In brief
Every Data page on this site is a tally of records the City of Long Beach publishes as open data: the business license layer on MapsLB, the Go Long Beach service-request dataset on the city’s open data portal, and the housing dashboard data behind the city’s Housing Element annual progress reports. The city computes nothing for us and endorses nothing here; the sums, groupings and exclusions are this site’s, and this page spells them out.
- Three sources: the Business Licenses Public View layer (179,455 records on October 1, 2026, refreshed nightly by the city), the Go Long Beach Service Requests dataset (refreshed daily) and the Housing Dashboard Data 2019-2025 layer1235.
- Both portals license the data for reuse: MapsLB grants “a license to copy, publish, distribute and/or transmit the Data” for “commercial and/or personal use”, and the 311 dataset carries a CC BY license42.
- “New business licenses” means license records with a location inside the city, counted by the month of the license start date, all statuses, with the current month left out1.
- Category groups such as “Food and drink” are this site’s grouping of the city’s license descriptions, listed below; home-based businesses appear only as totals1.
- Each page carries a provenance box with the source, the fetch date, the period and the method; the pages refresh on a set schedule and the two most recent months change when they do.
The city’s open data is good and under-used. Long Beach publishes its business license register, every 311 request since September 2020 and the project-level housing data it reports to the state, all as machine-readable layers with open terms123. What it does not publish is a readable answer to the questions people ask: how many businesses the city has, what opens and closes, how long a pothole report takes, how much housing gets permitted. The Data desk turns those layers into tables and charts, and this page is the method behind every one of them. Read it once and the provenance box at the top of each Data page will make sense.
The short answer
| If you are… | Read this |
|---|---|
| Quoting a number from a Data page | The provenance box on that page gives the source, the fetch date and the period; cite those with the number |
| Comparing a count here with a city press release | The city counts differently in different places; the definitions below say exactly what each table counts1 |
| Looking for a business by name or address | This site publishes aggregates only; the city’s own layer is searchable on MapsLB1 |
| Checking whether a month’s figure is final | The current month is never shown and the two months before it are provisional; see the refresh section |
| Reusing a table | The data is the city’s, under the terms quoted below; the grouping and the sums are this site’s and may be reused with a link42 |
The three sources and their terms
Business licenses. The Business Licenses Public View is a hosted feature layer on MapsLB, the city’s ArcGIS hub, described by the city as updated nightly by a script from its licensing system1. On October 1, 2026 it held 179,455 records. Each record is one license account with its description, status, start date, milestone and milestone date, home-based flag, ZIP, council district and a flag for whether the licensee is located outside the city15.
Service requests. Go Long Beach Service Requests is a dataset on data.longbeach.gov, the city’s OpenDataSoft portal, published by the City of Long Beach under a CC BY license, with one row per request: type, status, dates created and closed, council district, ZIP and the days to close2. The portal’s catalog lists its first record in September 20202.
Housing. Housing Dashboard Data 2019-2025 is a feature layer on MapsLB holding the project rows behind the city’s Housing Element annual progress reports: report year, stage, unit category, tenure, total units and units by income level3.
Terms. The MapsLB Terms of Use grant “a license to copy, publish, distribute and/or transmit the Data, to adapt the Data and to exploit the Data for commercial and/or personal use”, while stating that “No ownership interest in the Data is bestowed on you” and that the license “does not grant you any right to use the Data in any way that suggests City’s endorsement of your use”4. Each layer’s item page adds that the data “is for informational purposes, and may not have been prepared for or be suitable for legal, engineering, or surveying intents” and that the city “reserves the right to change, restrict or discontinue access at any time”5. The 311 dataset’s CC BY license requires attribution2. This site attributes every table to its source, claims no endorsement, and treats every figure as informational.
What the license tables count
Good to know The license layer is a register of accounts, not a census of storefronts. A landlord’s apartment house, a home-based consultant and a sidewalk cart each hold one license, and one company can hold several. The tables say “licenses”, not “businesses”, for that reason.
