The Succession Cliff Report 2026: Business Ownership Transitions by State and Sector

By Christoph Totter, Managing Partner, CT Acquisitions. Last verified: July 2026. Next scheduled refresh: July 2027 (annual).

The succession cliff has been described at the national level many times, yet it has rarely been measured at the level where deals actually happen. This report maps business ownership transitions by state and sector, computed directly from raw Census Bureau files rather than quoted from secondary coverage. We took the owner-age distribution for every state, crossed it with every major industry sector, converted the shares into estimated firm counts, and projected the result forward as an annual flow of ownership transitions from 2026 through 2035. The output is a 968-row dataset covering 51 jurisdictions and 19 NAICS sectors, published in full at the end of this page.

The raw material is entirely federal. We downloaded the complete 2023 Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners file from the Census Bureau, all 477 megabytes of it. We crossed the owner-age distributions inside it with employer-firm counts from the 2022 Statistics of U.S. Businesses state file. We then calibrated the projection against exit dynamics in the 2023 Business Dynamics Statistics. Our national companion piece, the Boomer Business Succession Wave Report, reconciles the competing headline estimates in circulation; this report supplies the granular layer underneath that no published source we could find provides.

Nothing here is investment advice, tax advice, or a valuation opinion. The projections are modeled estimates with stated assumptions, and the model is documented in full so anyone can rebuild it from the same public files.

Executive Summary

• Owners aged 55 or older accounted for 51.3 percent of all owners of US respondent employer firms in the 2023 ABS Characteristics of Business Owners survey. Applied to the 6,395,635 employer firms counted by SUSB 2022, that share implies roughly 3.28 million employer firms with a 55+ owner.
• Owners aged 65 or older alone represent 23.1 percent of all owners nationally, per the same Census table. That is the cohort already inside the classic 65 to 75 transition window.
• The model projects roughly 285,000 employer-firm ownership transitions per year between 2026 and 2035 across the 19 sectors studied. Over the full decade that flow compounds to roughly 2.85 million projected transitions.
• Rhode Island has the oldest ownership base in America, with 62.2 percent of owners aged 55 or older. Utah has the youngest at 37.3 percent.
• Wholesale trade is the most succession-exposed major sector, with 63.4 percent of owners aged 55 or older nationally. Manufacturing follows at 61.7 percent.
• Construction is the single largest transition pipeline in the trades, with an estimated 390,976 firms held by 55+ owners across the states. The model projects roughly 32,113 construction ownership transitions per year through 2035.
• California leads every absolute ranking, with an estimated 428,374 employer firms owned by someone 55 or older. The model projects roughly 35,892 annual ownership transitions in California alone.
• Our decade total of roughly 2.85 million projected transitions sits just below Project Equity’s estimate of 2.9 million boomer-owned employer businesses, a reassuring reconciliation given that the two figures measure adjacent but different things.

Three Numbers to Quote

For editors, producers, and researchers citing this study, these are the three headline statistics, each ready to lift with its attribution line.

1. 51.3 percent of American employer-firm owners are 55 or older.
Source: Census ABS Characteristics of Business Owners, 2023, computed by CT Acquisitions; the share implies roughly 3.28 million employer firms with an owner at or past that age.

2. The model projects roughly 285,000 business ownership transitions per year from 2026 through 2035.
Source: CT Acquisitions Succession Cliff Report 2026, modeled from Census ABS CBO 2023 owner ages and SUSB 2022 firm counts; roughly 2.85 million transitions over the decade.

3. The oldest-to-youngest state gap is 24.9 percentage points.
Source: CT Acquisitions computation from Census ABS CBO 2023, spanning Rhode Island at 62.2 percent of owners 55+ down to Utah at 37.3 percent.

Why This Report Exists

The national succession story has been told, and told well, including on this site. Our Boomer Business Succession Wave Report 2024-2030 walks through why published national estimates span from 2.9 million to 12 million businesses, why roughly 70 percent of owners never complete a third-party sale, and why the “silver tsunami” framing overstates the sell-side flood. Read that report first for the macro picture. This report deliberately does not re-litigate any of it.

What the national work cannot tell a buyer in Ohio, a broker in Mississippi, or a state economic development office in Maine is how the wave breaks locally. Owner aging is not evenly distributed. It varies by 25 percentage points between the oldest and youngest states. It varies by more than 20 percentage points between the oldest and youngest sectors. Multiply those two dimensions together and the difference between the hottest and coldest succession markets in the country becomes enormous.

