Most founders know that starting a business is expensive before they actually start.
They budget for the obvious things: premises, equipment, staff, software, marketing. If they’re really being sensible there’s a bit of cash left in reserve for when things go wrong.
The problem is that some of the most expensive things are the ones they don’t know to budget for.
A new survey from Bluevine, a US small-business banking platform, has put some numbers around the unknown. It surveyed 776 small-business owners across the States and found that 95% had estimated their startup costs before launching. Yet 51% said they subsequently encountered entire categories of expenses they hadn’t budgeted for.
More than half said they came across costs they didn’t even know existed before they started. Nearly a third said they encountered several expenses they’d never heard of.
The surprises weren’t necessarily the things you’d expect from a Silicon Valley startup story either.
The biggest was equipment and physical space, cited by 37% of founders. Business insurance caught out 35%, while licensing, permits and compliance came in at 34%. For construction and trade businesses, the last figure rose to 46%.
Software was cited by 28%, marketing by 27% and payroll management by 22%.
There appears to be a pattern. Founders tend to be pretty good at budgeting for things they have actively decided to buy. They’re not so good at budgeting for the costs of simply running the business.
You can research the costs involved with building your website. You can get multiple quotes for office space. You can work out marketing costs. It is harder to budget for the licence you didn’t know you needed, those insurance requirements you hadn’t considered, or the piece of equipment that turns out to cost twice as much as expected.
When those costs arrive it is the founder who often absorbs the shocks.
Bluevine found that 65% of small-business owners cut or even eliminated their own pay during their first year. 37% went without a salary for a period, while another 28% paid themselves significantly less than they had expected.
Personal savings were the most common source of additional funding. 63% of founders said they dipped into them, while 31% used personal credit cards and 19% took out personal loans.
Only 8% said the business generated enough immediate revenue to cover its startup costs without personal funds or outside capital.
These numbers highlight the realities of starting a small business. The business might carry the risk, but it’s the founder who carries the personal responsibility, especially in the early days.
The report also highlights the gap between expectations and reality. Nearly six in ten founders expected their business to become profitable within its first year. But among those expecting to reach profitability within six to 12 months, only 56% actually did so within that timeframe.
Once they’d experienced the reality of starting a business, 79% said they would save more money before launching if they could do it again.
Bluevine also looked at its own customer data, covering more than 200,000 active accounts, and found that the average starting balance for new business accounts through May 2026 was more than 15% lower than during the same period a year earlier.
That figure doesn’t tell us that American businesses in general are starting with 15% less cash – it’s Bluevine’s own customer data, so it shouldn’t be treated as a measure of the whole market.
As a backdrop to the whole survey, though, it highlights that founders may be starting with less of a financial cushion at precisely the point when unexpected costs can do the most damage.
The lesson isn’t simply to save more money before starting a business, although that is probably good advice. It’s to expect the unexpected.
The costs that appear on the business plan are rarely the ones that cause the biggest panic. It’s the invoice that arrives for something you didn’t know existed.
