The 21 big US cities where it pays most to be an entrepreneur

• If you want to start your own business, you may want to move to one of these cities.
• ZenBusiness compared income for entrepreneurs to earnings for other full-time employees by metro area to rank the cities where entrepreneurs are most successful.
• San Diego, Chicago, and San Antonio were among the cities on the list.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you are looking to start a new business endeavor, you may want to start your own company in one of these major cities.

ZenBusiness, a service that helps entrepreneurs grow their own businesses, created a ranking of the most successful metros for entrepreneurs based on the income premium for self-employed workers in 2018.

The income premium is the percent difference between the median income of entrepreneurs, who were defined as self-employed in the study, and all full-time employees using the Census Bureau's American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample.

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For example, the 2018 income premium for entrepreneurs in Las Vegas was 19.0%. That is, a typical entrepreneur in that city earns about $8,000 more than the median income of $42,000 of all full-time employees in Las Vegas.

The median salary for entrepreneurs in the 53 large metros on ZenBusiness' list is about $53,000, roughly the same as the overall US median annual income in 2018 of about $52,000.

The highest income earned by entrepreneurs is in San Jose, California, where people who own their own business make a median income of $70,000.

Entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City, Utah, make the most compared to all other full-time employees in the city, making it a potentially desirable metro area for aspiring business owners. A typical entrepreneur in Salt Lake City earns about $60,000, while a typical full-time employee earns $48,200, a difference of 24.5%.

The following are the 21 US cities with a population size of over 1,000,000 residents where entrepreneurs are most successful, along with their income premium, median 2018 income, and share of entrepreneurs - the percentage of workers that identify as self-employed.