The Invisible Majority: Florida’s One-Person Businesses

By Brian French. Brian French is founder and publisher of the Florida Authority Network and a Florida business news analyst with more than 20 years of experience as an analyst and money manager.

Quick Answer: The typical American business isn’t on CNBC. It has no ticker symbol, no HR department and exactly one worker: the owner. About 86% of Florida businesses have no employees. Yet the moment one of them hires a single person, it steps into the same payroll machinery as a billion-dollar company. Florida’s biggest untapped jobs opportunity isn’t luring the next headquarters. It’s helping millions of solo owners make their very first hire.

Change the Channel

Turn on CNBC and you’ll meet “business”: trillion-dollar tech giants, earnings beats, CEO interviews, a scrolling ticker of companies whose quarterly results move pensions.

It’s a great show. It’s also wildly unrepresentative.

At the end of 2025, there were 3,657 domestic operating companies listed on the major U.S. stock exchanges. Meanwhile, the U.S. had 36.4 million businesses in 2023.

Do the math, and publicly traded companies make up roughly one-hundredth of 1% of American businesses. About one in 10,000.

The other 9,999 don’t ring the opening bell. They mow your lawn, fix your air conditioner, groom your dog, keep your books, drive your kids to the airport and sell your house. Most of them have never been interviewed by anyone.

And most of them employ exactly one person.

Meet the Real Florida Business

Forget the glass tower. The typical Florida business is a pickup truck, a laptop at the kitchen table or a folding chair at the farmers market.

What You Imagine	What Florida Actually Has
A corporation with hundreds of employees	A sole owner with no employees
A stock ticker	A Venmo account
A board of directors	A spouse who asks how business is going
An HR department	Nobody, because there’s nobody to manage
Quarterly earnings calls	A quarterly estimated tax payment, paid nervously

Here are the hard numbers. In 2023, Florida had 3,117,327 businesses with no employees, versus 500,294 businesses with at least one paid worker.

Florida Businesses, 2023	Count	Share
No employees (owner only)	3,117,327	About 86%
At least one employee	500,294	About 14%

Shares calculated from Census data. Nonemployer figures count establishments and employer figures count firms, so percentages are approximate.

Florida is the solo-business capital of America. In 2022, the state had the nation’s highest concentration of businesses with no employees, at 13.3 for every 100 residents. Second place wasn’t close: Wyoming and Georgia tied at 10.8.

The trend line keeps climbing. Florida was among the three states with the biggest percentage jump in solo businesses from 2022 to 2023, growing 5.0%. Nationally, businesses with no employees have been multiplying more than twice as fast as businesses with staff, averaging 2.7% annual growth from 2012 to 2023 versus 1.1% for employers.

Translation: Americans love starting businesses. They are increasingly allergic to hiring for them.

Rich? Not Exactly

Public debate tends to assume “business owner” means “wealthy.” So when someone says businesses should pay more, provide more or absorb more, the mental picture is a company with a private jet.

Here’s a better picture. In 2023, America’s 30.4 million no-employee businesses generated $1.8 trillion in receipts. Divide it out, and the average comes to roughly $59,000 per business.

That’s not profit. That’s everything that came in the door, before gas, insurance, tools, software, licenses, a phone bill and self-employment tax. Many of these owners aren’t building empires. They’re building a living, one invoice at a time.

Meanwhile, the workers people imagine when they talk about “business” mostly work somewhere else entirely. Roughly 30% of private-sector employees work for about 1,100 firms with more than 10,000 employees, while the nearly 4.8 million businesses with fewer than 10 employees account for under 10% of private jobs. As of 2024, firms with over 250 employees held almost 56% of private-sector employment.

So when the national conversation demands that “business” do more for workers, it’s mostly talking about the giants. But the rules apply to everyone.

America Loves Small Business. Its Rulebook Doesn’t Notice.