In the city. Every table of new licenses, closures and active licenses keeps only records whose location flag says the licensee is inside Long Beach1. The layer also carries thousands of out-of-town contractors and vendors who hold a Long Beach license to work here; those are shown separately on the how many businesses page and nowhere else.
New licenses. A “new license” is a record counted by the month or year of its start date, the field the layer labels “Start Date”1. It is the date the license took effect, not the date of the application, and the city can set it ahead: a few hundred records carry start dates in the future. The tables therefore leave out the current month entirely and treat the two previous months as provisional.
All statuses. New-license counts include every status the record has today: Active, Pending, Inactive, Expired and the rest. A license started in 2019 and closed in 2021 still counts as a 2019 start. Where a table splits a month by status, “Active” and “Pending” are the city’s status labels and “Other status” holds everything else1. Roughly four in ten records from the most recent months are still Pending, which is why the month table shows both columns.
Closures. The closures tables count records whose current milestone is “Closed”, by the month of the milestone date1. The milestone date is the date of the last status change the city recorded, so a closure is the date the city closed the account, which can be long after the business stopped trading; it also includes accounts closed for non-payment or because the holder moved. A closure is not a business failure, and the pages say so.
Active licenses. “Active” counts are records whose status is Active on the fetch date, inside the city unless the table says otherwise1.
The category groups
The city’s license descriptions run to several hundred labels, from “Restaurant & Ready to Eat Foods” to “Horse Stable/Riding Academy”1. To make tables readable, this site assigns each description to one of thirteen groups by keywords matched against the description, in a fixed order, first match wins. The groups and the kind of description each holds:
| Group | What the city’s descriptions in it look like |
|---|---|
| Cannabis | Any description containing cannabis, marijuana or dispensary, medical or adult-use, including distribution, manufacturing and cultivation |
| Sidewalk vending | The city’s sidewalk vending descriptions, food and merchandise |
| Personal care | Barber and beauty shops and booths, nails, tattoos and piercing, massage, aestheticians, tanning |
| Arts, fitness and recreation | Instructors and personal trainers, fitness centers, artist studios, home crafts, dance and martial arts studios, recreation |
| Health and medical | Medical offices and clinics, physicians, dental, psychology and psychiatry, physical therapy, acupuncture, pharmacies, residential care |
| Food and drink | Restaurants with and without alcohol, catering, food retail stores, cottage food, mobile food vending, bars, home kitchens |
| Property rental | Apartment houses, commercial and industrial space rental, hotels and motels, hall rental, self storage, miscellaneous rentals |
| Construction and trades | Contracting and contractors, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, painting, roofing, machine shops and welding |
| Professional and office | Business offices, consulting, professional services, attorneys, real estate, property management, marketing, design, photography, financial services |
| Retail | Retail sales, internet sales, used merchandise, auto and boat sales, flower shops, gas stations, vending machines |
| Manufacturing and wholesale | Manufacturing, wholesale, warehousing, import and export, distribution, freight, recycling, food processing |
| Other services | General services, janitorial, mobile services, auto repair, parking lots, laundromats, pet services, day care, cell sites |
| Other | Everything no keyword catches: soliciting, fortune telling, arcades, museums and a few dozen others; under one percent of records |
Two choices in that list matter when reading the tables. “Property rental” is large because every apartment house in the city holds a license, so it says more about buildings than about shops. “Cannabis” includes the licenses for distribution, manufacturing and cultivation as well as dispensaries, and a single operator can hold several. The grouping is published in full in the site’s configuration file and can be changed; when it changes, every table is rebuilt and the methodology page notes it.
Home-based businesses and names
The layer carries the owner’s name and the address for every license, including home-based ones1. This site does not use either. Home-based licenses appear only as totals in the “home-based” column of a table, never by ZIP block, name or street. Non-home-based businesses are never named on a Data page either; a future page listing recent openings would use the business name the licensee registered and the street block, and nothing else.
What the 311 tables count
Year. Every 311 table counts requests by the year the request was created2. The dataset starts in late September 2020, so 2020 is a partial year, and the current year is partial until it ends.
