A new study that ranks cities by the lowest average age of entrepreneurs across the nation's 50 largest metro areas has found that Pittsburgh ranks among the highest in the country.
According to an analysis by online financial platform provider LendingTree, the average age of an entrepreneur in Pittsburgh is 34.15 years, ranking the city at spot No. 2 and bested only marginally by the average entrepreneur age of 34.13 years as seen in the Salt Lake City, Utah, metro. Cleveland came in at spot No. 3 with an average entrepreneur age of 34.27 years.
In fact, Rust Belt cities take up many of the top 20 slots on the list that ranks Milwaukee, Wisconsin as No. 6; Detroit as No. 8; Cincinnati, Ohio as No. 13; St. Louis as No. 14 and Chicago as No. 15.
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.
