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There are 36.2 million small businesses in the United States, according to the SBA's Office of Advocacy. It's a big, round, easy-to-skim number. But it hides something worth a closer look: a huge, varied group of companies, across completely different industries, mostly worried about the same thing.
Almost Half the Workforce Runs Through These Firms
The top-line figure is impressive on its own. Small businesses account for almost 46% of private-sector employment, according to the SBA. That's nearly half the working economy flowing through firms that, individually, look nothing alike. A two-person law office in Ohio and a coastal bakery don't share customers, suppliers, or seasons.
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So you'd expect their problems to look different too. They mostly don't.
What's the Top Financial Challenge for Small Businesses?
It's cost, and the newest federal data is blunt about it. In the Federal Reserve's 2026 Report on Employer Firms, drawn from the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey of more than 6,500 firms, rising costs of goods, services, or wages was the most commonly reported financial challenge of the prior 12 months. Owners across every industry named it more than any other problem, which makes it less a niche grievance than a baseline condition.
The 2025 cycle added a new pressure on top of it. More than four in 10 firms reported that tariff-related cost increases were a financial challenge of their own. Stack the two together and 77% of firms reported rising costs, tariffs, or both. The strain wasn't evenly spread: tariff cost challenges hit hardest in retail, where 69% of firms flagged them, and manufacturing, at 62%.
Where Does the Squeeze Actually Land?
The data turns practical fast. Costs only become a crisis when a business can't move them somewhere else, and most can move only part of the way. Among the roughly half of firms that import at least some inputs,76% reported passing at least some of the higher costs on to customers, while 60% reported absorbing at least some of the increase themselves. Most of these importers are doing both. The gap between what gets passed along and what gets eaten is exactly where thin margins live.
That's why controlling the costs you can predict has become one of the few levers owners actually hold. You can't single-handedly fix tariffs or wage inflation. You can decide how you buy the things you'll buy no matter what. The recurring, unglamorous overhead, the supplies that get reordered every few weeks, tends to be the most controllable line on the sheet. Sourcing those predictable consumables in bulk turns a fluctuating monthly expense into a fixed, plannable one. Options like Office Crave's wholesale toilet paper and other bulk essentials fit that approach: it won't touch a tariff bill, but it takes one line item off the list of things that catch owners off guard.
It's a small move. But when importers are largely splitting the difference, eating part of every cost increase and passing the rest along, the repeatable stuff tends to outperform the one-time fix.
A Sector Defined by Margins, Not Size
Step back and the 36.2 million figure reads differently. People usually talk about small businesses in terms of count, growth, and jobs, and those stories are real. But the survey data points to a quieter reality: right now, this is a sector spending its energy managing costs more than chasing expansion. Expectations for revenue and employment growth both fell to their lowest levels since 2020, even as actual performance held fairly steady.
That matters culturally as much as economically. Nearly half the private workforce is employed by firms whose owners spend their days watching costs rather than scaling up. When that many companies share one anxiety, it stops being a set of individual struggles and becomes a broader economic signal.
The encouraging part for some is that the same data hints at the response. Owners aren't waiting for rescue. They're passing along what they can and tightening the costs they control. For a sector built on thin margins, that discipline is often what carries a business through.
