San Francisco Business Openings and Closings: September 2026

Thirteen Months of Starts and Ends

Two things in the chart are about the register, not the economy. 708 of the January 2026 starts carry a start date of exactly 1 January, so January always looks like a boom. And end dates cluster on 31 December and on 30 June, the last day of the city’s registration year; the 30 June batch is mostly administrative closures, which the chart leaves out.

Revisions. When we first published August 2026 (register as of 17 September 2026) it showed 738 starts and 238 ends. As of 10 October 2026 it shows 784 (+46, +6%) starts and 261 (+23, +10%) ends. Across the 11 months before it, late filings since then added 125 starts and 119 ends.

The honest comparison for September 2026 is not the month before but the same month a year earlier, with one caveat pointing the other way: September 2025 has had a full year for late filings to arrive (810 starts and 425 ends as of today), and September 2026 has had a few weeks. We will re-run this month in next month’s report and say how much it moved.

By Type of Business

The industry code is whatever the business chose when it registered, and 21% of this month’s ended records carry none, so treat the smaller rows as indicative. Every business operating in the city has to register, not only storefronts, which is why professional services is the largest group.

By Neighborhood

New Restaurants, Cafés and Bars Registered in September 2026

27 locations with a restaurant or bar industry code, listed by the business name they registered and their neighborhood. A registration means the business told the city it began trading there on that date; some are new owners of an existing place, a few will be kitchens inside other businesses, and some open to the public later than the date shown.

Restaurants, Cafés and Bars Whose Registration Ended

7 locations. An ended registration is the strongest public signal that a place has stopped trading at that address, but it is not proof of a closure: 3 of these look like a handover to a new operator at the same address, and 1 like a move, where the same name registered somewhere else. We label those so they are not read as closures. We add a place to the closure tracker only after a second source confirms it.

How This Is Counted

• Source. The San Francisco Treasurer & Tax Collector’s register of business locations, published on DataSF as Registered Business Locations – San Francisco (dataset g8m3-pdis). Downloaded 10 October 2026. Only locations with a San Francisco city address are counted.
• Started / ended. A location counts in the month of its location start date or location end date. One business can have several locations; each counts once.
• Left out. 0 records the city marks as administratively closed this month (the city closing a stale registration, not a business reporting that it stopped) and 12 records that opened and closed within seven days, which are almost always corrections or duplicates.
• Named lists. Restaurant and bar industry codes only (NAICS 7224 and 7225), with no street addresses. Registrations at residential addresses, and registrations filed under what looks like a person’s own name, are left out entirely, so no one’s home or name appears here. Owners are never named. Handover means another food or drink business registered at the same address within 60 days; moved means the same name registered at a different address within 90 days.
• Revisions. Businesses file late, sometimes by months. We keep a snapshot of every month as first published and say in the next report how much it changed.

Use This Data

Download every table on this page as a CSV, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Suggested citation:

Project SF analysis of SF Treasurer registered business locations (DataSF g8m3-pdis), data as of 10 October 2026. https://projectsf.com/closures/openings-closings-september-2026/

Spotted a place in these lists that we have wrong? Tell us. Corrections are dated and made in public. The closure tracker is where confirmed closures, moves and renamings go.