Business Pulse: methodology and definitions

What is counted

• Registry records: corporations, LLCs, limited partnerships, nonprofit registrations, trusts and registered-agent designations in the Florida Division of Corporations corporate data files. Each record is counted once by its document number, using its newest available version.
• These are registered legal entities. They are not operating businesses, physical establishments, licensed professionals, or businesses listed on Browardly, and none of these is used as a stand-in for another.
• Active / inactive is the registry status on the record. It does not show whether a business operates.
• New domestic formations: Florida (domestic) LLCs, corporations and limited partnerships by the month of the filing date on record. A new registration is not a new opening.
• Foreign registrations: entities formed elsewhere that registered to do business in Florida. They are reported separately and never mixed into formations.
• Dissolutions and other events are kept as the state describes them. They are not published as closures, and registrations minus dissolutions is never reported as “net business growth”.
• Industry is not reported: the registry has no industry field, and names are not used to guess one. S-corporation status is a federal tax election that the registry does not record.

Time

• The quarterly file holds active and inactive records on record when it was generated; daily files add filings entered after it. Disappearing from a later file is never read as closure.
• Filings can be entered weeks after their filing date, so a month stays provisional until 60 days after it ends are covered by a quarterly snapshot. The month in progress and future-dated filings are not shown. Months without data are left out, never shown as zero.
• Active counts exist only as of the snapshot date. Earlier active totals are not reconstructed from a present-day file, because entities that closed earlier would be missing (survivorship bias).
• Month-over-month and year-over-year changes are shown only between two final months.

Geography

• Only the principal address is used. Mailing and registered-agent addresses are never substituted.
• Addresses are matched offline to U.S. Census TIGER/Line 2026 street address ranges for Broward County, and the resulting point is placed inside a city boundary (incorporated places) or unincorporated Broward. No address is sent to any outside service.
• Records that cannot be placed stay in explicit groups: a Broward ZIP that could not be placed, a ZIP partly in Broward, other Florida ZIPs, other states, outside the U.S., and no usable address. A ZIP or postal city name is never treated as a city boundary.
• The address is the newest one on record, not the address at formation. A principal address in Broward does not mean there is an office or storefront there.

Privacy and suppression

• Only aggregate counts are published. Names, addresses, officers, agents and tax identifiers are never published.
• Counts from 1 to 9 are shown as “—”.

Cross-check with the Division's published yearly counts

The Division's yearly statistics count new documents filed in each calendar year (read 2026-10-25). The registry column counts records in the latest file by filing date. Small differences are expected: filings dated in one year can be entered in the next, and records can later be merged, converted or corrected. They are shown, not adjusted.

Sources

• Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations: quarterly corporate data file
• Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations: daily corporate filings
• U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line 2026 (Broward address ranges, Florida places, county subdivisions)