the 2025 Form 511 packet; that is where most sole proprietors, LLC members and S corporation shareholders pay tax on business earnings. The old franchise tax is gone entirely: tax year 2023 was its last, and LLCs were exempt from it even then.

• Sales tax starts at a 4.5% state rate, in place since 1990; combined rates work out to 8.625% in Oklahoma City, 8.517% in Tulsa and 8.75% in Norman.
• Since August 29, 2024, the state portion of sales tax on groceries is zero under HB 1955; city and county food taxes still apply.
• Partnerships and S corporations can shift the income tax bill to the entity through the state’s pass-through entity election, on the books since 2019.
• The minimum wage is $7.25, matching the federal floor.

An Oklahoma LLC’s recurring state bill fits on one line: $25, once a year, on the day the company turns another year older.

Before You File: Four Oklahoma Answers

Sources

• The business count, ownership tables, export split and lending context trace back to the SBA Office of Advocacy’s 2025 Oklahoma Small Business Profile.
• Industry, county and pay figures for 2024 were pulled from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages files at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Monthly application counts sit in the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics, and the solo-business figures in its Nonemployer Statistics.
• Fiscal 2024 approvals by program and district are downloadable from the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 loan datasets.
• Output levels in current and chained dollars belong to the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional accounts.
• Filing costs and the annual certificate requirement are printed on the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s fee schedule.
• Income, sales and grocery tax details follow the Oklahoma Tax Commission and its published forms.
• The 2022 travel-impact figures were released by the Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department.