Cities for Business › Methodology
Cities for Business Power Rankings — Methodology
Field: 50 states + D.C.. Accountable official: Mayor. Cadence: quarterly. Data retrieved 2026-06-18.
State-level v1 (the spec's metro framing is a future refinement once Census BFS metro applications + BEA metro GDP are wired).
Weights are public so the ranking cannot be called rigged. Each dimension is normalized 0–100 across all ranked states & D.C. (min–max; inverted where lower is better), multiplied by its weight, and summed to the 0–100 composite. A metric that is unavailable for an entity is never estimated — the remaining weights are rescaled and the composite flagged “partial.”
| Dimension | Source | Direction | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Establishment entry rate (new business formation) | Census BDS 2022, ESTABS_ENTRY_RATE | Higher better ▲ | 30 |
| Job creation rate | Census BDS 2022, JOB_CREATION_RATE | Higher better ▲ | 20 |
| Nonfarm job growth (YoY) | BLS CES State (seasonally adjusted) | Higher better ▲ | 20 |
| Metro GDP growth pending | BEA metro GDP key blocked by signup CAPTCHA | — | 15 |
| Business survival rate pending | BLS BED ingest pending | — | 15 |
| Cost of doing business pending | C2ER + Tax Foundation feed pending | — | 15 |
Provenance
Primary source: U.S. Census Bureau (BDS) + U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · https://api.census.gov/data/timeseries/bds.