How many restaurants open in the US every month?
About 6,000 new restaurants open in the US every month. That is roughly 72,000 a year.
You will see bigger numbers floating around. Some vendors claim 150,000 openings a year. That figure does not survive contact with government data.
Where the number comes from
The most reliable anchor is the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics, which tracks establishment births by industry. Food services establishment births have held in a consistent band for years. Cross-checking against state liquor license filings, health department permits, and our own daily new-opening feed lands in the same range.
| Source | What it measures | What it implies annually |
|---|---|---|
| Census BDS | Establishment births, food services | ~72,000 |
| State license filings | New permits and licenses | Consistent with BDS |
| Ora new-opening feed | Openings we detect daily | ~6,000 per month |
Why this matters if you sell to restaurants
A new opening is the single best moment to sell to a restaurant. The operator is choosing a POS, a payments provider, a delivery platform, suppliers, and a reservation system, all in the same 90-day window. Six months later, those decisions are locked in and switching costs protect the incumbent.
At 6,000 openings a month, the question is not whether there are enough new restaurants to build a pipeline on. It is whether you find them before your competitor does.
The catch
Openings are not evenly distributed. Texas, Florida, and California account for an outsized share. And the data trail a new restaurant leaves (a license filing, a health permit, a Google listing, an Instagram account) appears weeks before the doors open. That gap between first signal and first day of service is the window that matters.
We publish more numbers like this from the Ora dataset. If you want the new-opening feed itself, the API docs show how to pull it.