Owning the recognition

Dallas deemed No. 4 county in U.S. for small businesses, says study

Dallas is a great place to start a small business.

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Small businesses are often called the backbone of the U.S. economy. Well, if that’s the case, then Dallas County might be the spinal cord of small business in Texas.

Personal finance website Smart Asset ranks Dallas County the best place in Texas for small business owners. Nationally, Dallas County lands at No. 4.

To come up with its list, the website examined federal data to zero in on three factors: the number of small businesses operating in each county, how much income they generate, and what they pay in taxes.

Smart Asset then weighed each set of data to develop an index score, with 100 being the top number. Dallas County earned a score of 94.26 on the 100-point scale. It didn’t appear in Smart Asset’s Texas or national top 10 last year.

The Smart Asset study mostly aligns with other recent rankings for North Texas. For instance:

In March, personal financial website ValuePenguin picked Dallas-Fort Worth as the country’s sixth best place for small businesses.
A LendingTree study released in October put DFW at No. 19 among the best places in the U.S. to start a small business.
Fort Worth ranked ninth and Dallas ranked 14th on an April list from personal finance website WalletHub of the best places in the country to start a business.

According to Dallas Economic Development, nearly 80 percent of businesses in Dallas are small businesses, and they employ almost 40 percent of the city’s workers.

“Small businesses account for a significant number of jobs and play a key role in growing tax revenue. Small business is fundamental to workforce development, especially in minority, immigrant, and under-educated … communities,” the economic development agency says.

Courtesy of Smart Asset, here’s the rest of this year’s top 10 counties in Texas for small business owners:

Galveston County (Houston metro area), No. 2 in the state and No. 5 nationally.
Haskell County (north of Abilene), No. 3 in the state and No. 6 nationally.
Titus County (east of Sulphur Springs), No. 4 in the state and No. 8 nationally.
Matagorda County (east of Victoria), No. 5 in the state and No. 9 nationally.
Goliad County (west of Victoria), No. 6 in the state (not in national top 10).
Glasscock County (east of Midland), No. 7 in the state (not in national top 10).
Stonewall County (northwest of Abilene), No. 8 in the state (not in national top 10).
Brooks County (north of McAllen), No. 9 in the state (not in national top 10).
Midland County (Midland metro area), No. 10 in the state (not in national top 10).

lists rankings

Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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