Best States for Small Business Lending – #3 Utah

Small business is a major contributing factor to the growing Utah economy. Utah has a stunningly beautiful landscape with a collection of national monuments, lush forests, lakes, canyons, and gorges. The state is a much-favored destination for adventure seekers and vacationers. Its many cities offer exciting channels for commerce and act as launching pads for entrepreneurs and start-up enterprises. Among the top 15 cities that have been featured in the Brookings Institution’s report (source: The New Yorker) are Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Provo. Many well-known businesses worth billions of dollars today, began as start-ups in the state, including: Qualtrics and Adobe.

Small businesses makeup 96.7% of the businesses in Utah numbering 259,786 and together hire 47.2% of the workers in the state. By the end of 2015, unemployment levels were just 3.4% which is marginally low, as compared to the national average of 5.0% as reported by the CPS. The financing industry is a good index to measure the exponential growth of the small business sector in Utah. The FFIEC declared that in the year 2014, small business lending companies made loans worth an astonishing $848.5 million in denominations of below $100,000.

Small business has assisted in the development of several industries in Utah. Among them are professional, scientific, and technical services, construction, healthcare and social assistance, retail stores and trade, restaurant and food services, automotive repair and maintenance, and information technology, to name a few.