1. Annual Payroll
2. Employment
3. Establishment
4. Ethnicity
5. Firm
6. Gender
7. Mid-March Employment
   
8. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)
9. Race
10. Veteran Status

Dollar Values

All dollar values presented in the SBO reports are expressed in current dollars, i.e., 2012 data are expressed in 2012 dollars and 2002 data in 2002 dollars. Consequently, when making comparisons to prior years, data users should take into consideration the inflation that has occurred.

Employment Size Class

Represents the employment size categories of firms:

• Firms with no employees
• Firms with 1 to 4 employees
• Firms with 5 to 9 employees
• Firms with 10 to 19 employees
• Firms with 20 to 49 employees
• Firms with 50 to 99 employees
• Firms with 100 to 499 employees
• Firms with 500 employees or more

Noise Infusion

A method of disclosure avoidance in which values are perturbed prior to tabulation by applying a randomnoise multiplier to the magnitude data, such as the sales and receipts for all firms. Disclosure protection is accomplished in a manner that causes the vast majority of cellvalues to be perturbed by, at most, a few percentage points. For sample-based tabulations, such as SBO, the estimated relative standard error for a published cell includesboth the estimated sampling error and the amount of perturbation in the estimated cell value due to noise. Per Department of Commerce Administrative Order DAO 216-26, as of June 4, 2026, noise infusion will no longer be used for future Census Bureau statistical products.

Receipts

Includes the total sales, shipments, receipts, revenue, or business done by domestic establishments (excludes foreign subsidiaries) within the scope of the Survey of Business Owners.

Receipts Size Class

Represents the sales/receipts/revenue size categories of firms:

• Firms with sales/receipts of less than $5,000
• Firms with sales/receipts of $5,000 to $9,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $10,000 to $24,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $25,000 to $49,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $50,000 to $99,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $100,000 to $249,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $250,000 to $499,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $500,000 to $999,999
• Firms with sales/receipts of $1,000,000 or more

Unclassifiable

Publicly held and other firms not classifiable by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status companies include:

• Publicly held. Includes corporate enterprises owned by many shareholders who hold a collective interest in the equity of the company in the form of shares of stock. Capital may be raised by selling ownership shares to the general public.
• Foreign-owned. Includes U.S. corporations controlled or owned by any foreign entity directly or indirectly, based on 50 percent or more of a U.S. corporation's voting stock at the end of the tax year.
• Not for profit. Establishments that indicated that all or part of their income was exempt from federal income tax under provisions of Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code.

Note: Publicly held and other firms not classifiable by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status data are tabulated separately in the ethnicity, race, and veteran status fields. As the result of these tabulations and the timing of the data releases, these estimates may not always be equal when comparing SBO data files.