Tennessee drops two spots in latest WalletHub rankings
The personal financial website ranked states on best places to start a business.
Not quite two weeks after a new report by Swoop Funding found Tennessee the 10th best state for starting a business, WalletHub, the personal financial website, more or less confirmed that opinion. It ranked the Volunteer State at #12, a drop of two spots from Tennessee’s ranking of #10 in 2024.
In last year’s report from WalletHub, three neighboring states outperformed Tennessee – Georgia (#2), Florida (#3), and North Carolina (#9). For 2025, Florida held the top spot, followed by Georgia (#2), Kentucky (#10), and Arkansas (#11). Four of the five next spots were held by Southeastern or Mid-Atlantic states: South Carolina (#13), Mississippi (#14), North Carolina (#15), and Alabama (#17). Rounding out the top 20 was Louisiana at #20.
In order to determine the best and worst states to start a business, WalletHub compared the 50 states across three key dimensions: (1) Business Environment, (2) Access to Resources, and (3) Business Costs. The analysts evaluated those dimensions using 25 relevant metrics, with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for new-business creation. Finally, WalletHub determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order the sample.
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