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Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Yes.

Wisconsin was among the bottom 10 states in job and business creation in some 2025 rankings, but higher in others.

For starting a business, National Business Capital, a financier, ranked Wisconsin 42nd, citing high taxes and low available funding. Small-business publication Simplify LLC, whose analysis included new business and job creation rates, ranked Wisconsin 43rd. Wisconsin was ranked 35th by WalletHub and 34th by U.S. News & World Report.

More generally, CNBC ranked Wisconsin 21st for business. Wisconsin scored higher in infrastructure and cost of doing business, lower in quality of life and legal and regulatory burdens. Wisconsin also ranked 21st in a poll of CEOs and business owners on best states for business.

Critics say rankings have limited value or are misleading.

From January 2018 to January 2025, Wisconsin added 63,300 jobs, ranking 40th in job creation, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

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Tom Kertscher joined Wisconsin Watch as a full-time reporter in October 2024. He started as a fact checker in January 2023 and contributes to our collaboration with the The Gigafact Project to fight misinformation online. Kertscher is a former longtime newspaper reporter, including at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He is a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and sports freelancer for The Associated Press.