What San Antonio's Top Ranking Doesn't Show

Entrepreneurial EcosystemsEconomic DevelopmentSmall Business Growth
Written By Lina G. Rugova

The Ranking

In March, GoDaddy's Small Business Research Lab ranked San Antonio the most entrepreneurial city in the United States for 2026. The number behind the headline: microbusinesses here, meaning businesses with their own website or domain, grew 11 percent year over year between August 2019 and March 2026. The city added 9,232 new businesses in the past year alone, by GoDaddy's count. GoDaddy paired that with Zillow data showing why: a typical home here runs about $278,644 against a national average of $366,712, and rent averages roughly $1,398 a month against $1,930 nationally. Cheaper to live means more room to take the leap. The report also cites a common multiplier in local economic development research: every new business that launches in a county tends to bring five new local jobs with it.‍ ‍

That's a real number, and San Antonio earned it. But a ranking like this measures one thing: how many people are starting businesses. It says nothing about how many of them are still standing in a year, or five, what they're paying themselves while they try, or whether they can get a loan if they need one.‍ ‍

The Bankruptcy Numbers, Checked

Bankruptcies did rise sharply in Texas in 2026, and that part holds up against real, dated numbers, not a secondhand estimate. In the first quarter of 2026, Texas businesses filed roughly 4,500 bankruptcy cases, about one of every six filed nationwide that quarter, up 1.5% from the previous quarter, according to federal court data reported in April 2026. Over the twelve months ending March 31, 2026, Texas accounted for roughly 1 in 15 business bankruptcy filings nationwide, and total bankruptcy filings nationally, businesses and individuals combined, rose 11.9% to 591,850 cases over that same period, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the federal judiciary's own reporting body. That's a real, current, statewide surge.

What it doesn't show is San Antonio specifically. I could not find a San Antonio or Bexar County bankruptcy count that traces back to the courts' own published data rather than a secondhand estimate, so this piece isn't going to claim one. The honest version: Texas is seeing a confirmed bankruptcy surge in 2026. Whether San Antonio is rising faster, slower, or in line with that statewide number isn't something I can back with a primary source right now.

Some of the churn behind those numbers is just what starting a business looks like anywhere, not a Texas problem specifically. In the most recent complete cohort the Census Bureau has measured, 22.1% of new businesses closed within their first year, and 48.6% were gone within five, according to Business Employment Dynamics data compiled by LendingTree. Texas actually sits slightly below that national average, at a 21.6% first-year failure rate, ranking 33rd among states. The Texas Comptroller's small business data shows the same churn from a different angle: in the most recent year measured, the state saw 86,385 new business establishments open and 78,648 close. That's a net gain, and a real one, but it means for every 100 businesses that opened, roughly 91 others closed in the same stretch.

What Businesses Here Actually Earn

There's another side to the affordability pitch that the ranking leaves out: what people actually earn once they're here. The most recent full wage data available, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in May 2025 (the next update isn't due until 2027), put the average hourly wage across the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro at $29.39, against $33.54 nationally, a gap of roughly 12%. The lowest-paid categories in the region, food service, healthcare support, building and grounds work, sit in the $15 to $17 an hour range, and the local job base leans more heavily on office and administrative support and food service work than the country as a whole does. Cheaper housing is part of why San Antonio topped this ranking. Lower wages are part of the same math, and they cut the other way: a founder with a smaller cushion, and customers with less to spend, both change how much room a new business has to get something wrong.

The Capital Gap

The clearest 2026 read on capital access comes from the Federal Reserve's own Small Business Credit Survey, published in March 2026 based on responses collected in late 2025: 22% of firms that applied for a loan, line of credit, or merchant cash advance got no financing at all, and only 42% got the full amount they asked for. Approval also depended heavily on where someone applied; 57% of applicants at small banks were fully approved, against 32% at large banks.