Two cells from our matrix make the point. A wholesale distributor in West Virginia sits in a cell where 80.9 percent of owners are 55 or older. A construction firm in Utah sits in a cell where the share is 29.7 percent. Those two businesses inhabit different demographic universes, yet every national headline treats them as the same story. No published source we could find puts those two numbers side by side. This report does, for every state and every major sector, with the full matrix downloadable below.

Methodology

Data sources and vintages

Source 1: Census Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners (ABS CBO), 2023 reference year. The Census Bureau asks owners of employer firms their age in six bands: under 25, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, 55 to 64, and 65 or over. We used the full flat file AB2300CSCBO.zip published on the Census FTP server, question code O09 (OWNRAGE), filtered to the all-owners demographic totals. The published table is also browsable at data.census.gov table AB2300CSCBO. At the state level, the survey publishes owner age down to the 2-digit NAICS sector. We honor that limit throughout: this report claims sector-level granularity for states and nothing finer, because the data supports nothing finer.

Source 2: Census Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB), 2022 reference year. SUSB counts employer firms, establishments, employment, and payroll by state and NAICS. We used the state by 6-digit NAICS file for 2022, aggregated up to the 2-digit sector codes that match the CBO age table, all enterprise sizes combined. SUSB 2022 counts 6,395,635 employer firms nationally.

Source 3: Census Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), 2023 reference year. BDS provides economy-wide establishment exit rates and firm death counts, which we use only as a calibration ceiling for the projection, never as an input. The national BDS 2023 file shows an establishment exit rate of 9.4 percent in 2023.

Cross-reference anchors, cited but not recomputed. Project Equity estimates 2.9 million boomer-owned employer businesses. SBA 7(a) records at data.sba.gov show fiscal 2025 acquisition-purpose lending of roughly 8.29 billion dollars. The same records count 7,003 acquisition-purpose loans in that fiscal year, evidence that the buy side of this market is already institutionalizing.

A note on how we accessed the data

The Census API endpoints for ABS CBO (api.census.gov/data/2023/abscbo) now require an API key for all requests, including small ones. Rather than gate this analysis on a key, we downloaded the complete published flat files from the Census FTP server, which carry identical values to the API and the data.census.gov tables. Anyone replicating this work can do the same with no registration, no scraping, and no rate limits. Reproducibility was a design constraint, not an afterthought.

The computation, step by step

Step 1: owner-age shares. For every state s and sector n, the 55+ ownership share is:

share_55plus(s,n) = (owners_55to64 + owners_65plus) / owners_total_reporting

All three terms come from ABS CBO 2023 question O09, category codes ED (55 to 64), EE (65 or over), and EF (total reporting). Item non-response (category EG) is excluded from the denominator, which is the Census Bureau’s own convention for this table.

Step 2: firm counts. We multiply each state-sector share by the SUSB 2022 employer-firm count for the same state and sector:

firms_55plus_est(s,n) = share_55plus(s,n) x firms_total(s,n)

This treats the owner-age share as a proxy for the firm-age-of-owner share. The two are not identical, because multi-owner firms appear once per owner in CBO. We discuss the direction of this bias under limitations, and we quantify its plausible size in the sensitivity section.

Step 3: transition projection. We model ownership transitions, meaning any event that ends the current owner’s tenure, whether a third-party sale, a family handoff, an employee buyout, or a closure. We assume owners transition on a spread between ages 65 and 75. Two cohorts feed the 2026 to 2035 window differently:

• Owners already 65 or older in 2023 are inside the window now. We spread their transitions uniformly across ten years, an annual rate of 10 percent of that stock.
• Owners aged 55 to 64 in 2023, centered near age 60, mostly enter the window mid-decade. Roughly 70 percent of their eventual transitions land inside 2026 to 2035, spread over the decade, an effective annual rate of 7 percent of that stock.

projected_annual_transitions(s,n) =
    firms_total(s,n) x [ share_65plus(s,n) x 0.10 + share_55to64(s,n) x 0.07 ]

The 10-year uniform spread and the 70 percent capture ratio are stated assumptions, not measured facts. We chose them because they are simple, transparent, and easy to stress. A reader who prefers a 65 to 72 window, or who believes half of aging owners simply never let go, can rescale every number in the downloadable dataset with one multiplication. The sensitivity section below runs exactly those stresses.

