How Much Solo Businesses Earn: What $1.8 Trillion Across 30 Million Firms Reveals
There is a dataset the U.S. Census Bureau publishes every year that almost nobody writing about entrepreneurship seems to open.
It tracks every business in the United States with no paid employees and at least $1,000 in annual receipts. Not surveys. Not self-reported income from a forum poll. Tax-filed revenue from every single one of them. In the most recent release, that is 30,427,808 businesses reporting nearly $1.8 trillion in combined receipts.
That is the largest sample of one-person businesses that exists anywhere, and it answers a question the entire online-business genre usually handles with anecdotes: how much solo businesses earn, and — far more usefully — where that money concentrates.
The answer is not what most people assume. The sector with the most solo operators earns less per business than the national average. The sector with the highest revenue per business holds only about a tenth of them. And the fastest-growing sector is growing for a reason that should make you cautious rather than optimistic.
The Dataset, and Why It’s Better Than What You’ve Been Reading
Nonemployer Statistics covers businesses with no payroll: sole proprietorships, single-member LLCs, independent contractors, freelancers, gig drivers, solo consultants. Because the figures derive from federal tax filings rather than voluntary responses, they avoid the failure that ruins most income claims in this space — people who did well volunteer their numbers, people who didn’t stay quiet.
Two limits are worth stating before any of the figures, because they change how you should read everything below.
Receipts are gross revenue, not profit. A business reporting $80,000 in receipts may have spent $50,000 getting there. Nothing in this dataset tells you what anyone kept.
Averages hide enormous spread. These are means, not medians, and in a population of 30 million the mean is pulled upward by a small number of very large operators. The typical business in any sector below earns less than that sector’s average. Probably meaningfully less.
With those two caveats held firmly, the comparisons between sectors remain valid — and the comparisons are where the useful information is.
How Much Solo Businesses Earn on Average
Across all 30.4 million nonemployer businesses, average receipts come to roughly $59,200 per firm, per the Census Bureau’s Small Business Week release.
Those businesses now make up 78.4% of all U.S. establishments, up from 75.4% in 2012. Over that same period, nonemployer businesses grew at an average of 2.7% a year while employer businesses grew 1.1%. The one-person business is not a fringe of the American economy. It is, numerically, the default form of American business, and it has been gaining share for over a decade.
Their combined $1.8 trillion equals 6.4% of U.S. GDP.
Hold $59,200 in mind, because its usefulness is as a benchmark. Every sector figure below is either above it or below it, and the pattern in which sectors land where is the actual finding.
The Inverse Relationship Nobody Mentions
Here is the comparison that reframes the whole question. Using the Census Bureau’s sector-level breakdown of the smallest businesses:
| Sector | Solo businesses | Total receipts | Average per business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real estate, rental & leasing | 3,145,367 | $344.7B | ~$109,586 |
| Construction | 2,875,590 | $238.0B | ~$82,745 |
| Professional, scientific & technical services | 4,013,209 | $229.4B | ~$57,128 |
| Transportation & warehousing | 3,854,720 | — | — |
| All sectors | 30,427,808 | ~$1.8T | ~$59,200 |
Read the first and third rows together.
Professional, scientific and technical services — consulting, design, writing, marketing, bookkeeping, IT services, the entire category most online-business advice points people toward — contains the largest number of solo businesses of any sector, over four million of them. And its average receipts, at roughly $57,128, sit below the all-sector average of $59,200.
Real estate, rental and leasing holds around 3.1 million businesses, roughly a fifth fewer, and averages nearly double: about $109,586.
Construction, with the fewest firms of the three, comes in second at about $82,745.
The pattern is not subtle. Across these sectors, the more crowded the field, the lower the revenue per business. That is what a competitive market looks like from the inside, and it is the opposite of the impression you get from content telling you that freelance consulting is where the money is.
Why Real Estate Sits on Top — and What That Doesn’t Mean
The high figure needs unpacking, because taken naively it produces a terrible conclusion.
Real estate receipts are large partly because the transactions are large. A solo agent’s receipts reflect commissions on property sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rental and leasing receipts include gross rent collected on properties carrying mortgages, maintenance, taxes and insurance — costs this dataset does not show. Gross revenue and take-home pay diverge more sharply here than in almost any other sector.
It is also, notably, the sector with the highest barrier to entry on this list. Licensing in most states. Capital, for anything involving owned property. Local market knowledge that takes years.
Which is precisely the point. The sector with the most protected entry has the highest revenue per operator, and the sector anyone can enter this afternoon with a laptop has revenue per operator below the national average. Barriers to entry are not an obstacle to your income — they are the reason income exists in a sector at all.
That principle is the single most transferable thing in this entire dataset, and it applies just as much to the four million people in professional services as it does to real estate. Within a crowded sector, whatever makes you harder to replace is doing the same job that licensing does elsewhere. It is the same reason the skills that raise your income are rarely the ones that are easiest to acquire — difficulty of acquisition is the pricing mechanism.
