Method
How we count who owns Texas businesses
We look at where each business's tax paperwork is mailed, and ask: is that in the same county?
The short version
Every shop that sells things in Texas needs a sales-tax permit. The state publishes a public list of them. For each shop, the list shows where the shop is and a mailing address for the business that owns it. We ask one question about every shop: is that mailing address in the same county as the shop?
That gives three answers.
- Green: same county. The owner's address on file is in the county where the shop is.
- Yellow: elsewhere in Texas. The address is in Texas, but in a different county.
- Red: out of state. The address is outside Texas.
What we counted
- We counted 874,165 shops (the state calls them "outlets") in all 254 counties. That is every active sales-tax permit on the list, as of 7 Nov 2026, after we took out government offices, schools, and nonprofit groups.
- Across Texas, 70.6% are green, 18.3% are yellow and 11.1% are red.
- A few shops (1,737, about 0.2%) have a Texas address with no usable county. We left them out of the percentages.
- Opened in the last 12 months means a new permit was issued between 3 Nov 2025 and 2 Nov 2026. Closed means the state lists an out-of-business date in that time.
- New owner at an old address is our own signal. We look for an address where one business closed and a different business opened within a year. We skip pairs with nearly the same name (a business that only changed its legal form) and big buildings that hold many businesses, such as malls. Statewide we found 15,287 of these in 12 months.
- A county with fewer than 100 shops on file is hatched on the map and marked "too few to say". With so few, one or two shops swing the percentages a lot. There are 32 of them.
- We call a company a chain if it has shops in 10 or more Texas counties. Chains run 10.3% of all shops. Without them, 78.2% of the rest are green.
Where the numbers come from
All of it is public. We did not contact anyone.
- Active Sales Tax Permit Holders: the Texas Comptroller's list of every shop with an active permit (public domain, updated 7 Nov 2026).
- All Permitted Sales Tax Locations: the Comptroller's list that includes out-of-business dates and past permit holders. We used it for closures and for the new-owner signal (updated 2 Nov 2026).
- County lines on the map: U.S. Census Bureau (public domain).
- To check our totals, we compared them with the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns and Nonemployer Statistics. Our shop counts follow theirs closely, county by county. That check caught a mistake in our first try: the state numbers its counties in a slightly different order than the Census does for nine counties (the "Mc" names), so we fixed it and checked every county against the ZIP codes of its shops.
- The two statewide Census facts on the home page (family-owned firms and owner age) come from the Annual Business Survey 2023, which counts employer firms. It is a survey, so the numbers have a margin of error. 29.1% of the Texas firms that answered said they are family-owned (margin about 0.5 points), and 48.8% of the owners of Texas employer firms are 55 or older. The Census hides most small-county numbers to protect privacy, so we do not show family-owned or owner-age numbers for counties.
- Machine-readable copy of every county number: ownership.json.
What the colours mean
- On the map, a county is shaded by its green share: how many of its shops list an owner in the same county. The darker the green, the bigger the share. There are five steps: under 60%, 60 to 64%, 65 to 69%, 70 to 74%, and 75% or more.
- Hatched means too few shops to say.
- In the county card, the bar splits that county's shops into green (same county), yellow (elsewhere in Texas) and red (out of state). The numbers are rounded to whole numbers that add up to 100.
- Grey is for later, when we map single shops on a square. It means "not confirmed". Nothing on the county map is grey in that sense.
What these numbers do not say
Please read this before you quote a number.
- A mailing address is not where an owner lives. It can be an accountant's office, a mailbox in the next county, or a registered agent's address. A small county next to a big city can look less local than it is.
- Chains blur the picture. Some local owners of a chain's franchise file as a local company and look green. Some local families run a company with shops in many counties and look yellow. Think of dollar stores or convenience-store chains: the owner address is often far from the shop.
- Companies that use someone else's address can look out of county or out of state even when the owners live next door. The opposite happens too.
- One-person businesses list their home address, so they are almost always green (90.3% of them). That is real local ownership, but it includes side jobs and online sellers.
- Not every permit is a storefront. Vending machines, rental properties, online sellers and oil-field equipment also hold permits. Sales-tax shops are only about 22% of all the business places the Census counts, so this is a view of businesses that collect sales tax, not of every business.
- "New owner at an old address" is a signal, not a sale. It can be a new tenant, a business that was renamed, or a family handing a shop to the next generation. We cannot see money change hands.
- "Opened" counts permits, not exact new businesses. The state sometimes issues a new permit to a business that already existed. Counting by first-sales date instead gives about 131,000 statewide, not 168,836.
- "Closed" is a floor. Some permits stop with no end date, so we cannot call them closed. The real number is higher.
- The dates differ. The list of shops is from 7 Nov 2026. Closures and new-owner signals run to 2 Nov 2026. The file that holds them goes back only four years. The Census facts are for 2023.
Found a mistake? That is what this page is for. We will say here what we changed.