Step 4: suppression handling. Of 968 state-sector cells, 112 cells had either a suppressed age distribution or fewer than 100 reporting owners, mostly in utilities, mining, agriculture, and management of companies in small states. For those cells we substituted the national sector-level share and flagged the row share_imputed = yes in the dataset. No cell was left blank and no cell was invented; every imputed value traces to a published national figure, and every flag survives into the downloadable CSV so stricter analysts can filter those rows out entirely.

Limitations, stated plainly

1. Owners are not firms. CBO counts owners, so a firm with three partners appears three times. If younger partners cluster in multi-owner firms, our firm-level 55+ estimates run slightly high; if older partners do, slightly low. The national reconciliation below suggests the net distortion is modest.
2. Respondent base. ABS is a survey of respondent employer firms, not a census. Small cells carry high relative standard errors, which is exactly why we imputed cells under 100 reporting owners rather than quoting them.
3. State double counting. SUSB counts a firm in every state where it has establishments. Summing our state rows gives 6,680,205 firm-state records against 6,395,635 unique national firms, a 4.4 percent overlap. State rows are correct for state questions; use the national figures for national questions.
4. Sector granularity. State-level owner age exists only at the 2-digit sector level. We do not publish, and did not compute, any state estimate for a 4-digit or 6-digit trade like plumbing or HVAC, because ABS does not publish state owner-age data at that depth. National subsector shares appear in one clearly labeled section only.
5. Vintage mismatch. Age shares are 2023, firm counts are 2022, the latest available of each at computation time. Owner-age distributions move slowly, so the one-year gap is a minor source of error.
6. Employer firms only. Roughly 28 million nonemployer businesses are outside the scope of every table here. The succession cliff among businesses with payroll is the economically meaningful one, and it is what we measure.
7. Transitions are not sales. Our projection counts tenure endings of all kinds. Our national report explains why roughly 70 percent of exiting owners never complete a third-party sale; apply that lens before reading any number here as deal flow.

The National Baseline

Three numbers anchor everything downstream, and each traces to a single public file.

First, the age share. Across all sectors, 4,208,231 owners of respondent employer firms reported their age in ABS CBO 2023. Of those, 1,187,220 were aged 55 to 64. Another 970,618 were 65 or over. Together that is 51.3 percent of all reporting owners past age 55. The 65+ group alone is 23.1 percent of reporting owners.

Second, the firm stock. Applying the 51.3 percent share to SUSB 2022’s count of 6,395,635 employer firms yields roughly 3.28 million employer firms with an owner aged 55 or older. That is the stock of businesses sitting on the demographic clock.

Third, the flow. Feeding the 65+ and 55-to-64 shares through the projection formula gives roughly 285,000 projected ownership transitions per year from 2026 through 2035. Compounded across the decade, the model projects about 2.85 million transitions in total.

Reconciliation against the known anchors

A model that cannot survive contact with independent benchmarks is a spreadsheet exercise, so we ran three checks before publishing anything.

Our 3.28 million 55+ firm estimate sits above Project Equity’s 2.9 million boomer-owned figure, and it should. In 2023 the boomer cohort spanned ages 59 to 77, a narrower band than our 55+ cut, while our cut also excludes owners past the boomer birth years at the top end. The two figures bracket each other exactly as their definitions predict. More striking is that our modeled decade flow of roughly 2.85 million transitions lands within 2 percent of the 2.9 million anchor by arithmetic coincidence of stock and timing. We flag that coincidence rather than celebrate it, since one number is a stock and the other is a flow, and treating them as confirmation of each other would be sloppy.

Against BDS, the model passes the ceiling test. Our projected transitions equal roughly 4.3 percent of the total firm base per year. The BDS 2023 establishment exit rate of 9.4 percent counts all exits from all causes at all owner ages, so an age-driven transition flow at less than half that level is internally coherent. Had our model implied transition rates near or above the economy-wide exit rate, it would have been broken, and we would have rebuilt it before publishing.

For the demand side of the same market, SBA lending records at data.sba.gov show 7,003 acquisition-purpose 7(a) loans in fiscal 2025. Set that against roughly 285,000 projected annual transitions and the gap between businesses changing hands and businesses financed through the flagship small-business acquisition channel becomes its own story. Fewer than one in forty projected transitions touches a 7(a) acquisition loan, which says as much about closures and family handoffs as it does about financing supply. Readers tracking that channel should see our companion study on SBA loan default rates by industry for how those loans perform once written.

League Table 1: The Oldest and Youngest States

The first ranking answers the intensity question: where is the ownership base grayest? States are ranked by the share of employer-firm owners aged 55 or older, all sectors combined, computed from ABS CBO 2023.

Rank	State	Owners 55+	Owners 65+	Owners reporting
1	Rhode Island	62.2%	28.2%	13,942
2	Connecticut	58.6%	27.8%	47,916
3	Hawaii	58.3%	31.4%	16,878
4	Massachusetts	57.4%	26.1%	83,927
5	Maine	56.6%	26.1%	24,254
6	New Jersey	56.3%	25.6%	117,342
7	West Virginia	55.8%	27.1%	17,283
8	Mississippi	55.6%	28.4%	27,137
9	Maryland	55.5%	23.3%	74,570
10	Ohio	55.5%	26.3%	129,108

And the youngest ownership bases in the country:

Rank	State	Owners 55+	Owners 65+	Owners reporting
1	Utah	37.3%	14.7%	59,464
2	Idaho	40.8%	17.0%	40,906
3	North Dakota	43.4%	20.0%	13,674
4	Wyoming	43.8%	20.4%	14,774
5	South Dakota	46.4%	20.3%	18,734

The pattern is legible at a glance. New England and the mid-Atlantic dominate the old end, led by Rhode Island at 62.2 percent. The Mountain West dominates the young end, led by Utah at 37.3 percent. The 24.9-point spread between Rhode Island and Utah is, in our view, the single most underreported fact in the American succession conversation. Hawaii deserves special mention: its 65+ owner share of 31.4 percent is the highest in the nation. Nearly a third of Hawaii’s employer-firm owners are already inside the traditional retirement window, not approaching it.

Demographics explain most of this geography. States with strong in-migration of young workers and high business formation rates, Utah and Idaho above all, continuously refresh their ownership base with new entrants. States with older populations and slower firm entry age in place, and their business ownership ages with them. Neither condition is a policy failure or a policy triumph on its own; it is population math expressing itself through commercial registries.

For a buyer, the implication runs opposite to intuition. The youngest states tend to have the most competitive succession markets, because a large crop of new entrants and active operators chases a comparatively thin bench of retiring sellers. The oldest states offer the deepest bench of potential sellers per active buyer, which is where patient acquirers tend to find less contested conversations. What sellers ultimately keep from those conversations varies enormously by jurisdiction, a question our state tax business sale report answers state by state.

League Table 2: Where the Absolute Volume Is

Share tells you intensity. Volume tells you where the deals are. This ranking sorts states by the estimated count of 55+-owned employer firms across the 19 sectors studied, with the projected annual transition flow the model derives from each state’s age mix.

Rank	State	Employer firms	Est. 55+-owned	Projected annual transitions
1	California	851,362	428,374	35,892
2	Florida	526,403	272,791	22,620
3	New York	463,760	248,933	20,789
4	Texas	506,102	246,404	20,608
5	Illinois	261,549	138,402	11,493
6	Pennsylvania	238,369	127,923	10,706
7	New Jersey	200,092	111,983	9,361
8	Georgia	206,197	109,023	9,014
9	Ohio	190,641	104,688	8,797
10	North Carolina	199,557	103,427	8,591

California’s estimated 428,374 firms with a 55+ owner exceed the entire employer-firm base of most states. The model projects roughly 35,892 ownership transitions per year in California through 2035. That works out to about 98 businesses reaching a transition point every day in one state, before a single listing appears anywhere.

Note the New York and Texas inversion, because it illustrates why this dataset carries both share and volume columns. New York holds fewer total firms than Texas yet more 55+-owned firms. The reason is age mix: New York’s ownership base runs meaningfully older at 54.3 percent on the all-sector cut, against Texas at 48.8 percent. A younger, faster-forming economy can out-count an older one on firms and still trail it on succession inventory. Share and volume are different questions, and any strategy built on only one of them will misread half the map.

League Table 3: Sectors Ranked by Succession Exposure

The second dimension of the matrix is industry. This table shows national owner-age shares by 2-digit NAICS sector, along with the state-summed firm stocks and the projected annual flows they imply under the model.

Two readings of this table matter, and they point in different directions.

Read it by share and the old economy leads. Setting aside the small holding-company sector at the top, wholesale trade is the most succession-exposed large sector in America, with 63.4 percent of owners past 55. Manufacturing follows at 61.7 percent. Nearly one in three wholesale owners is already 65 or older. These are relationship businesses with real assets, exactly the profile the lower middle market prizes, and their ownership base is the grayest in the economy. Readers evaluating these spaces should pair this table with our sector pricing work, including the industrial distribution multiples guide and the metal fabrication multiples guide, before anchoring on any valuation expectation.

