Real-time data on COVID-19 impacts

The state of hourly work at US small businesses

The spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) is having a devastating impact on small businesses and hourly workers. At Homebase, we are in a unique position to see this happen in real-time. In the interest of transparency, we’re sharing our data publicly here, so that governments and communities can understand and support the people who are most impacted. We’ve also created guides and resources to help small businesses navigate the crisis.

The data on this site runs through 2021. If you are interested in access to real-time data feeds, please reach out to us at data@joinhomebase.com.

Coronavirus Stats: Impact on Local Small Business

Homebase is a free scheduling and time tracking tool used by 100,000+ local businesses and their hourly employees.

Homebase’s customers in the US primarily consist of restaurant, food & beverage, retail and services and are largely individually owned/operator-managed businesses.

Our data shines a light on the impact COVID-19 has had on Main Street businesses through three key measures:

1) the volume of hours worked by employees
2) the number of businesses open at all
3) the number of employees working


This data runs through 2021. If you’re interested in real-time data email us at data@joinhomebase.com.

This coronavirus dataset is based on Homebase data for over 60,000 businesses and 1 million hourly employees active in the US in January 2020. All the rates compare that day vs. the median for that day of the week for the period Jan 4, 2020 – Jan 31, 2020.

  • Hours worked is calculated from the hours recorded in Homebase timecards.
  • Locations open is based on whether or not a business had at least one employee clock-in.
  • Employees working is based on the distinct number of hourly workers with at least one clock-in.

Note that the cyclical dips represent the weekends—one interesting insight from the data is that businesses are more likely to be closed on the weekends, relative to weekdays, in comparison to the January benchmark.

Dig into the data

Use the tools in the “Overall” section to compare coronavirus impacts across city, state, industry, and key metrics. The city and state pages track impact for each location by industry and key metric.