Last month, John observed that “DExit” hasn’t been a stampede by any stretch, based on the (limited) number of reincorporation proposals and high percentage of Delaware-incorporated IPOs that occurred in 2024 and 2025.

A recently published dataset for entity formations, gathered by Professor Andrew Verstein at the UCLA School of Law, takes that one step further – Delaware experienced a “sharp increase” in incorporations in 2025, on an absolute basis as well as relative to other states. Here’s more detail from this HLS blog:

The Corporate Census is a draft paper and accompanying dataset that tracks entity formation in the United States. It presents a near-complete dataset of entity formations — including corporations, LLCs, and other business forms — for all U.S. states, dating back to the nation’s founding. It allows entity-by-entity, week-by-week, analyses and comparisons across states. The database includes about 100 million formations and allows for granular, longitudinal analysis of state popularity, entity-type trends, and legal or economic shocks.

And:

About 30% more Delaware corporations formed in 2025 than in 2024, greatly exceeding the prior trendline. This, while national incorporation levels remained flat.

This was an absolute increase, not driven by a decline in formation in other states. While Delaware averaged 1090 new corporations per week in 2020-24, that number increased by 309 in 2025. The rest of the nation as a whole enjoyed no statistically significant increase in corporate formation, nor did any other state individually. Plainly, something happened in 2024 or was anticipated for 2025 that rendered Delaware more attractive as a site of formation in 2025.

I was on the edge of my seat after reading that line, but the paper doesn’t arrive at any firm conclusion about what may have driven Delaware’s popularity last year, and we also can’t predict for sure whether the trend will continue. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to have numbers, instead of just “vibes,” about where Delaware stands.

– Liz Dunshee