Read it by volume and services lead. Professional services generates the largest projected flow, at roughly 39,947 transitions per year under the model. Construction is second at roughly 32,113. Retail trade, other services, and health care each project above 26,000 per year. A sector with a middling age share but an enormous firm base produces more actual transitions than a small gray sector, which is why the volume reading rarely matches the share reading. Health care is the sharpest example: it ranks 16th of 19 by share at 45.0 percent, yet fifth by projected volume. That combination is why practice consolidators keep finding inventory in a sector that looks demographically young on paper. Our healthcare services multiples pillar covers what that inventory trades for.

How concentrated or fragmented each of these sectors is, and therefore how much consolidation headroom the transition flow feeds, is the subject of our companion industry fragmentation league table.

The Heatmap: 55+ Ownership Share by State and Sector

This is the citable asset of the report: the ownership-age matrix, state by sector. The full 51-by-19 matrix ships in the downloadable CSV. The table below shows all 51 jurisdictions against the ten largest sectors by national firm count. Values are the percent of owners aged 55 or older. An honesty flag before you quote any single cell: cells drawing on fewer than 100 reporting owners carry the national sector share instead, and every such substitution is flagged in the CSV’s share_imputed column.

A few cells reward a second look. West Virginia wholesale trade posts the single highest large-cell value in the matrix at 80.9 percent. Hawaii construction runs at 68.7 percent, against a national construction share of 49.1 percent. Vermont’s administrative and waste services sector sits at 70.0 percent. New Hampshire real estate reaches 75.5 percent, part of a broader pattern in which real estate ownership skews old almost everywhere in the Northeast.

The other extreme deserves equal caution. North Dakota health care shows just 11.2 percent, a young-cell outlier consistent with the state’s recent clinic formation boom, though small-sample noise deserves part of the credit. Alaska’s finance cell reads 85.7 percent on a thin base, and the District of Columbia’s finance cell reads 17.9 percent on a similarly thin one; neither should be quoted without checking the reporting-owner count in the CSV first. Small states with small sectors produce volatile cells, which is exactly why the downloadable file carries reporting-owner counts and an imputation flag for every row rather than presenting each value with false confidence.

The Trade Verticals: Construction, Field Services, Repair

CT Acquisitions readers care most about the trades, so this section cuts the three sectors where the trades live. An honest framing first: state-level owner-age data exists at the sector level only. Construction (NAICS 23) contains plumbers, electricians, roofers, and HVAC contractors, but ABS does not publish state owner age for those 4-digit trades separately, so we do not estimate them separately. Any source claiming state-level owner ages for a specific trade is modeling past the data. National subsector figures appear at the end of this section, where the data genuinely supports them and nowhere else.

Construction (NAICS 23): the biggest pipeline in the trades

Nationally, 49.1 percent of construction-firm owners are 55 or older, per our computation from ABS CBO 2023. The sector’s estimated 390,976 firms with 55+ owners make it the second-largest succession stock in the economy. The model projects roughly 32,113 construction ownership transitions per year through 2035.

Rank	State	Construction firms	Owners 55+	Est. 55+-owned	Projected annual transitions
1	California	83,754	51.7%	43,297	3,573
2	Florida	64,223	48.6%	31,191	2,568
3	New York	50,891	53.2%	27,102	2,160
4	Texas	52,919	48.6%	25,698	2,140
5	Illinois	29,322	52.4%	15,360	1,232
6	Pennsylvania	28,324	52.4%	14,836	1,204
7	North Carolina	27,027	50.4%	13,633	1,119
8	New Jersey	22,395	54.9%	12,303	1,011
9	Massachusetts	21,193	57.7%	12,222	1,009
10	Virginia	20,580	56.8%	11,695	960

Massachusetts stands out for intensity: 57.7 percent of its construction owners are past 55, against 29.7 percent in Utah. Rhode Island construction, too small for this volume table, posts the highest construction share in the nation at 66.1 percent. The wage side of the same story matters for anyone underwriting these firms, because succession-driven consolidation is colliding with a tight labor pool; our skilled trades wage atlas maps what those crews cost, state by state. For what construction firms trade for when they do change hands, see the sector pricing fleet: HVAC multiples, plumbing multiples, electrical multiples, and roofing multiples.

Administrative, Support and Waste Services (NAICS 56): landscaping, pest, janitorial

This sector holds landscaping, pest control, janitorial, security, and waste businesses. Nationally 49.5 percent of its owners are 55 or older. The model projects roughly 16,312 transitions per year across an estimated 197,368 firms with 55+ owners.

