- If you want to start your own business, you may want to move to one of these cities.
- ZenBusiness compared income for entrepreneurs to earnings for other full-time employees by metro area to rank the cities where entrepreneurs are most successful.
- San Diego, Chicago, and San Antonio were among the cities on the list.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
If you are looking to start a new business endeavor, you may want to start your own company in one of these major cities.
ZenBusiness, a service that helps entrepreneurs grow their own businesses, created a ranking of the most successful metros for entrepreneurs based on the income premium for self-employed workers in 2018.
The income premium is the percent difference between the median income of entrepreneurs, who were defined as self-employed in the study, and all full-time employees using the Census Bureau's American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample.
For example, the 2018 income premium for entrepreneurs in Las Vegas was 19.0%. That is, a typical entrepreneur in that city earns about $8,000 more than the median income of $42,000 of all full-time employees in Las Vegas.
The median salary for entrepreneurs in the 53 large metros on ZenBusiness' list is about $53,000, roughly the same as the overall US median annual income in 2018 of about $52,000.
The highest income earned by entrepreneurs is in San Jose, California, where people who own their own business make a median income of $70,000.
Entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City, Utah, make the most compared to all other full-time employees in the city, making it a potentially desirable metro area for aspiring business owners. A typical entrepreneur in Salt Lake City earns about $60,000, while a typical full-time employee earns $48,200, a difference of 24.5%.
The following are the 21 US cities with a population size of over 1,000,000 residents where entrepreneurs are most successful, along with their income premium, median 2018 income, and share of entrepreneurs - the percentage of workers that identify as self-employed.