Data

Businesses by region: local units, creations and failures

How many local units each region has in industry, construction and market services, how many businesses were created there in 2025, how many failed and how dense businesses are per inhabitant.

Local units: 2024 · creations and failures: 2025 · population on 1 January 2025 · Eurostat and INSEE, retrieved on 4 November 2026 · by Martin Adamec

← All data pages

  • 6,278,194local units in France in 2024 (industry, construction, market services)
  • 1,165,795business creations in 2025
  • 68,540business failures in 2025
  • 91.1local units per 1,000 inhabitants

The 18 regions

The table can be scrolled sideways.

Local units 2024 in NACE sections B to S excluding O and S94: Eurostat, local units by NUTS region (sbs_r_nuts2021), reference year 2024, data as of 30 September 2026. Creations 2025 (sum of the four quarters, raw data): INSEE, business creations (macro-economic database, raw quarterly data). Failures 2025 by date of judgment: INSEE, business failures by date of judgment (macro-economic database, raw data). Population on 1 January 2025: Eurostat, population on 1 January by NUTS region (demo_r_d2jan). Values retrieved on 4 November 2026; densities calculated by firmdata.fr.
RegionLocal units 2024per 1,000 inh.Creations 2025of which micro-entrepreneursFailures 2025Population
Île-de-France1,407,649112.2333,45262.4%16,13912,549,288
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes803,01297.1134,75166.1%8,1238,270,088
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur623,724118.0112,60167.1%6,3565,285,125
Occitanie609,85898.3105,52868.1%6,1266,205,575
Nouvelle-Aquitaine586,69794.595,23868.5%6,5216,210,839
Grand Est403,60572.768,15467.3%4,4305,550,155
Hauts-de-France386,54564.771,78367.6%4,9865,974,447
Pays de la Loire312,27679.248,13565.0%3,2063,945,359
Brittany285,16581.743,17762.1%2,5543,489,252
Normandy236,06370.439,77066.2%2,6953,350,982
Bourgogne-Franche-Comté210,20275.235,08966.8%2,2852,796,878
Centre-Val de Loire186,81872.232,59867.5%2,2722,588,306
Réunion (overseas)72,16779.815,44156.7%1,113904,180
Martinique (overseas)50,027139.28,10441.3%518359,419
Corsica46,005127.06,56065.0%466362,253
Guadeloupe (overseas)39,82496.29,14755.3%497413,791
French Guiana (overseas)13,62945.83,96654.0%168297,455
Mayotte (overseas)4,92815.02,30141.0%n/a329,208
France6,278,19491.11,165,79565.1%68,54068,882,600

n/a: not available — INSEE does not publish a failure series for Mayotte. The sum of the regions (68,455) differs slightly from the published national total (68,540); for local units, creations and population the sum of the regions equals the total for France. The 2025 population is provisional.

What the table shows

  • Three regions account for 45.1% of local units: Île-de-France (1,407,649), Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (803,012), Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (623,724).
  • Density: in metropolitan France, local units per 1,000 inhabitants range from 64.7 (Hauts-de-France) to 127.0 (Corsica); the national average is 91.1.
  • Creations: relative to population they are highest in Île-de-France and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Across France, 65.1% of the businesses created in 2025 were micro-entrepreneur registrations.

Definitions and limits

  • Establishment (local unit): according to INSEE, a geographically separate production unit that is legally dependent on the legal unit (a plant, a shop, one hotel of a chain …). A business can have several. Eurostat’s figures cover industry, construction and market services (sections B to S excluding O and S94), not agriculture.
  • Business creation: under INSEE’s definition, the start of a new combination of production factors with no other business involved; micro-entrepreneur registrations are included.
  • Failure (défaillance): according to INSEE, a legal unit is in failure as soon as receivership proceedings (redressement judiciaire) are opened against it; it is counted at the date of the judgment. A failure is not a closure: according to INSEE, liquidations following a failure account for only about 20% of business closures.
  • The regions are those in force since 2016 (13 metropolitan and 5 overseas regions). Eurostat’s regional data correspond to France’s NUTS regions.

How to cite

The figures come from Eurostat and INSEE; you may reuse them with attribution. Suggestion:

firmdata.fr: Businesses by region: local units, creations and failures. Based on Eurostat, sbs_r_nuts2021 and demo_r_d2jan; INSEE, business creations and failures. Retrieved on 4 November 2026. https://firmdata.fr/en/donnees/entreprises-par-region/

Company data for one region?

We assign each record to its region via the postcode. Name the region or departments and the fields you need: the quote states the number of records available.

Request a quote · Our records by region · Creations and failures · Businesses in the EU