Today marks our nation’s annual Veterans Day. The influence of veterans on our culture are vast, and their contributions essential to the structure of our society. The Census Bureau puts out a Facts for Features for all “holidays” each year, and their newsletter on Veterans Day is a terrific one, well worth your time. The economic impacts of veterans mentioned in the Bureau’s data compendium piqued our interest. In this post, we take a closer look at data (from the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey) for the nation, peer metros, and the Atlanta MSA.

The results are shown in Table 1 below. As far as highlight findings: nationwide,  veteran-owned firms provide 7 million jobs (6% of the job base) and $353 billion in payroll. The Atlanta share is 13,500 veteran-owned firms, providing just over 150,000 jobs (7% of the entire job base of our area), and $7.4 billion in payroll. The relative presence of veteran-owned businesses in Atlanta exceeds that in all of its metro peers (as defined by the Catlyst economic strategy) except Charlotte and (not surprisingly) Washington, DC. Metro areas as a group dominate the economic landscape of  the veteran-owned economy, as they do the landscape of the economy as a whole. But in “non-metro”, more rural America, veteran-owned businesses provide a far larger share of firms, jobs, and payroll than they do  in more urban areas.

For (a lot more) recent data on veterans in our region and state, check out these posts on 33N: