A new study that ranks cities by the lowest average age of entrepreneurs across the nation's 50 largest metro areas has found that St. Louis ranks near the top.
According to an analysis by online financial platform provider LendingTree, the average age of an entrepreneur in St. Louis is 35.44 years, ranking the city at spot No. 14. Salt Lake City, Utah, had the lowest average age for entrepreneur age at 34.13 years. It is followed by Pittsburgh at No. 2, with an average age of 34.15, and 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; 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. The study also examined the average of entrepreneurs by state, with Missouri coming at No. 18 with an average entrepreneur age of 35.31 years.
To compile its report, LendingTree looked at more than 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.
