A business slump hit Cherokee County in 2025 sending overall growth down 17.3 percent for 2025 over a year earlier, with local business filings at the North Carolina Secretary of State dropping to 248 for the year from 300 filings in 2024.
But for those of you who read that as bad news, take heart: During the past decade, business activity in the county marched almost steadily upward to show a 105 percent increase in 2025 over 2016 — even with the 17-plus percent drop in 2025.
There’s also the reality that the state data leaves out plenty. Small business startups known as Sole Proprietorships — probably the most common type of business around — are not required to be licensed in Cherokee, and thus aren’t tracked by the county or state.
The state data deals with corporations — Limited Liability concerns along with professional corporations, nonprofit corporations and others. That measure of business recorded a 17.3 percent drop from 2024 to 2025.
In those categories, Cherokee County recorded 121 new and existing business filings at the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office 10 years ago, in 2016. But last year, in 2025, it had 248 — a hike of more than 104 percent.
The county saw business reversals in only two years during the decade: In 2018, business filings dropped to 141 from 145 in 2017. And in the pandemic year of 2020, the county recorded a modest drop to 162 filings from 164 in 2019. Otherwise, it was a climb upward.
The peak year for Cherokee was 2024 with its 300 filings at the state office, a 15.4 percent hike from the 260 filings the year before, making the 2025 plunge even more notable.
Neighboring Clay County had 137 new business fillings in 2025, compared with 138 in 2024. It had 122 in 2023 and 98 in 2022.
While the overall numbers were smaller than Cherokee — as is to be expected in a significantly less populated county, its overall decade improvement in business filings far outpaced those of Cherokee.
Clay County saw a 191.5 percent hike in new business filings over the past decade, from 47 it recorded in 2016 to the 137 filed with the Secretary of State in 2025.
Cherokee’s population stands at 30,373, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — 86 percent more people than live in Clay County. Clay, meanwhile, had just 12,042 people in the same 2024 Census snapshot.
The overwhelming majority of the licenses tracked by the state are for Limited Liability Corporations, a legal creation that affords some advantages to smaller concerns such as protecting personal assets from business liabilities, and for providing some tax advantages that may not be available to Sole Proprietorships.
Cherokee’s somewhat sluggish corporate activity was reflected across the nation, where the U.S Census Bureau is projecting a nationwide decline of more than 3 percent in new business formations for 2025 when the final numbers are in in the weeks ahead.
Meanwhile, home sales, one of the big-ticket items driving the overall U.S. economy, remained at a 30-year low across the country, with the National Association of Realtors reporting a slight decline in home sales in 2025 compared with the year before.
Auto purchases remained something of a bright spot for the nation, but they also turned downward in December 2025 and are projected to remain slow through 2026.
In Cherokee County, meanwhile, a somewhat inexplicable anomalie that stood out in the 2025 Secretary of State filings was the huge surge in Articles of Dissolution recorded for the county that year.
A dissolution is a formal notice to the Secretary of State that a business is ceasing operations for one reason or another. The Secretary of State itself can force an “administrative dissolution” when a business fails to meet requirements such as filing annual reports, but most are voluntary on the part of the business.
There were 593 dissolutions in Cherokee County for 2025, up from just 116 in 2024 — a whopping 411.2 percent hike. There were 341 dissolutions for the county in 2023.
Overwhelmingly the dissolutions were reversed — seemingly because of caught-up paperwork lapses — leaving only a small fraction of the 593 businesses that actually had shut their doors. But no one we spoke with seemed to have a good answer to account for the surprising surge in dissolutions for the county.
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