The Sector Four Million People Chose
Professional, scientific and technical services deserves its own examination, because it is where most readers of an article like this one already are or are heading.
Four million solo businesses. Below-average receipts. That combination is what an oversupplied market looks like in official statistics rather than in opinion.
But “oversupplied on average” is not the same as “no money in it,” and the average conceals the thing that matters. This sector spans an enormous range: a freelancer writing $50 blog posts and a solo engineering consultant billing $200 an hour are both counted in the same $57,128 average. The number is low because the entry-level end of the sector is vast, not because the ceiling is.
What the figure does tell you is that being in the sector buys you nothing. Four million other businesses are also in it. Positioning inside it is the entire game — which specific problem you solve, for which specific buyer, in a way that isn’t immediately substitutable.
This is also the sector where AI has changed the production cost of the work most dramatically, and where confusion about what that means is thickest. The production of a deliverable got cheaper for everyone simultaneously, which lowers the price floor rather than raising anyone’s income. What holds value is the part that didn’t get cheaper: judgment about what should be made, and responsibility for whether it was right. I wrote about that distinction in more detail in what AI still can’t do, and this dataset is quietly consistent with it — the sector most exposed to cheap production is the one earning least per operator.
Transportation: Fastest Growth, Thinnest Ground
Between 2022 and 2023, transportation and warehousing added solo businesses faster than almost any other sector, growing 5.3%. Within it, taxi and limousine services — which is how the Census classifies most rideshare driving — added nearly 122,000 nonemployer businesses, passing pre-pandemic levels for the first time.
Accommodation and food services grew fastest overall at 6.4%, with utilities third at 5.1%.
Growth sounds like opportunity. Here it mostly isn’t, and it’s worth being clear about why.
Sectors that grow this fast in number of businesses are sectors with near-zero barriers to entry. Rideshare driving requires a car and an app. When 122,000 new operators enter a market in a single year, they are not creating new demand — they are dividing existing demand into more pieces. High entry growth is a signal of low entry cost, and low entry cost is the same condition that keeps revenue per operator suppressed.
Contrast that with real estate at the top of the revenue table, which is not growing quickly in business count. The two facts are connected.
When you see a sector booming in operator count, the honest reading is that it just became easier to enter, not that it just became more profitable.
What’s Shrinking
Six sectors saw revenue decline between 2022 and 2023. Health and personal care retail fell 13.5% in nonemployer count, and mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction led revenue declines at -10.1%.
Declines are as informative as growth, and in some ways more so. A sector losing solo operators is usually one where either the economics stopped working or consolidation is squeezing independents out. Neither is a market a new one-person business should enter without a specific reason.
The Deceleration Signal
This is the finding I found most interesting, and the one I have seen nowhere else.
Nonemployer business growth by year:
| Year | Growth in nonemployer businesses |
|---|---|
| 2021 | +4.9% |
| 2022 | +4.7% |
| 2023 | +2.1% |
Growth more than halved in a single year. Over the same period, nonemployer receipts as a share of GDP fell 0.4 percentage points, from 6.8% to 6.4%.
Both at once means something specific: the surge of new solo businesses that followed 2020 is cooling, and the revenue side is not keeping pace with the business count. More operators, slightly thinner revenue per operator.
This is not a reason to avoid starting something. It is a reason to be unsentimental about which sector you start in, and about the assumption that a rising tide will carry an undifferentiated business. For most of 2021 and 2022, it arguably did. In 2023 it stopped doing so as reliably.
What This Data Cannot Tell You
Honesty about the limits is what separates using data from hiding behind it.
It says nothing about profit. Only gross receipts. A construction business averaging $82,745 may keep less than a consultant averaging $57,128 once materials, tools, insurance and vehicle costs are paid.
It says nothing about hours. A figure of $59,200 could represent full-time work or a weekend side business. The dataset does not distinguish, and gig-heavy sectors contain a large number of part-time operators, which drags their averages down for reasons unrelated to how profitable the work is.
It is an average, not a typical outcome. Worth repeating, because it is the most common way statistics like these get misused. In a population this large and this skewed, the median business earns well below the mean.
It is national, and it is American. Sector economics differ by country and by city. If you are not operating in the U.S. market, treat these as structural patterns — crowding versus revenue, barriers versus pricing — rather than as numbers that transfer directly.
And it is retrospective. The most recent data covers 2023, released in 2025. It tells you what happened, not what is happening this quarter.
How to Actually Use This
Four practical conclusions follow from the figures, and only from the figures.
Treat crowding as a pricing signal, not a validation signal. Most people read “millions of people do this” as proof a market exists. The data suggests reading it as proof the market is competitive. Both are true; only one affects your rate.
