Does state of incorporation matter? · the national picture

Where America is incorporated

Every U.S. public-market issuer, placed in its state of incorporation (not its headquarters). Drag the size filter and watch the map re-sort itself — Delaware holds the large-cap core, Nevada is a micro-cap tail that empties as you raise the floor, and Texas is the firm we are tracking. Every number derives from a single embedded dataset snapshot.

Entity type
Minimum size all sizes
Map labels show the raw count or each state's share of the national total
87
Texas
579
Nevada
3,100
Delaware
5,634
all states

Reading the map

At full scale the country is Delaware — 3,100 incorporations, more than five times any other state. Push the size floor to $100M and Nevada collapses from 579 to 138: three-quarters of Nevada's companies are micro-caps. Texas is small by count (87) but concentrated in a few very large issuers. Maryland and Massachusetts rank high because they are the REIT and fund-charter venues — toggle to "Operating only" to strip those out.

Source-status note. S&P Capital IQ screening diagnostic — screen as of June 16, 2026not the Reincorporation Index source of record. State-of-incorporation values are current-screen fields that may include recent reincorporations. Basis = all entities with a stated U.S. state of incorporation (5,634 across the 50 states; Puerto Rico and Guam excluded). The Texas count here is a national tally by current legal domicile — distinct from the Reincorporation Index’s tracked-mover cohort, which counts firms changing their state of incorporation since June 2024; an announced move remains in its origin state until legally effective.
SMU Corporate Governance Initiative. Descriptive market-structure context, not legal or investment advice. All counts hydrate from a single embedded dataset — no hard-coded figures. Geography: us-atlas; projection d3 geoAlbersUsa.