Ask Americans what they think of small business and you’ll get something close to a group hug. In 2025, 95% of Americans held a positive view of small business, compared with 37% for big business. Confidence numbers tell the same story: 70% trusted small business, and just 15% trusted big business.

In Gallup’s 2026 institutional confidence survey, small business was the only one of 17 institutions to earn majority confidence.

So we adore small businesses. We trust them more than Congress, the media and nearly everything else. And then, the day one of them tries to grow by hiring a single human being, we hand it the same basic employer starter kit we hand to a multinational.

Employee Number One: Welcome to the Big Leagues

To be precise: many federal laws do scale with size. Civil rights rules generally start at 15 employees, family leave at 50, and so on. That’s sensible.

But the foundation of being an employer doesn’t scale at all. Hire one person in Florida and you immediately enter the same core payroll system as the largest companies in the state:

• Payroll withholding for federal income tax, Social Security and Medicare, filed on schedule.
• Florida reemployment tax registration, with new employers paying 2.7% on the first $7,000 of each worker’s wages and filing quarterly.
• New-hire reporting to the state within 20 days.
• Employment eligibility paperwork for every new worker.
• Minimum wage compliance, now $15 an hour after the Sept. 30, 2026 increase.
• Workers’ compensation coverage from the very first worker in construction, and at four employees in most other industries.
• Legal liability for what the worker does on the job, exactly like any other employer.

A Fortune 500 company handles this with a payroll department, an HR team, a benefits manager and outside counsel. The solo owner handles it at 10 p.m. after finishing the day’s actual work.

Same forms. Same deadlines. Same penalties. Wildly different resources.

The Math That Kills the First Hire

Now combine the two facts above: a typical solo business with about $59,000 in gross receipts, facing the full cost of one employee.

Adding One Florida Employee	Annual Cost
Wages at $15 an hour, full time	$31,200
Employer payroll and unemployment taxes	About $2,600
Benefits, if offered at the Southern average	About $9,800
Total	About $43,600
As a share of average solo business receipts	About 74%

Estimates based on Florida’s $15 minimum wage and the South’s 28.4% benefit share of total compensation. Average receipts calculated from Census data.

Even without benefits, wages and payroll taxes alone run close to $34,000, more than half the average solo business’s total receipts.

Then there’s the wait. Gallup estimates most new employees need more than a year to become fully productive. So the owner pays now and hopes later.

It’s not that solo owners don’t want help. It’s that for many of them, the first hire looks less like growth and more like jumping off a diving board into a pool they can’t see the bottom of.

The Most Underrated Milestone in the Economy

Politicians love ribbon cuttings. A new headquarters with 1,000 jobs gets a press conference, a giant pair of scissors and a tax-incentive package.

But consider the other math.

Florida has more than 3.1 million businesses with no employees. If just 1 in 10 of them made a single hire, that would be more than 300,000 new jobs. That’s the equivalent of hundreds of headquarters relocations, without luring anybody from anywhere.

Going from zero employees to one is the most powerful, most overlooked transition in the economy. It’s the moment a self-employed person becomes a job creator. It’s the moment a side hustle becomes a business. And it’s the moment that current rules make hardest.

Every successful employer in America once had one employee. Most never got there.

A First-Hire Agenda for Florida

If Florida wants more jobs, it should stop treating the first employee like the thousandth. Here’s what a serious first-hire agenda could look like.

1. A first-hire on-ramp. Give businesses adding their first one to three employees a simplified payroll and reporting track, with combined filings and longer deadlines.

2. A first-hire tax credit. Offset part of the reemployment tax or payroll cost for a business’s first year as an employer. Florida already offers incentive packages to big relocations. The solo owner deserves a seat at that table.

3. Grace instead of gotchas. Give first-time employers a penalty-free window to correct good-faith paperwork mistakes before fines kick in.

4. Plain-English guidance. One state web page, one checklist, one phone number for “I’m hiring my first person.” No law degree required.

5. Count it. Track how many Florida businesses make their first hire each year, and treat that number as seriously as headline job announcements.

