A new study that ranks cities by the lowest average age of entrepreneurs across the nation's 50 largest metro areas has found that Milwaukee ranks among the youngest in the country.
According to an analysis by online financial platform provider LendingTree, the average age of an entrepreneur in Milwaukee is 34.54 years, ranking the city at No. 6.
In fact, Rust Belt cities take up many of the top 20 slots on the list that ranks Pittsburgh at No. 2 (34.15 years); Cleveland at No. 3 (34.27); Detroit as No. 8; Cincinnati, Ohio as No. 13 (34.80); St. Louis as No. 14 (35.44); and Chicago as No. 15 (35.47).
Ranking at the top with an average entrepreneur age of 34.13 years was the Salt Lake City metro. Also ahead of Milwaukee and rounding out the top five were Philadelphia (34.44) and Providence, Rhode Island (34.52).
Nationally, the average age of entrepreneurs across the 50 largest metros in the U.S. was 36.4 years, the LendingTree study found.
To compile its report, LendingTree looked at over 35,000 funding requests from business owners to its SnapCap program, a loan lending service for companies, between July 2022 and June 2023.
As part of its funding request process, LendingTree asks business owners to disclose their birth year as well as the year their company was founded, which the firm then used to calculate the age of its applicants at the time of their company's establishment. LendingTree also gathered geographic locations for these applications to determine metro-based statistics.
Insights from Hawaii were omitted from the analysis due to insufficient data collection, LendingTree said.