That national report doesn't break results out by state or by owner race. For that lens, the most recent data anywhere is a LendingTree analysis of 2024 lending activity, not a 2026 figure, and it's worth being upfront that it's two years old. With that caveat: Texas's overall denial rate was 28%, tied for second-highest in the country. Micro-firms with one to four employees, close to what fills the filing data below, were denied 26% of the time. Hispanic-owned businesses were denied 29% of the time, Black-owned businesses 39%, against 18% for both white-owned and women-owned businesses. If a more current version of that state and demographic breakdown comes out, it belongs in an update to this piece.

Who Follows Up After the Filing

Between the wages, the credit denials, and now a confirmed statewide bankruptcy surge, there's a real question underneath the ranking: once someone files for an LLC or “DBA”, who actually follows up with them?

The answer, according to Bexar County's own county clerk's office, is close to no one. Filing an Assumed Business Name certificate, a DBA, registers a name with the county so the business can legally operate, sue, and be sued under it. It is not a business license. The county does not track whether the business is actually operating, does not check in on it, and does not verify it's succeeding, only that the name isn't already taken. If someone stops using the name, the county has no way of knowing unless that person files a separate Notice of Abandonment themselves.

What this Year's Filings Show

That absence of tracking isn't theoretical, and it shows up directly in the county's own filing data. (Source: Bexar County assumed name filings, the export you pulled yourself, January 1 through July 21, 2026, not a published article, so there's no public link to attach here.) That pull comes to 1,124 new DBA filings. It's worth being clear this is a different, narrower count than GoDaddy's 9,232, which includes any business with a website or domain regardless of how it's registered. The DBA file only captures people registering to operate under a name other than their own legal one, and it has seven columns: business name, owner name, business address, recorded date, document number, document type, and an internal ID. Nothing about employees, revenue, status, or whether the business is still open next month. All but one of the 1,124 filings, 1,123 of them, are registered as unincorporated, meaning the overwhelming majority are sole proprietorships or general partnerships, structures with no legal separation between business debt and personal assets. If one of these fails, in most cases, it isn't only the business that absorbs it.

The filings themselves paint a rougher, more textured picture than any single ranking can. Trades work, construction, roofing, electrical, HVAC, and landscaping are the largest identifiable slice, 96 of the names, about 8.5%. Consulting and advisory services, auto repair and detailing, and beauty and personal care each account for roughly 3.5 to 4%. Cleaning, transportation, real estate, and anything describing itself as tech or AI each make up a small fraction, none reaching even 4% on its own. More than seven out of ten of the 1,124 names filed this year don't fit neatly into any single obvious category at all, which says something on its own: this isn't a handful of industries scaling up, it's over a thousand individual people, each building something narrow and specific, one truck or one chair or one client list at a time. One more pattern worth noting: 40 different owners in this year's filings registered more than one assumed name, out of 1,068 unique owners total. One owner filed six. The data can't say whether that's someone testing several ideas at once, a person who let one name lapse and restarted under another, or one operator running several small ventures side by side. It's exactly the kind of question that would matter to answer, and exactly the kind no one is set up to ask, because the filing system was never built to look back.

What Already Exists

That doesn't mean no support exists; it means the support exists outside the filing process, and someone has to go find it. The UTSA Small Business Development Center has served Bexar County and ten surrounding counties since 1987. Mentoring shows up in the data with a real, if imperfect, correlation to survival: SCORE, the national small business mentoring network, reported that in fiscal year 2022, 77% of the more than 300,000 clients it mentored that year stayed in business. That's one organization's own reporting on its own clients, not a controlled study, so it's a correlation worth taking seriously rather than a guarantee. But a mentor doesn't solve a credit denial. The capital gap and the follow-up gap are two separate problems sitting on top of each other, and right now both of them default to opt-in.

San Antonio's entrepreneurial ranking is being built one filing at a time, by people earning less than the national average, borrowing against a state with one of the country's higher denial rates, during a year when Texas bankruptcies are confirmed to be rising, with almost no structure checking back in on whether it worked. Until the follow-up and the financing catch up to the filing rate, the city will keep producing an impressive number of new businesses and a real number of failures in the same twelve months, and the ranking alone won't tell you which of those two lines someone is about to be on.


Sources:

Lina G. Rugova https://atlasstart.com
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