Home / Low-density ZIPs nearby
Enter a ZIP code or city, choose a radius and one industry. We list the ZIP codes inside that circle where the business is statistically sparser than the U.S. rate — how many exist, how many the national rate predicts, and how confident the gap is. If there are none, the page says so.
Distance is a straight line between census ZIP-area points, not drive time. Only ZIPs in our 500 covered counties are searched.
Index. Businesses with paid employees per person present — residents plus 0.5 × jobs located in the ZIP — divided by the U.S. rate. 100% means the ZIP has the national density.
Who can be listed. Only ZIPs in the 500 covered counties, whose county has at least 15 ZIPs in our data, with at least 10,000 residents, and at least 5 published businesses in that industry. Census hides counts of 0–2, and derived counts are excluded.
“Statistically low”. A one-sided Poisson test asks whether the published count is lower than the national rate predicts, beyond what rounding and chance explain: P(X ≤ n | expected) < 0.05. Each test has a 5% false-positive rate, so in a radius with about 30 comparable ZIPs roughly 1–2 results can clear the bar by chance. Treat every line as a question to check locally.
Small ZIPs are under-represented. A ZIP with 10,000 residents needs a very low count to reach significance; one with 60,000 residents reaches it more easily. “Not significant” therefore does not mean “no gap”.
Bedroom ZIPs can look low by construction. The index assumes residents spend locally, but commuters eat and shop near work. In a mainly residential ZIP, some of that demand is counted at home while the businesses are counted in the employment ZIPs, so a low index can reflect leakage rather than an opening. The ZIP-type tag on each card is a jobs-to-residents ratio, not a zoning classification.
What the data cannot see. Rent, foot traffic, revenue, zoning and commercial space, closures, and businesses with no paid employees. A low count can mean an unmet market, a different trade area, or a street with nowhere to open. Nothing here is a recommendation.
BizGapMap — free, no-login small-business saturation reports for major U.S. counties. Built entirely from public U.S. Census, BLS, and IRS data (ZBP 2023, ACS 2024 5-year, PEP 2024, LODES, QCEW, IRS SOI). No forecasts, no revenue guesses — withheld cells are marked, and the few derived counts are labelled as estimates.