Sole Proprietorships on the Rise

According to the Summer 2009 Statistics of Income Bulletin, there were about 23.1 million individual income tax returns that reported nonfarm sole proprietorship activity for 2007. This represents a 4.7% increase over the prior year.

Activities with the largest profits were professional, scientific, and technology services. However, while profits for all Schedule C filers totaled $280.6 billion in 2007, this represented a slight decline (1.8%) compared with 2006.

Source: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09sumbul.pdf