Study: San Antonio metro has nation's highest percentage of family-owned businesses

From Southtown to the northern suburbs, the Alamo City is chock full of mom-and-pop shops.

Perhaps then it should come as no surprise a recent study found that the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro has the nation's highest percentage of family-owned businesses. To get its rankings New York-based online lending company On Deck compiled data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 Annual Business Survey and found that 34.11% of all SA-metro small businesses are in family hands.

Indeed, San Antonio was one of just three U.S. metros where more than a third of all businesses were family-owned. The others are Fresno, California, and Oklahoma City, which ended up No. 2 and No. 3 on the list, respectively.

"You don't see any big box retailers in Gruene," Tammy Wood, founder of that Hill Country town's annual Small Business Saturday event, said in a written statement. "We are a city filled with small businesses, and a lot of them have been around for a while. So those shoppers are a big factor in what makes this city successful year-round."

For its part, the City of San Antonio encourages residents to buy local every holiday season as part of an annual campaign of the same name. For every $100 someone spends at a San Antonio-owned business, $68 gets cycled back into the local economy,  city officials told the Current.

Although the San Antonio metro is full of family-owned businesses, it's a bit of an outlier in the Lone Star State since only 30.08% of businesses statewide are in family hands. Indeed, Texas didn't even crack the study's list of top 10 states. The leading slot on that list belonged to South Dakota, where 41.52% of businesses are family owned.

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