Only one North Carolina city made smartasset’s new list of the top ten cities with the lowest costs for startup companies in 2017, while another fell off the list.
Greensboro came in third on the smart asset list and Winston-Salem and Orlando were the only two cities that lost their spots on the latest ranking.
In order to find the cities with the lowest startup costs, SmartAsset gathered data on 80 cities. It compared them across metrics like the cost of labor, office space, energy, legal and accounting fees, utilities and filing fees.
Running a startup in Greensboro, smartasset wrote, will cost a total of about $236,000, $400 more than Knoxville. Utilities in Greensboro are also slightly more affordable than they are in the two cities ranked above it, costing an estimated $1,600 per year.
Labor costs on the other hand are affordable by national standards but not low enough to rank Greensboro any higher, smartasset says. One concern for business owners here compared, to those is North Carolina’s higher income tax rate.
The states around the southern portion of the Appalachian mountain range occupied most of this top 10. In particular states like Tennessee and Kentucky scored very well. This was largely thanks to the low cost of hiring workers.
Chattanooga, TN, led the list, followed by Knoxville. After Greensboro at number three, Wichita, KS, was fourth; Little Rock, AR, fifth; Columbia, SC, sixth; Memphis, TN, seventh; Lexington, KY, eighth; New Orleans, LA; ninth; and Lousiville, KY, tenth.
The most expensive places to get startups up and running are the places you probably tend to associate with startups. Cities like San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland in California and New York City are all in the top 10 cities with the highest startup costs.
The most expensive cities were San Jose, CA; San Francisco, CA; Washington, DC; New York, NY; Boston, MA; Bridgeport, CT; Seattle, WA; Oakland, CA; Trenton, NJ; and Newark, NJ.