Ask what your barrier is. Real estate has licensing. Construction has skill, tools and physical presence. If your chosen field has no structural barrier, you need a manufactured one — a specific niche, a reputation, a relationship, proprietary process knowledge. Without it you are priced at the sector floor by default.
Don’t confuse operator growth with demand growth. A sector adding businesses rapidly may simply have become easier to enter. Check whether receipts are growing alongside the business count. In 2023, frequently they were not.
Start where capital requirements match what you have, then move deliberately. The sectors with the best revenue per operator generally need licensing, capital, or years. That is an argument for starting in a low-barrier sector and building a barrier of your own — not for staying there indefinitely. If capital is the constraint right now, the realistic floor for a first online business is a few hundred dollars, and the first genuine advantage you build matters more than the sector you started in.
If you want to see what this looks like applied to specific work rather than sectors, the four categories of task that solo operators are actually being paid for right now — and roughly what each pays — are laid out in how to make money online with AI tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average income for a one-person business? Average receipts were about $59,200 across 30.4 million U.S. nonemployer businesses in 2023. That is gross revenue before any expenses, not income, and because it’s a mean across a highly skewed population, the typical business earns meaningfully less.
Which sector has the highest revenue per solo business? Real estate, rental and leasing, at roughly $109,586 in average receipts — nearly double the all-sector average. Much of that reflects the large transaction sizes and gross rents involved, not proportionally higher take-home pay.
Why do professional services earn less than average despite requiring skill? Because it holds more solo businesses than any other sector — over four million — and entry requires no licence or capital. Crowding suppresses rates. Within the sector the range is enormous; the low average reflects the size of the entry-level end, not a ceiling.
Is the number of solo businesses still growing? Yes, but much more slowly. Growth fell from 4.9% in 2021 and 4.7% in 2022 to 2.1% in 2023, while receipts as a share of GDP declined 0.4 percentage points.
Does this mean I shouldn’t start a service business? No. It means that being in the sector confers no advantage on its own, and that positioning inside it determines your rate. Service businesses remain the fastest route to a first paying client; the data simply argues against assuming the sector will carry you.
Are these figures profit or revenue? Gross receipts, from federal tax filings. The dataset contains no expense or profit information at all.
Does the data cover part-time businesses? Yes — any business with no employees and at least $1,000 in annual receipts is included, whether it’s full-time or a weekend operation. This is a significant reason sector averages in gig-heavy categories run low.
Where can I look at this data myself? The Census Bureau publishes it as Nonemployer Statistics, with sector and state-level tables available through its data portal. The summary articles linked in the sources below are the accessible entry point.
Conclusion
Thirty million businesses filing real revenue figures produce a picture noticeably different from the one the online-business genre paints.
The crowded sectors earn less per operator. The sector with the strictest entry requirements earns the most. The fastest-growing sector is growing because it became easier to enter, not more profitable. And the post-2020 surge in solo businesses slowed sharply in 2023 while revenue per operator came under pressure.
None of that argues against building something on your own — 78.4% of American establishments already are, and that share keeps climbing. What it argues against is choosing a direction based on how many people are already going that way. On the evidence here, that number tells you about competition, not opportunity.
The question worth sitting with is not which sector pays best. It’s what will make you difficult to substitute inside whichever one you pick.
A Note from Lucas
I went into this expecting to find that professional services — consulting, writing, design, the whole online-freelancing world — would sit at the top of the revenue table. It’s what every guide implies, and it’s where I’ve spent my own effort. Finding it below the national average, with four million businesses in it, genuinely changed how I think about my own positioning. The number that stayed with me isn’t the $109,586 for real estate, it’s the pairing: the most protected sector earns most, and the most open sector earns least, and that relationship is visible in official tax data rather than in someone’s opinion. My honest takeaway is that I’ve been thinking about barriers to entry backwards — treating them as obstacles to get around rather than as the thing that makes income possible at all.
About the Author
Lucas Palma is the founder and editor of Info Is The Key. He writes about online business, entrepreneurship, and the practical mechanics of building income independently, working from primary sources and official data rather than recycled advice.
Last Updated: September 2026 | Reading Time: 11 minutes
Editorial note: This article is educational analysis of public government data and does not constitute financial, business, tax, or investment advice. All figures are gross receipts from U.S. federal tax filings, not profit, and represent averages across a highly varied population. Sector economics differ by country and local market. Consult a qualified professional before making significant business or financial decisions.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau — Small Business Week: nonemployer establishments and receipts (2023 data)
- U.S. Census Bureau — The Steady Rise of the Nonemployer Business
- U.S. Census Bureau — Statistics Shed Light on Self-Employment by Sector and State
- U.S. Census Bureau — Nonemployer Statistics program
- U.S. Census Bureau — 2023 Nonemployer Statistics release
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