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2025 trends: Here are the best industries and cities for US small businesses
After a few years of volatility, 2025 proved to be a rebound year for small businesses.
To dig deeper into this yearâs boom, Bluevine combined data from more than 210,000 active business checking accounts with a proprietary survey of 1,067 U.S. small business owners to find the industries and cities that thrived the most.
Hereâs what stood out.
Key takeaways
- The administrative services, education, retail, business management, and health sectors grew the most, each posting projected year-over-year growth rates in Bluevine business checking account applications ranging between 64% and 91%.
- Smaller metros experienced a surge in small business activityâfor example, there was a 175% growth in total Bluevine account applications in Washington, D.C.
- 58.4% of small businesses met or exceeded their revenue projections for 2025, and 68.3% of respondents rated their companyâs overall financial health as strong or stable.
5 industries saw major growth or recovery in 2025
Bluevine
The data that Bluevine collected and analyzed suggests small business activity rebounded across the country. Itâs a refreshing signal after what was largely a slow year in 2024.
Note: While precise industry-specific business growth can be challenging to pinpoint, Bluevine used thousands of its business checking account applications as a metric to help estimate where year-over-year industry growth was most evident.
1. Administrative services
The market for office administrative services reached $272 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $425 billion by the end of 2029.
Bluevine data backs this upward trajectoryâthe administrative service businesses sector posted a blistering 91% growth in funded checking accounts year over year, the strongest among all industries.
This follows a similarly stellar 16.5% year-over-year growth rate in 2024, a year in which it was one of the only industries to post positive growth. This highlights a continued shift towards white collar operations in the small business landscape.
2. Education
Recent surveys from the Cato Institute show that COVID-19 reshaped the U.S. education sector, spurring a boom in private education enrollment that has lasted up to this year.
Moreover, the U.S. private tutoring market is expected to grow by $29 billion between 2025 and 2029 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.1% as parents and students alike seek access to extra materials and programs to gain an edge and prepare for important exams.
Small businesses are cashing in on the growing demand and optimism for this industryâprojected applications for Bluevine accounts within the education sector grew by a massive 72.5% year over year.
3. Retail
A recent Bain & Company study painted a cautiously optimistic picture of the retail sector to round out the year. They project in-store sales to grow by 2.75% year over year, and report that nonstore sales (where many small business retailers operate) grew at a slowed, but still healthy 7% rate.
Bluevine data shows that people are taking notice of the sectorâs positive performance, with Bluevine account applications growing by 71.6% year over year, representing a fantastic rebound.
Data from Bluevineâs survey of more than 1,000 business owners backs the optimistic outlook. While two-thirds of retailers raised prices in 2025 (likely in response to rising costs and cash flow challenges), 56.1% of them met or exceeded their 2025 revenue projections. This suggests demand remains steady despite rising costs.
4. Business management
Bluevine data has the business management industry as the fourth-fastest growing small business sector of the year, with projected Bluevine account applications growing 64.6% between 2024 and 2025.
While this is a rather broad category, a more granular look into market data reveals healthy growth in prominent management-related sectors. For example, Mordor Intelligence pins the global management consulting service market at $358 billion for 2025, with projected growth up to $451 billion by 2030.
The same report shows that startups demonstrated the highest growth in this category in 2024 (at a CAGR of 5.9%). As organizations grow in scale and complexity, opportunity opens up for small businesses to offer their cost-effective, specialized management expertise.
5. Health
A recent report by Precedence Research predicts that the U.S. health and wellness market will grow to an astounding $3.7 trillion by 2034, and Bluevine data shows that small businesses are riding the wave. Projected Bluevine business checking account applications for 2025 in this industry grew 64.3% over their 2024 levels.
Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company study identified that 84% of U.S. consumers rate wellness as a top or important priority, fueling an estimated $500 billion in annual spend that grows at a 4%-5% clip despite macroeconomic stressors.
Bluevine survey data backs these projections and performance indicators, displaying hallmarks of a resilient and growing industry. Just under 41% of respondents in this industry exceeded their revenue projections for 2025.
And while 71.4% raised prices on their products, 33.3% still managed to improve customer retention and acquisition rates.
