How long do South Carolina businesses survive?

About half of new business locations in South Carolina are still operating five years after they open. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Business Employment Dynamics (BED) program tracks every private establishment with employees from the year it first appears. For the five cohorts that opened in the years ending March 2015 through March 2019, South Carolina's five-year survival rate ranged from 48.8% to 52.0% and averaged 50.3%.

The national rate for the same cohorts averaged 51.2%, so South Carolina is about 0.9 points below the U.S., a small gap. At ten years, the picture is mixed: 35.7% of South Carolina's 2015 cohort was still open in March 2025, against 34.6% nationally, while the 2014 cohort shows 33.6% in South Carolina and 34.9% nationally after ten years.

Most closures happen early. In South Carolina, about 20% of new locations close in their first year. After that, the BLS figure for survival of the previous year's survivors climbs: for the 2019 cohort, 91.3% of locations open after four years were still open after five, and for the 2015 cohort, 96.5% of those open after nine years made it to ten.

Across the South Carolina cohorts we checked, the share of the previous year's survivors that stayed open was between 87.0% and 91.9% in year three, between 89.3% and 93.8% in year five, and 92.9% to 96.5% around year ten. Each year a business stays open, the odds of making it through the next one improve.

That pattern means the risk of closing falls sharply once a business gets through its first two or three years. For planning, the first year deserves the most attention: cash reserves, a steady way to find customers and basic systems for booking, billing and follow-up matter most when a business has the least margin for error.

Recent cohorts are doing at least as well as older ones. Locations that opened in the year ending March 2020 had a five-year survival rate of 55.9% in South Carolina, the highest of any cohort we looked at and 4.6 points above the national 51.3%. The 2020 cohort opened just before the pandemic and lived through an unusual period of federal relief programs, so treat it with caution.

Early survival for the newest businesses is also strong. Of the 16,674 South Carolina locations that opened in the year ending March 2024, 82.3% were still open a year later, against 77.7% nationally. For the 2021 cohort, three-year survival was 59.9% in South Carolina and 59.1% nationally.

There are also many more new businesses. South Carolina recorded 8,844 new private establishments in the year ending March 2015 and 16,674 in the year ending March 2024, an increase of 89%.

Nationally, service locations in food service, personal services, education and real estate survive five years more often than average, and professional services and information firms less often. BLS publishes survival by industry for the U.S. but not by industry for individual states, so this table uses national data.

For locations that opened in the year ending March 2020, 59.9% of other services (repair, personal care and similar) and 59.3% of accommodation and food services were still open in March 2025, against 51.3% across all private industries. Professional, scientific and technical services had 50.8%, and information 45.6%. Ten-year survival for the 2015 cohort shows the same order.

These figures may surprise anyone who has heard that most restaurants close in their first year. BED counts locations with employees, so very small ventures run without payroll are not in the data, and a location is counted as surviving as long as it keeps employees on the books, whatever its profits. Professional services include many small consulting and contracting practices that start easily and close easily.

Survival rates are averages across very different businesses, but they give a realistic baseline. A new dental practice, insurance agency or salon in South Carolina has roughly even odds of reaching year five, and the first year carries the most risk. A business that is past year three has already cleared most of the risk the data shows.

The factors behind survival are not in this dataset, but the timing points to where effort pays off. In the first year, a business depends on turning early inquiries into paying customers and keeping cash coming in. Fast responses to leads, clear pricing, reminders that reduce no-shows and invoices that go out on time all protect that early revenue.

Monvell's Consulting work helps new and growing service businesses set priorities for those first years, and our Operations team builds the intake, scheduling and billing workflows that keep revenue steady.

• Plan cash for at least the first 12 months, when closure risk is highest.
• Track lead response time and booking rate from the first week, not after problems appear.
• Set up invoicing and payment follow-up before volume grows.
• Review results by quarter in year one and adjust what is not working.

Dataset: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics (BED), establishment age and survival data, Table 7 ('Survival of private sector establishments by opening year'), for South Carolina total private and for the U.S. by industry, with data through March 2025. We read the published survival rates since birth for each cohort at 1, 3, 5 and 10 years.

Definitions: a cohort is the set of private establishments that first appeared in the year ending in March of the year shown. The survival rate since birth is the number of those establishments still operating in a later March divided by the number at birth. Industries use NAICS sectors.

Method: we report BLS rates as published and computed simple averages across the 2015 to 2019 cohorts and percentage point differences between South Carolina and the U.S. The 2020 cohort is shown separately because it opened just before the pandemic.

Limits: BED counts establishments (physical locations) with employees covered by unemployment insurance, not companies or self-employed people. A closed location is not always a failed company, and a business sold to a new owner may continue as the same establishment. BLS does not publish state survival tables by industry, so sector comparisons are national. The plan for this article also named the Census Business Dynamics Statistics for state sector exit rates; we did not use it, so no state-by-sector figures appear here.