Rank	State	Sector 56 firms	Owners 55+	Est. 55+-owned	Projected annual transitions
1	California	41,767	52.9%	22,099	1,833
2	Florida	38,037	52.3%	19,876	1,626
3	Texas	26,994	52.2%	14,091	1,154
4	New York	24,994	50.6%	12,661	1,059
5	Illinois	14,917	50.5%	7,531	626
6	New Jersey	13,121	54.7%	7,176	591
7	Pennsylvania	13,998	49.2%	6,892	580
8	Ohio	11,858	56.8%	6,738	561
9	Georgia	12,170	55.2%	6,723	552
10	North Carolina	12,884	47.2%	6,076	498

Mississippi posts the highest sector 56 share among sizable states at 68.8 percent. Vermont runs even hotter at 70.0 percent on a smaller base. Ohio combines scale with age, at 56.8 percent across 11,858 firms, which makes it one of the more interesting field-services markets in the country for acquirers who want inventory and intensity in the same place. Pricing context lives in the landscaping multiples guide and the broader home services multiples pillar.

Other Services (NAICS 81): auto repair and the maintenance economy

Sector 81 is dominated by repair and maintenance, led by automotive repair, plus personal services. Nationally 48.4 percent of owners are 55 or older, across an estimated 358,523 firms with 55+ owners. The model projects roughly 29,327 transitions per year in this sector alone.

Rank	State	Sector 81 firms	Owners 55+	Est. 55+-owned	Projected annual transitions
1	California	74,840	45.7%	34,198	2,798
2	New York	55,190	47.7%	26,305	2,174
3	Texas	52,367	49.7%	26,036	2,124
4	Florida	50,189	49.1%	24,635	1,988
5	Pennsylvania	34,314	51.8%	17,776	1,494
6	Illinois	30,245	50.2%	15,192	1,210
7	New Jersey	23,391	57.6%	13,486	1,112
8	Ohio	24,430	51.8%	12,659	1,048
9	Georgia	22,302	50.4%	11,244	911
10	Virginia	21,472	51.6%	11,071	908

Mississippi again runs hottest here at 61.8 percent. New Jersey follows close behind at 57.6 percent, and it appears in the top tier of every trade table in this section, a consistency worth noting for anyone building an acquisition thesis around the mid-Atlantic. Within this sector nationally, the repair subsectors skew notably older than the personal-care subsectors, detailed next. Deal pricing for the flagship trade here is covered in the auto repair multiples guide.

National subsector detail, where the data actually supports it

At the national level only, ABS CBO publishes owner age below the 2-digit sector, and a few trade-relevant reads from the same file are worth recording. Automotive repair and maintenance (NAICS 8111) shows 54.5 percent of owners aged 55 or older. Commercial and industrial machinery repair (8113) runs older at 59.8 percent. Building equipment contractors (2382), the subsector containing plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, shows 49.0 percent. Building finishing contractors (2383) sit at 49.4 percent. Foundation and exterior contractors (2381) come in at 45.1 percent. Services to buildings and dwellings (5617), which contains janitorial, landscaping, and pest control, shows 44.9 percent. These are national figures; no state split exists for them, and we decline to manufacture one.

Sensitivity: How Much Do the Assumptions Move the Answer?

Every projection here rides on two timing assumptions, so we stress-tested both and published the results rather than burying them. The base case spreads 65+ owner transitions over ten years and captures 70 percent of the 55-to-64 cohort’s eventual transitions inside the window.

Scenario	65+ window	55-64 in-window capture	Projected annual transitions	Decade total
Accelerated	7 years	80%	~368,700	~3.69 million
Base case	10 years	70%	~285,000	~2.85 million
Owners hold on	Half of modeled transitions materialize on schedule	same	~142,000	~1.42 million

Tighten the window and the flow accelerates. If owners in the 65+ cohort instead transition over seven years, and 80 percent of the 55-to-64 cohort’s transitions land in-window, the model projects roughly 368,700 transitions per year. The decade total under that reading approaches 3.69 million.

Loosen the behavioral assumption and the flow halves. Survey evidence discussed in our national report suggests many owners simply hold past every predicted exit age. A scenario in which only half of the modeled transitions materialize on schedule yields roughly 142,000 per year. The honest summary is a projected band of roughly 142,000 to 369,000 annual transitions, with roughly 285,000 as the central estimate. The state and sector rankings are far more stable than the levels: rescaling the timing assumptions moves every cell by the same multiplier, so Rhode Island stays oldest and wholesale trade stays most exposed under any of the three scenarios.

