Best Cities to Start a Business in Illinois

Illinois and Chicago, its largest city, have built a reputation as top destinations for entrepreneurs to build a thriving businesses. As the 3rd largest city in the U.S., Chicago has all the benefits of a world-class city: wonderful neighborhoods, great dining and nightlife scenes, and a wide pool of young, well-educated potential employees to draw from, but without the exorbitant costs of living endemic to New York City and Los Angeles.

Chicagoans are proud of their city, and those who establish themselves there usually refuse to budge. Grubhub and Groupon–two hugely successful pioneers in online food ordering and e-commerce, respectively–began in Chicago and are still based there.

With an established pedigree of successful tech companies and the choice of renting an apartment larger than the size of a closet that won’t break your bank account, why go anywhere else to start your business?

For those looking for an even cheaper cost of living and lower tax rates, smaller cities in the vicinity of Chicago, like Joliet and Naperville, offer big-city access via rail but with a lower financial burden on nascent companies.

Only cities with over 50,000 inhabitants are reported in the results. Some data had to be interpolated to the county level and extrapolated to all the cities in the county. We concentrated on the following metrics to obtain our ranking: Cost of living, Best state for business, Unemployment, Kauffman index, and Universities.