None of this means dropping worker protections. A worker at a two-person landscaping company deserves fair pay and safe conditions just as much as one at a bank. The point is that the way we deliver those protections should fit the size of the business delivering them.

Meanwhile, Software Is Waiting by the Door

There’s a reason this matters now more than ever. Solo owners have an alternative that didn’t exist five years ago.

Small business owners already wear the hats of customer service rep, marketer and bookkeeper, and those are exactly the jobs AI tools are absorbing first. In one 2026 study, 46% of small business owners said they’d pick AI over a new employee for the same task.

The Census Bureau found AI use among employer businesses climbing to 23.8% by late summer 2026, from 17.7% at the start of the year.

That’s not a villain story. AI is a useful tool, and owners should use it. But if the human first hire stays this expensive and this complicated, many of Florida’s 3 million solo businesses will simply skip it, and a generation of first jobs at small local businesses will never exist.

The Bottom Line

The real American business isn’t on CNBC. It’s invisible, it’s tiny and it’s usually run by one person who is doing just fine, or just getting by. Florida has more of these businesses per capita than anywhere in the country.

Treating that owner like a corporation doesn’t protect workers. It prevents them from being hired in the first place.

If we want more jobs, the most exciting number in Florida isn’t the next corporate relocation. It’s one. As in, one employee, hired by a business that never had one before. Make that easier, and watch what happens.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of businesses are publicly traded?

A tiny fraction. There were 3,657 domestic operating companies listed on major U.S. exchanges at the end of 2025, compared with 36.4 million U.S. businesses in 2023, or roughly one in 10,000.

How many Florida businesses have no employees?

About 3.1 million, or roughly 86% of Florida businesses, according to 2023 Census data.

Which state has the most one-person businesses?

Florida has the highest rate, with 13.3 no-employee businesses per 100 residents in 2022.

Do small businesses follow the same employment rules as big companies?

Some major federal laws only apply above certain employee counts. But core employer obligations, including payroll taxes, reemployment tax, new-hire reporting, eligibility paperwork and minimum wage, apply from the very first employee.

How much does a typical one-person business bring in?

About $59,000 a year in gross receipts on average, before expenses and taxes.

Why does the first hire matter so much?

It’s when a self-employed person becomes an employer. With more than 3.1 million solo businesses in Florida, even a small share making a first hire would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Sources and Further Reading

1. The Number of Operating Companies Listed on Nasdaq and the NYSE, 1980–2025, Jay R. Ritter, University of Florida
2. Census Bureau Releases New Data About Characteristics of Employer and Nonemployer Business Owners, U.S. Census Bureau
3. QuickFacts: Florida, U.S. Census Bureau
4. Census Bureau Statistics Shed Light on Self-Employment by Sector and State, U.S. Census Bureau
5. Number of U.S. Nonemployers Grew Faster Than Employer Businesses Nearly Every Year From 2012 to 2023, U.S. Census Bureau
6. How Many Businesses Are There in America, Certified Employee-Owned, citing Census Statistics of U.S. Businesses
7. Distribution of Private-Sector Employment by Firm Size, Statista, citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
8. Americans Dislike Big Business, Gallup
9. Confidence in U.S. Institutions Mired Near Record Low, Ground News, citing Gallup
10. How to Hire a Worker in Florida, Deel
11. Florida Raises Minimum Wage to $15, Effective Sept. 30, HR Morning
12. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for the Regions, March 2026, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
13. Remote Employee Onboarding Time-to-Productivity Statistics 2026, Stealth Agents, citing Gallup
14. Small Business Owners and AI Survey, Business2Community, citing Adobe Express and Talker Research
15. Small Business AI Adoption Surges but Training Gaps Persist, BriefGlance, citing Thryv
16. U.S. Business AI Use by State and Industry, Start Business by State, citing Census Business Trends and Outlook Survey

About the Author

Brian French

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