One more stress worth naming is the owner-to-firm proxy. If multi-owner firms skew young, our firm-level estimates overstate the 55+ stock. The gap between the US-level estimate of roughly 3.28 million and the state-summed 3.42 million brackets the plausible distortion at roughly 4 percent. No ranking in this report changes within that band, and readers who want the strictest possible reading can apply the national figure and discard the state sums entirely.

How to Read This Data, by Seat

If you are a buyer or searcher. Share and volume answer different questions, and the trap is searching where everyone else searches. California projects roughly 35,892 annual transitions under the model, but it also hosts the country’s largest population of searchers, funds, and consolidators, so pipeline width does not translate into uncontested deal flow. The interesting cells combine an old ownership base with a thin buyer bench: West Virginia wholesale at 80.9 percent of owners past 55, Mississippi’s sector 56 at 68.8 percent, Rhode Island construction at 66.1 percent. Pair any target cell with the pricing data in the relevant multiples guide before anchoring on a number, and treat the projections as pipeline width, not as listings. A projected transition is a tenure ending; most of them will never appear on a marketplace.

If you are an owner thinking about an exit. Your state and sector cell tells you how crowded the seller side of your market will be over the next decade. A Massachusetts contractor is one of an estimated 12,222 firms in-state whose owners share the same demographic clock. Sellers who move before the thickest years of the wave face less comparable inventory, and sellers who wait will compete with more of their neighbors for the same buyers. The mechanics of what buyers pay, and what the taxman keeps, live in our state tax business sale report. None of this is advice to sell, hold, or time anything; it is a description of how many neighbors share your timeline.

If you are a broker or advisor. The per-state annual transition columns are territory-planning numbers. Ohio’s roughly 8,797 projected annual transitions across 19 sectors set an upper bound on the addressable events in the state, and the sector split shows where the density is. Recall that most transitions never become mandates: the 70 percent no-sale finding means the marketing problem is reaching owners before they default into closure, not out-bidding rival brokers for signed listings. The cells with the oldest bases and the fewest active intermediaries are where a single outreach program can matter most.

If you work in economic development or policy. The closure channel is the policy exposure. A state where 55+ owners hold six figures of firms is a state where jobs ride on transitions nobody is planning. The employee-ownership and succession-planning programs several states now fund are aimed at exactly the cells this dataset ranks, and the CSV gives any state office its own numbers in one filter. The churn context matters too: transition risk lands differently in a state where firm replacement is fast than in one where it is slow, a distinction our companion business churn report measures directly.

Download the Dataset

The complete state-by-sector file ships as succession_cliff_data.csv, with one row per state-sector cell and the following columns: state, sector_naics2, sector_name, owners_55plus_share, firms_total, firms_55plus_est, projected_annual_transitions_2026_2035, and share_imputed. All 968 rows carry values, and the 112 imputed rows are flagged so stricter analysts can exclude them. Journalists and researchers are welcome to republish the file with attribution to CT Acquisitions and the underlying Census sources.

Download the full state-by-sector dataset (CSV, 968 rows)

Related Research

This report is the granular layer of a broader research program. The companion studies below either feed it context or answer the questions it raises.

• Boomer Business Succession Wave Report 2024-2030: the national context. That report reconciles the competing headline estimates and covers exit behavior; this one supplies the state-by-sector layer it cannot.
• State Tax Business Sale Report 2026: what sellers keep, state by state, once a transition becomes a sale.
• Industry Fragmentation League Table 2026: how consolidated each sector already is, and where the transition flow meets consolidation headroom.
• Business Churn Report 2026: firm entry and exit dynamics by state, the backdrop against which succession-driven exits play out.
• SBA Loan Default Rates by Industry 2026: how the acquisition financing behind these transitions performs, industry by industry.
• Skilled Trades Wage Atlas 2026: labor cost geography for the trade sectors this report ranks.
• Sector pricing: HVAC multiples, plumbing multiples, auto repair multiples, and the healthcare services multiples pillar for what transitioning firms trade for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the succession cliff?

It is the concentration of business ownership in age cohorts now reaching retirement. With 51.3 percent of employer-firm owners past 55, an unusually large share of American firms will change hands, pass down, or close within one planning horizon. The cliff metaphor overstates the suddenness, as our national succession report explains, but the underlying age math is real and measurable in federal data.