Status. Counts by type, district and ZIP include every status: Closed, Closed Referred, In Progress, Cancelled, Duplicate and New2. A “Closed Referred” request was passed to another department or agency and closed in the 311 system.
Days to close. The days-to-close tables use the dataset’s own days-to-close field and show the median over requests with status Closed or Closed Referred, grouped by type and the year the request was created; open, cancelled and duplicate requests are not in the median2. The portal computes the medians from the city’s rows; this site does not recompute them. Some series move in ways that look like a change in how the city records a request rather than in how fast it works, which the page notes where it happens rather than smoothing over.
District and ZIP. The council district and ZIP are the ones the city attached to the request; requests without one are shown as “Not recorded”2. Per-resident rates are not shown because the site has no sourced population by council district; counts are raw.
What the housing tables count
The housing layer holds one row per project per stage per report year, with the stage names Planning Application, Entitled, Building Application, Permitted and Built3. A table of units by stage sums the units of every row in that stage for that report year. The same project can appear in several stages across years, and in more than one stage in one year, so stages are never added together. “Permitted” is the stage most people mean by housing production and is the one the chart shows; “Built” is units the reports record as completed. Units by income level come from the layer’s very low, low, moderate and above moderate fields, and “All units” is the layer’s total-units field, which can differ slightly from the sum of the four3.
What the pages do not do
- They do not list businesses, people or addresses.
- They do not estimate what the city does not record: no revenue, no employment, no “businesses” as distinct from licenses.
- They do not adjust the city’s numbers. If a month looks wrong, the table shows it and the text says so.
- They do not forecast.
Refresh schedule and provisional months
| Pages | Refreshed | Why that often |
|---|---|---|
| New licenses, closures, how many businesses | Monthly, in the first week | The city’s layer updates nightly; the previous two months fill in as pending records resolve1 |
| 311 pages | Quarterly | The dataset updates daily, but medians move slowly2 |
| Housing | Yearly, when the city posts the next report year | The layer follows the annual progress reports3 |
On every refresh the whole table is rebuilt from the current layer, not appended, so earlier months can change. The provenance box gives the fetch date; a figure quoted from this site should carry that date.
How to read the provenance box
Each Data page opens its tables with a box naming the source and its page on the city’s portal, the date the data was fetched, the period the table covers and the method in one sentence, followed by the sentence that the figures are this site’s own tallies used under the city’s terms and that the city does not endorse the site. The derived tables are also kept as files in the site’s public repository, which is how a reader can check a number against the record.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does the Long Beach business license data come from?
From the Business Licenses Public View layer on MapsLB, the city’s ArcGIS open data hub, which the city describes as updated nightly from its licensing system1.
Is the City of Long Beach's open data free to reuse?
Why do the new-license numbers here differ from the city's?
Because of definitions: this site counts in-city records by start date, all statuses, and leaves out the current month. A city figure may count applications, issued licenses only, or all records including out-of-town licensees1.
Does a "closed" license mean the business failed?
No. It means the city closed the license account on that date, which also happens when a holder moves, stops paying or changes entity1.
How many of the city's license records are active?
On October 1, 2026, 29,748 records had Active status, of which 24,024 were located inside the city1.
How is "days to close" for a 311 request calculated?
It is the dataset’s own days-to-close field, summarised as a median over requests with status Closed or Closed Referred, by type and year created2.
What does "Permitted" mean in the housing tables?
It is the stage name in the city’s Housing Element annual progress report data; the table sums the units of every project row recorded in that stage for the report year3.
Related Articles
Sources
- Business Licenses Public View — City of Long Beach, MapsLB. Accessed 2026-10-02.
- Go Long Beach Service Requests — City of Long Beach open data portal. Accessed 2026-10-02.
- Housing Dashboard Data 2019-2025 — City of Long Beach, MapsLB. Accessed 2026-10-02.
- Terms of Use — City of Long Beach, MapsLB. Accessed 2026-09-30.
- Business Licenses Public View, item details (REST) — City of Long Beach, MapsLB. Accessed 2026-10-02.