The American cities with the most businesses on the map

Ask where American business happens and most people will name a handful of big cities. The listings mostly agree, with some interesting wrinkles. Of the 7,704,728 business listings listed on CheckThisBiz, a large share sit in a short list of places, and a long tail is spread across 42,569 city and town names.

The leaders

New York, NY leads with 120,033 listed businesses. Houston, TX is second with 86,964, and Los Angeles, CA is third with 69,903. The ten cities at the top of the list together hold 579,311 listings, or 7.5% of the national total.

Why the names can surprise you

Cities in this data are the place names written in each listing's address, not official city limits or metro areas. That matters in a few ways. Some large cities are split across neighborhood or borough names that people use in their mailing addresses. Suburbs count on their own, even when they sit inside a big metro. And a place name shared by towns in different states is counted separately for each state. So a ranking like this one describes how businesses label their location, which usually, but not always, lines up with how we think of a city.

It also counts listings, not people. A city with many listings is not necessarily more "business-dense" per resident; it may simply be larger. We do not have population figures in this dataset, so we do not rank places per capita.

Big places and the long tail

Of the 42,569 place names in the database, 33,427 have fewer than 100 listings each. Those small places add up to 577,626 listings, or 7.5% of the total. Small towns are individually modest on a chart like this, but together they are a meaningful part of the map.

The leading city in every state

Here is the place name with the most listings in each state, and what share of the state's listings it holds. Where one city dominates a state's economy, the share is high; where business is spread across many towns, it is low.

By that measure, the most concentrated state is District of Columbia, where Washington, DC holds 98% of listings. The least concentrated is New Jersey, where the leader, Newark, NJ, holds 2.5%.

Looking for businesses in one of these places? Every city above links to its directory on CheckThisBiz, where you can check a business before you call, buy or hire.