Restaurant industry statistics
How many US restaurants there are, how many people they employ, how long new ones actually last, and how they get financed. Every figure traces to a federal dataset or to the organisation that produced it, and every calculation Fundur made is shown in full.
Establishment, employment and payroll figures are Census County Business Patterns, reference year 2023. Survival figures are BLS Business Employment Dynamics, cohorts tracked to March 2025 (table last modified 17 December 2025). Sales are Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey, calendar year 2025, not seasonally adjusted. SBA figures are computed by Fundur from SBA’s 7(a) FOIA loan-level file, snapshot 30 June 2026. Last reviewed 28 August 2026.
How many restaurants there are, and who works in them
County Business Patterns is the Census Bureau’s annual census of establishments with paid employees. It counts locations, not companies, and it excludes businesses with no employees.
| NAICS | Industry | Establishments | Employees | Annual payroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 722 | Food services and drinking places | 714,532 | 12,644,827 | $312.3bn |
| 7225 | Restaurants and other eating places | 618,476 | 11,406,584 | $276.9bn |
| 722511 | Full-service restaurants | 258,626 | 5,387,020 | $150.9bn |
| 722513 | Limited-service restaurants | 270,088 | 4,965,080 | $103.6bn |
| 722515 | Snack and non-alcoholic beverage bars | 85,140 | 985,583 | $20.9bn |
| 7223 | Special food services (caterers, food trucks, contract) | 55,221 | 805,701 | $24.2bn |
| 7224 | Drinking places (alcoholic beverages) | 40,835 | 432,542 | $11.1bn |
New restaurants outlive the average new US business
The claim that most restaurants fail in their first year is not supported by any federal dataset. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked every private-sector establishment opening since 1994 and publishes the survival curves. Food service establishments sit above the all-industry average at every horizon it measures.
| Years since opening | Accommodation & food services | Retail trade | All private industry | Cohort measured |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 year | 85.3% | 84.4% | 77.9% | opened year to March 2024 |
| 5 years | 59.3% | 59.8% | 51.4% | opened year to March 2020 |
| 10 years | 41.6% | 44.2% | 34.7% | opened year to March 2015 |
Read the first row carefully, because it is the one most often reported backwards. Of the food service and accommodation establishments that opened in the year to March 2024, 85.3% were still open a year later. The comparable figure across all private industry was 77.9%. A new restaurant was less likely to close in its first year than a new US business of any kind.
The advantage narrows but does not reverse. At five years, 59.3% of the March 2020 food service cohort survived against 51.4% of all private establishments. At ten years, 41.6% of the March 2015 cohort survived against 34.7%.
Three things this does not say. It does not say restaurants are durable in absolute terms — well over half of the ten-year cohort is gone. It does not isolate restaurants: BLS publishes this series at the two-digit sector level, so the figures cover NAICS 72, Accommodation and Food Services, of which food services and drinking places are 91.0% of establishments on the Census count above. And it counts establishments, not businesses: a location that closes may be a relocation, a sale or one unit of a chain, and the series records it as a death either way.
Restaurants are small companies, but not the smallest
Statistics of US Businesses counts firms rather than locations, and sorts them by total employment across every establishment they operate.
Half of SBA restaurant lending goes to businesses that are not open yet
SBA publishes every 7(a) approval as a loan-level record. The figures below are computed by Fundur from that file for fiscal years 2020 to 2025, with cancelled approvals excluded. The method is set out in full below.
| Food services (722) | Restaurants (7225) | All 7(a) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approvals | 32,369 | 28,025 | 302,593 |
| Share of all 7(a) | 10.70% | 9.26% | 100% |
| Total approved | $15.30bn | $13.77bn | $159.22bn |
| Median approval | $260,000 | $296,000 | $198,300 |
| Mean approval | $472,787 | $491,414 | $526,186 |
| New or not-yet-open borrowers | 50.0% | 50.5% | 33.5% |
| Approvals later cancelled | 13.80% | 13.85% | 12.93% |
How these numbers were produced
Census figures are read directly from the published data files rather than from a secondary summary. Establishment, employment and payroll counts come from the County Business Patterns 2023 US summary file, using the rows where legal form of organisation is set to all. County Business Patterns covers establishments with paid employees only, so businesses with no employees are outside every count on this page. Firm-size figures come from Statistics of US Businesses 2022, the most recent year published.
Sales figures are the twelve not-seasonally-adjusted monthly estimates for calendar 2025 in the Monthly Retail Trade Survey time series, summed. Retail sales and food service sales are separate lines in that table: the $7.519 trillion retail figure does not contain the $1.181 trillion food service figure.
Survival figures are quoted directly from BLS Business Employment Dynamics Table 7, which reports survival since birth for every annual opening cohort from 1994 onward. A cohort can only be read at a given age once it has reached it, which is why the one-, five- and ten-year figures come from three different cohorts. We use the most recent cohort available at each horizon rather than averaging across cohorts, and we say which cohort each figure belongs to.
SBA figures are computed by Fundur from SBA’s 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan-level file, 7(a) extract, snapshot dated 30 June 2026 (SHA-256 beginning 6c1e9132, 181,130,871 bytes). From 388,338 parsed rows we keep complete fiscal years 2020 to 2025, gross approval above zero and a valid approval date, then exclude the 12.93% of approvals recorded as cancelled and never disbursed. That leaves 302,593 approvals. Industry assignment uses the NaicsCode field on each record. Medians are reported alongside means because these distributions are right-skewed: across all industries the mean approval is 2.65 times the median.
Duplicate rows. The file contains 368 exact duplicate rows inside this fiscal-year window, 0.11% of it. Removing them changes no median on this page by more than $100 and no percentage by more than 0.04 points. The counts above retain them, consistent with SBA’s own file, and this note exists so the choice is visible rather than assumed.
No rate filter is applied here, because this page publishes no interest-rate figure. Our published SBA rate analysis uses a narrower population of 302,513 approvals — the same set less 80 records with a missing or out-of-range rate. That method and its robustness checks are on our SBA rates and fees analysis, and the national small business lending picture is on our small business lending statistics page.
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You are welcome to reproduce any figure or table on this page in noncommercial reporting, research or educational material, with attribution and a link back to this page. No permission request is needed. Where a figure is a Fundur calculation rather than a published statistic it is labelled as one above, and we would rather you carried that label through.
If a figure here contradicts one you have published, we would rather you checked our method than took it on trust — it is set out in full above, and every input file is linked.
Every source on this page
- US Census Bureau — County Business Patterns, 2023 US summary data file · establishments, employment, annual payroll
- US Census Bureau — Statistics of US Businesses, 2022 US and state detailed employment sizes · firms by employment size
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics — Business Employment Dynamics, Table 7: Accommodation and Food Services, Retail Trade, Total Private · last modified 17 December 2025
- US Census Bureau — Monthly Retail Trade Survey sales time series, 1992 to present · calendar 2025, not adjusted
- US Small Business Administration — 7(a) & 504 FOIA loan-level data · 7(a) extract, snapshot 30 June 2026
Fundur is a financing marketplace, not a lender. If you run a restaurant and are working out what your own business could borrow, our restaurant business loans page covers the options and what lenders weigh.