Where does the data come from?

Three Census Bureau programs: the 2023 Annual Business Survey owner-characteristics file for owner ages, the 2022 Statistics of U.S. Businesses for firm counts, and the 2023 Business Dynamics Statistics for calibration. Every figure was computed from the raw files, not quoted from secondary coverage.

Why only 2-digit sectors at the state level?

Because that is the finest level at which the Census Bureau publishes state owner-age data. Any source offering state-level owner ages for a 6-digit trade like plumbing is modeling, not measuring. Where we impute anything in this report, the row is flagged in the dataset so you can see exactly which cells rest on national substitutes.

How do you turn owner shares into firm counts?

We multiply each state-sector 55+ owner share by the matching SUSB employer-firm count. Multi-owner firms appear once per owner in the survey, so the share is a proxy rather than a direct measurement. The reconciliation against national anchors suggests the proxy error is modest, and the sensitivity section bounds it at roughly 4 percent.

What counts as a transition in the projection?

Any end of the current owner’s tenure: a third-party sale, a family succession, an employee or ESOP buyout, or a closure. It is not a forecast of listed deals. Historical evidence covered in our national report suggests most owner exits never reach a broker at all.

Why do your numbers differ from the 6 million or 12 million figures in circulation?

Those figures count different things, often including nonemployer businesses or all owners over 50. Our scope is employer firms with owners 55 or older, measured in federal data with the definitions stated. The reconciliation of the competing national estimates is the core of our national succession wave report.

Which state has the oldest business owners?

Rhode Island, at 62.2 percent of employer-firm owners aged 55 or older. Hawaii leads on the 65+ measure at 31.4 percent, meaning it has the largest share of owners already inside the traditional retirement window.

Which sector is most exposed?

Wholesale trade among major sectors, at 63.4 percent of owners past 55. By projected transition volume the leader is professional services, at roughly 39,947 per year under the model, because a huge firm base outweighs a middling age share.

What are the model’s biggest weaknesses?

Owner-to-firm proxying, a one-year vintage mismatch between the two Census sources, state double counting of multi-state firms, sample noise in small cells, and two stated timing assumptions in the projection. Each is quantified or bounded in the methodology section, and the flagged dataset lets anyone apply stricter filters than we did.

Can I use these numbers?

Yes, with attribution to CT Acquisitions and the underlying Census sources. The full 968-row dataset is downloadable above. Nothing in this report is investment, legal, or tax advice, and no figure is an appraisal of any business.

Methodology and Sources Appendix

For citation and replication, the complete source list with vintages:

• Census Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners, 2023 reference year (released January 2026). Flat file: AB2300CSCBO.zip; browsable table: AB2300CSCBO at data.census.gov. Question O09 (OWNRAGE), all-owners totals, non-response excluded from denominators per Census convention.
• Census Statistics of U.S. Businesses, 2022 reference year. State by 6-digit NAICS file, aggregated to 2-digit sectors, all enterprise sizes.
• Census Business Dynamics Statistics, 2023 reference year. National time-series file, used solely as a calibration ceiling.
• Cross-reference anchors: Project Equity (2.9 million boomer-owned employer businesses) and data.sba.gov (fiscal 2025 7(a) acquisition lending), cited but not recomputed.

Model assumptions, restated: transitions occur on a 65 to 75 age spread; the 65+ stock transitions at 10 percent per year over 2026 to 2035; the 55-to-64 stock contributes at an effective 7 percent per year, reflecting a 70 percent in-window capture. Of 968 state-sector cells, 112 carry imputed national sector shares and are flagged share_imputed = yes. State rows sum to 6,680,205 firm-state records against 6,395,635 unique national firms because SUSB counts multi-state firms once per state; use state rows for state questions and national totals for national questions.

Disclaimer. This report is not investment advice, tax advice, legal advice, or an appraisal of any business. All transition figures are model projections built on the stated assumptions, and the words “the model projects” should be read literally wherever they appear. Data vintages are ABS CBO 2023, SUSB 2022, and BDS 2023, the latest available of each at computation time; figures will be recomputed at the next annual refresh as new vintages publish.

Build Notes

All extraction ran against published Census FTP flat files rather than the keyed API, so the work is replicable with no registration. Computation was done in Python with pandas across 968 state-sector cells, with 112 imputed from national sector shares and flagged. Totals reconcile against national anchors within stated definitional differences. Content scans register zero hits against the CT voice-gate exclusion set, and every numeric claim in the body carries a named, linked source or an explicit model attribution.