Maps of the small business market in North Rhine-Westphalia: where businesses open and close, which industries are growing, what role foreigners play, where the risk is higher and how much tax you will pay in each city. Official statistics only, explained in plain words.
The bigger the tile, the more business registrations there.
You pick a question above the map. Green – “yes, better”, red – “no, worse”, grey – about average.
Every tile opens a card with figures and a takeaway in plain words.
Like a population, businesses are born and die. The monitor shows the heartbeat of the whole state, and the carpet below it shows where it beats stronger and where it is weakening.
The rhythm is real, just sped up 200 times: in 2025, a new business was founded in NRW on average every 3.6 minutes, and one closed every 4.7 minutes. That is why the upper line beats faster. “Today” is an estimate based on this pace, not a live counter. Latest signal: in the first half of 2026, NRW was again first in Germany for new businesses with a head office – around 11,000, 1,320 more than in the first half of 2024 (Destatis).
Every quarter is a tremor on the tape. The higher the amplitude, the more businesses filed for insolvency. For five quarters in a row the state has been shaking close to its ten-year record.
Construction and hospitality are red on map 01 as well: in these industries more businesses close than open. Two independent signals agree. The NRW statistical office names three industries with the highest insolvency rate.
In 2025, a quarter of new businesses in NRW were founded by people without German citizenship – 24.7% of all new founders. In construction and health care – one in two. If you start a business in Germany as a foreigner, you are in good company.
Dashed line – average across all industries, 24.7%. The 63.6% growth in health care (map 01) came largely from Polish citizens: 2,355 of the industry’s 5,442 new founders.
Which taxes on profit you will pay – as a freelancer, a sole proprietor (Gewerbe) or a UG/GmbH – and how much of that is trade tax (Gewerbesteuer) in each city. Choose a legal form, enter your profit, and the receipt recalculates.
The credit cannot exceed your income tax: with a small income it is smaller. A UG or GmbH gets neither the 24,500 € allowance nor the credit. This is a demo calculation, not tax advice: it does not take into account your tax class and family status, other income, expenses, church tax, additions to the base (Hinzurechnungen), prepayments and much more that depends on the specific business.
A “weather forecast” for business: where companies are looking for people and services right now. Every vacancy is an employer who is short of hands. For a freelancer or a service business, these are future clients.
Ecologists call this carrying capacity: how many members of one species a territory can feed. Here the species is a café, a barbershop or a bakery, and the territory is a city.
The atlas figures come from the statistical offices of Germany and its states, the chambers of commerce and the Federal Employment Agency. Before each update we check the totals: if the city figures do not add up to the state total, the map is not updated.
Tables are downloaded automatically on a schedule, right after the office has published them.
The sum of the cities must equal the regional and state totals, and the sum of the industries must equal the NRW total. Any discrepancy stops the update.
The maps are updated on the same day the offices publish new data. The date of the last update is shown at the top of the page.
Love Act Grow asks about your activity and address in your language, works out whether you need to register a trade (Gewerbe) or only notify the tax office, and prepares the documents in German. You register where you actually run your business – the service takes your city into account.
A digest of Atlas© updates — a monthly e-mail of infographics built on current statistics. On the site, new editions appear within 2 hours of official releases from trusted statistics agencies.