Over 58% of small businesses met or exceeded their 2025 revenue projections
While some industries stood out more than others, 2025 was a fruitful year for the small business economy in general. Bluevineâs survey shows that 58.4% of small businesses met or exceeded their revenue projections for the year.
The uptick in performance fueled sentiment for the year, with 83.9% of respondents indicating optimism about their financial health. Notably, 68.3% of respondents rated their companyâs overall financial health as strong or stable, while 15.6% reported that their business was improving after a difficult period.
One factor that could be driving this success is improved access to funding. In Q3 2025, the Chamber of Commerceâs Small Business Index reported 61% of small businesses rated their access to capital (like business loans and lines of credit) as good.
Recent tech developments could also be fueling high performance by helping small businesses thrive under difficult macroeconomic conditions.
The rise of generative AI
One U.S. Chamber of Commerce report revealed that 86% of small businesses had adopted generative AI tools by 2025. Bluevineâs survey on small business trends revealed that the majority are using AI in functions that help support growth, like sales (39.4%) and data analysis for business insights (32.6%).
Widespread digitization
The same Chamber of Commerce report found that 58% of small businesses use four or more technology platforms, yielding widespread benefits. For example, over 80% say that these platforms have helped acquire new customers, build better customer relationships, and operate with a higher degree of efficiency.
Data from Bluevineâs survey showed that improved customer retention or acquisition rates (29.1%) and reduced costs/improved profit margins (23.4%) were the top two most-reported wins in 2025, potentially indicating that these platforms could be having a substantial impact where they are most influential.
Social media and e-commerce platforms
Social media apps (like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook) and e-commerce platforms (like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay) have emerged as central parts of the small business economy. Together, they’re driving more than 50% of revenue in over 1 in 5 small businesses, according to a 2025 SBE Council report.
Small city metros dominate the 5 hottest spots for SMB growth, with DC skyrocketing
Bluevine
Holistically, Bluevineâs proprietary data around new checking account applications paints a very healthy picture of the U.S. small business economy on paper.
As expected, the massive cities that have historically led business growth continued to drive small business activity. New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago finished in the top six of the most total Bluevine account applications for 2025.
But looking deeper, a more interesting trend emergedâsmall metros saw meteoric growth in Bluevine account openings. The five metros with the fastest relative growth above a statistically significant threshold were:
- Indianapolis, Indiana (+361% YOY)
- Columbus, Ohio (+200% YOY)
- Washington D.C. (+175% YOY)
- Sacramento, California (+147% YOY)
- Phoenix, Arizona (120% YOY)
The case of Washington, DC
Washington, D.C., skyrocketed to #3 in total Bluevine account applications for the year, beating out metro areas many times its size, including Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Chicago, and Miami-Fort Lauderdale.
Bluevine observed a spike in applications around February of 2025, shortly after the current presidential administration announced workforce reductions in the federal government (the D.C. metroâs largest employer).
While Bluevineâs data canât prove causation, the timing suggests that federal workforce reductions may have been one contributing factor in the surge of small business activity in the nationâs capital.
At a higher level, Bluevineâs survey on small business ownership concerns established a clear correlation between layoffs and interest in starting a new business. Among people laid off in the last one to two years at the time of the survey, 64.9% said they are âvery interestedâactively making plans nowâ to start a business.
2025 saw U.S. employers cut hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the yearâthe federal government included. Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureauâs Business Formation Statistics showed over 473,000 seasonally adjusted business applications in August 2025 alone.
Itâs likely that heavy layoffs and economic uncertainty, among other factors, nudged many people toward entrepreneurship in 2025.
Methodology
Centiment Audience conducted this survey of 1,067 company owners, founders, partners, CEOs, presidents, or managing directors of U.S. businesses with annual revenue between $50,000 and $5,000,000 for Bluevine between Nov. 4 and Nov. 10, 2025. It is paired with internal data measured from more than 200,000 active Bluevine accounts. Survey data is unweighted, and the margin of error is approximately +/-3% for the overall sample with a 95% confidence level.
This story was produced by Bluevine and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
