Capital Mobility
Index
The Capital Mobility Index is governed by an independent methodology working group. Its methodology is public and applied uniformly.
What it measures
Who reaches capital, and who is left waiting.
The Index quantifies the distance between small businesses that are ready for capital and the capital that doesn't reach them, by geography, sector, and firm characteristics. It draws on public loan and lending data, small-business survey evidence, and locally sourced indicators, combined under a documented and reproducible methodology.
Approval rates, denial reasons, and time-to-decision across lender types.
The share of ready businesses served by regulated and community lenders in each market.
Cost of capital, loan size, and structure for comparable borrowers.
Gaps in reach and terms by geography, sector, and firm demographics.
Why it matters
A shared, comparable picture — updated every year.
Small-business capital access is measured today in fragments: by lender, by program, by anecdote. Communities and policymakers rarely have a comparable, standing benchmark for the market as a whole.
The Index publishes a shared frame: the same measures, applied the same way, in every city and state, every year, so gains and gaps can be seen and tracked over time. The underlying data is open for researchers, journalists, and civic leaders to interrogate.
Rankings & data
City & state rankings
Methodology
Fully public. Applied uniformly.
The Index's methodology is authored and governed by an independent working group of researchers and practitioners. It will be published in full — including data sources, weights, and replication code — and applied identically across all geographies. Revisions are versioned and public.
- —Public working paper on measurement and weights
- —Open replication code and datasets
- —Annual methodology review by the working group
- —Errata and versioning on the record
Be notified when the first edition publishes.
We'll send the Index, its methodology, and the underlying datasets when they're released.