An EIN application is a request for a tax identity, and the Census release counts requests rather than firms: Business Insider states that the applications did not necessarily result in a business being formed [4]. So the roughly 400,000 extra filings in 2025 [14] record a decision that costs a form, which sits some distance from the decision to sign a lease or run a payroll. That gap is where all of the interpretation happens, and it is worth knowing how wide it is before the number goes on a slide.
Sheridan County is the clearest measure of the gap. Its 2025 filings amount to more than 60% of Wyoming's 79,024 statewide total [8][15], and Mocsary told Business Insider that filers can put a registered agent's Sheridan address on the EIN application while operating somewhere else entirely [9]. Sheridan also out-filed Philadelphia County, which ranked 25th with 31,924 applications and has roughly 47 times Sheridan's population [10][17]. An operator reading the county table as a map of where new competition or new demand is forming is, in at least one of the top 20 rows, reading a mail-forwarding industry.
On why the national figure moved, the source offers two accounts and commits to neither. Business Insider ties the rise loosely to an economic shift in President Trump's first year back in office, including a weaker labor market that may have pushed laid-off or out-of-work Americans toward entrepreneurship [5], and separately credits the AI boom with removing obstacles to starting and running a business [6]. Those readings do not point the same way for anyone setting headcount: displacement widens the pool of people willing to take contract work at whatever rate clears, while cheaper venture formation widens the set of small rivals calling your accounts. The release as published does not let you weigh one against the other.
Framed as a percentage, 8% on a base of 5.2 million can look like ordinary variation, not a planning input [2]. In levels it is around 400,000 filings [14], which is not trivial, but the sharper problem is dispersion. King County, Washington, rose 25.3% [11] while Queens County fell 3.1% [12] and Palm Beach County fell about 1% [13], two decliners among the eleven counties in the published lower half of the ranking [18]. A national average of 8% describes none of those three markets.
The board-deck version is that business formation is up 8% and the economy is minting founders. It is incomplete in a specific way: Sheridan's own increase works out to roughly 9,600 additional filings [16], a figure a formation-services industry can produce through good marketing without anyone being hired anywhere. Given what the June release actually contains, the surge reads as a composition question, how much of the total is registered-agent volume versus real formation [1].
For this quarter, that narrows the number's use to one thing. If your contractor pipeline is thickening and candidates arrive already incorporated, this data is consistent with slack rather than ambition, and it will support the question without settling it. Deciding a hiring plan on the assumption that 5.6 million filings represent 5.6 million operating businesses is the error the caveat in the release was written to prevent [4].
