15 Cash Flow Statistics

The median U.S. small business holds a cash buffer of 27 days, meaning it could cover only 27 days of typical outflows if cash inflows stopped.

This is the headline finding from anonymized transaction data on about 597,000 small businesses. A 27-day buffer leaves little room for a single late payment or slow month.

Twenty-five percent of small businesses hold fewer than 13 cash buffer days in reserve.

The bottom quarter of firms sits below two weeks of runway. For these businesses, a gap in collections becomes an emergency within days, not months.

Cash buffer days vary widely by industry: small restaurants hold the fewest at about 16 days, while small real estate businesses hold the most at about 47 days.

Industry matters more than most owners assume. The same number of days of slack carries very different risk depending on the volatility of the business.

The median small business reported average daily cash inflows of $381 and average daily cash outflows of $374.

Inflows and outflows are close to balanced for the median firm, which is exactly why a short buffer is dangerous. There is little surplus to absorb a shock.

The most common reason small employer firms sought financing was to meet operating expenses, cited by 56 percent, ahead of pursuing expansion at 46 percent.

More firms borrow to cover day-to-day costs than to grow. That pattern signals cash-flow pressure rather than ambition for most applicants.

Among small firms that applied for financing, 42 percent received the full amount sought, 36 percent received some or most, and 22 percent received none.

Fewer than half of applicants are fully funded. Planning runway on the assumption that requested credit will arrive in full is optimistic.

Seventy-seven percent of small employer firms reported rising costs of goods, services, or wages, or higher tariff-related costs, as a financial challenge in the prior 12 months.

Cost pressure is now near-universal among small employers. Rising input costs compress margins and shrink the cash cushion the JPMorgan data shows is already thin.

A financing gap, where firms did not receive all the funding they sought, affected 44 percent of low credit risk firms, 71 percent of medium risk firms, and 90 percent of high risk firms.

Credit risk sharply changes the odds of being fully funded. The riskier the profile, the less an owner can rely on external capital to bridge a cash shortfall.

About 78.7 percent of new private-sector establishments survive their first full year, according to Business Employment Dynamics data.

Roughly one in five new establishments closes within the first year. First-year cash-flow management is what separates the survivors from the closures.

Only 34.7 percent of U.S. private-sector establishments born in March 2013 were still operating in March 2023.

About one-third of businesses make it to a decade. Sustained cash flow over years, not a single strong quarter, is what keeps a firm open.

Ten-year survival rates range from 50.5 percent in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting down to 24.5 percent in mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction.

Survival odds depend heavily on sector. Capital intensity and demand volatility, both of which strain cash flow, help explain the spread.

The United States had 36.2 million small businesses in 2026, which is 99.9 percent of all U.S. firms.

Nearly every business in the country is small, and most run on the kind of thin cash buffers the JPMorgan data describes.

Small businesses employ 62.3 million people, or 45.9 percent of private-sector workers, and generate 43.5 percent of U.S. GDP.

Small-firm cash flow is not a niche concern. It underpins close to half of private employment and output.

In 2022 there were about 4.0 million nonemployer establishments tracked in one Census release, and nonemployers, businesses with no paid staff, make up most U.S. firms.

Most U.S. businesses are solo operations with no payroll. For them, personal and business cash flow are tightly linked, which raises the stakes on timing.

Nonemployer establishment counts grew 4.9 percent in 2021 and 4.7 percent in 2022, among the fastest rates in nearly two decades.

A surge of new solo businesses entered the economy after 2020. Many launched with little capital, which makes early cash-flow discipline decisive.