New Business Index: what it measures, and what it doesn’t

What the index measures

The index is a monthly, full count of new business records in our database. A record is a single business location — a chain with forty branches is forty records. A new record is one that entered our newly opened businesses section within the measurement window; the 30 countries listed are simply those with the most new records in that period. The current edition covers September 23 – October 23, 2026 and counts 1,788,929 new records; United States ranks 2 of 30; United Kingdom ranks 8 of 30.

What it does not measure

• It does not measure openings. A record’s index date is the day it reached us, not the day the business opened or was registered. The feed is fast — a business we find becomes searchable within a day — but “arrival” is the honest word for what is dated.
• It does not measure company formations. Registry statistics count legal entities; the index counts places of trade. The two series run side by side, never subtracted from each other — the difference is laid out in newly registered vs newly opened.
• It is not seasonally adjusted and not the whole database. The figures are raw counts over a rolling 30-day window, refreshed monthly; the database holds many more territories, of which 30 are listed. Day-to-day swings inside a window reflect when records reach us, not when businesses opened.

The period and the update rhythm

Each edition states its measurement period and date: this one counts records that arrived between September 23 – October 23, 2026 — the October 2026 edition, measured October 23, 2026. Updates are monthly; when a new edition is published, it replaces the previous one on the index page, which also answers the common questions in short form.

The rates and categories in the table

Alongside new records, the table shows a phone rate and an own-website rate. Both are fill rates — how often that detail is present in our records — and neither says a phone is answered or a site is good. “Own website” means the business’s own domain; social media profiles and platform pages do not count towards it, so this column runs lower than broader “website information” figures elsewhere on the site. Categories are each record’s own and were not merged; the “largest category” column shows where a country’s new records concentrate.

The CSV and the embeddable chart

The full table downloads as CSV: rank, country code and name, new records, phone rate, own-website rate, number of categories, largest category and its record count, and the period start and end dates — decimal points, one header row, no comment lines, so it opens cleanly in any tool. The chart is published as an image with an embed code on the index page, for anyone who wants the ranking visible in their own piece.

Licence and how to cite

The index — figures, chart and CSV — is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit Auspector and link to the index page. A plain citation looks like: “Auspector, New Business Index, October 2026 edition, auspector.com /new-business-index”. We ask for the link because it carries the definitions — a number without them cannot be checked by your readers.