Best Cities to Start a Business in Nebraska

Nebraska offers an excellent, often overlooked environment for starting a new business. The state boasts one of the highest opportunity shares of new entrepreneurs in the United States and a 2.8 unemployment rate, the fifth lowest in the nation.

The state economy is diverse, with significant agricultural, manufacturing, finance, and information technology sectors. Schools like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Creighton University in Omaha provide the economy with a young, well-educated pool of graduates.

Not surprisingly, Lincoln and Omaha are also the best cities to start businesses in the state. Each is home to quirky startup scenes that develop products with Nebraska’s agricultural industry in mind, like Vishal Singh’s Quantified Ag, which develops a device that is tagged to a cow that monitors the health of an animal and can send alerts in the case of any early indicators of illness.

Lincoln’s Liberty is another promising startup. A car service app specifically tailored to the needs of rural Americans, it is another example of how Nebraskan tech startups are addressing the particular demands of their state with their innovations.

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.