Which Email Format Do Small Firms Use The Most? (2026)

From our internal dataset of eligible small firms with 20 or fewer employees across 25 states and Washington, DC, we randomly selected 30,000 law and accounting firms. We then measured decision maker coverage yield, limiting capture to no more than two direct work email addresses per firm. Coverage yield refers to the share of firms for which we captured two direct work emails for decision makers. It does not imply that the firm has only two decision makers.

TL;DR

• 48% of emails were first@domain

• 23% of firms had 2 decision makers captured

• Texas, New York, and Illinois have the highest counts of firms

Email Format Distribution

*Examples of other email addresses that showed up are: {f}{m}{l}@domain, {f}{l}@domain, and {last}{f}@domain.

Decision Makers Captured per Company

Law vs Accounting Comparison

Top States by Company Count

Results Analysis

In our random sample of 30,000 law and accounting firms, the most common email format is first@domain. In terms of coverage, 77% of firms have one captured decision maker and 23% have two. The law and accounting split is nearly the same, with both sitting at about 23% for two captured decision makers. Texas, New York, and Illinois contributed the highest number of firms in the sample, and across states the share of firms with two captured decision makers generally stayed in the 20% range.