Solopreneurs Over $10M Nearly Tripled, Stripe Says

This post advances three related arguments. First, solopreneurship is growing faster than employer-business formation, and the acceleration is validated by multiple independent data sources, making it unlikely to be driven by a fraud wave. Second, both the number and share of solopreneurs reaching meaningful income thresholds is rising. And third, early signals indicate that AI is filling the capability gaps that once made hiring necessary—and doing so fast enough to show up in the income distribution. ／ Until 2022, the Census Bureau assumed that businesses over a given revenue threshold must have employees. Even if a business declared itself a solo enterprise, it was automatically reclassified as an employer when it hit a certain income threshold. ／ And so in 2022, the Census Bureau systematically raised its income thresholds. The resulting counts of nonemployer businesses at higher income levels skyrocketed. ／ In 2023, roughly four million Americans earned their primary income as solopreneurs, generating over $100,000 in annual revenue. That figure has risen substantially from the mid two-million range of the early 2010s, a period when the infrastructure enabling solo business at scale—Stripe, Substack, Kajabi, and other platforms—was still small in scale and more limited in capabilities. — From the three arguments, the 2022 methodology change and the 2023 headcount

Here, the Census Bureau's data is unfortunately more limited. Methodological changes over the years make longitudinal studies of Nonemployer Statistics (NES) data challenging. ／ To understand what is happening with higher-income solopreneurs, we constructed a proxy index of solopreneurs on Stripe, covering approximately 115 solopreneur-focused platforms and all solo Stripe Atlas businesses. ／ More than twice as many solopreneurs earned over $1 million in 2025 than in 2023, and close to three times as many crossed $5 million and $10 million. — From the limits of Census data, the construction of the proxy index, and the tier-by-tier growth from 2023 to 2025

Perhaps even more interestingly, the share of solopreneurs earning above these income thresholds has also doubled in the last two years, suggesting that—rather than the surge in business applications reflecting low-quality experimentation with a few lucky standouts— the cohorts of new solopreneur businesses might actually be of higher quality than in the past. ／ This index almost certainly understates the actual Stripe solopreneur population, since most solo operators use general-purpose infrastructure rather than solopreneur-specific platforms. But it tracks directional trends with reasonable fidelity ／ This is a proxy. There might be nonsolo businesses using these solopreneur-focused platforms. Businesses that started as solopreneurs might have since added employees. And even for those that are in fact solo, the earnings distribution within the solopreneur category is almost certainly wide. — From the change in the share, the understated population and the three stated caveats

New business registrations have risen roughly 40% in Australia, 70% in Finland, and 80% in France since 2017, with meaningful acceleration in 2025 alone. Multicountry acceleration across different regulatory environments argues for a more fundamental driver than fraud activity. ／ Delaware incorporations have grown approximately 40% year over year since early 2025, and they have remained at or above the pandemic-era peak every month since January 2025. ／ Businesses that signed up on Stripe after 2023 reached material transaction volumes earlier than the sign-up cohorts that preceded them. ／ While Delaware represents only about 75,000 of the roughly 5.7 million business applications filed in the United States in 2025, it is the incorporation jurisdiction of choice for founders who intend to raise institutional capital or establish formal governance structures, making it a strong signal of genuine business intent. It is not the natural destination for a passive LLC filing by bad actors. ／ Business applications are also growing fastest in Wyoming, another jurisdiction associated with deliberate legal structuring rather than passive registration. The geographic composition of the acceleration tilts toward intent. ／ It required an EIN and little else for eligibility, creating strong incentives for applications with no genuine entrepreneurial intent. Economic research has found a contemporaneous increase in the composition of 2020 applications toward businesses likely to be nonemployers ／ For the current acceleration in new business applications, there is no comparable federal subsidy creating a financial incentive to file. The PPP stopped accepting new applications in May 2021, and the last forgiveness payout was in 2024. — From the cross-country registrations, Delaware and Wyoming, Stripe sign-ups and the comparison with the PPP

It seems likely that AI is one of the primary drivers of both the acceleration in solo business formation and the outsized performance of solopreneurs in recent years. However, untangling this effect is not always easy. ／ The recent growth in nonemployer businesses shows a positive relationship with industry-level AI adoption, suggesting that higher AI adoption has been broadly consistent with more growth in nonemployer applications, though with notable outliers (manufacturing on the downside, transportation and warehousing on the upside). ／ Preliminary evidence of growth in AI tool usage and solopreneur growth in high-AI-adoption sectors suggests that advances in AI are responsible for a meaningful portion of this growth. ／ AI-influenced user journeys now constitute nearly 4x the share of Stripe sign-ups as last January. We measure two types of AI assistance among the businesses using Stripe today: direct and passive. ／ Direct behavioral signals indicate use of AI tools to build or manage Stripe integrations. ／ Passive signals indicate association with AI tools but not necessarily AI-assisted building. These are things like AI referrals, or traffic arriving from large language models like ChatGPT that recommend Stripe to businesses researching how to accept payments. — From the statement on AI as a driver, the industry-level relationship, the conclusion and the AI-influenced sign-ups

Part of the reason businesses historically tended to be built by groups was that a single individual rarely possesses all the skills needed in the entrepreneurial journey. Whether it's how to evaluate or size a market, code an app, price a product, write and execute a marketing campaign, or close a deal, AI (and AI-augmented software) can fill many of the gaps that founders previously turned to another human for. ／ The availability of this breadth of on-tap assistance allows anyone with sufficient motivation to go it alone. — From the explanation of why running a business alone became possible