Bad Bunny’s Residency: San Juan Sees a 13% Jump in Small Business Employment

When Bad Bunny announced his 2025 San Juan residency, the city braced for a cultural moment. What followed was more than music. It was an economic surge that rippled through restaurants, shops, and venues. Homebase data shows how San Juan’s small businesses started moving when the residency was announced, built momentum into July, and peaked during thirty unforgettable nights.

The first signs: Staffing up after the announcement

Bad Bunny’s impact began long before the residency started. Within weeks of the January announcement, small businesses jumped into action.

• Hours worked rose ~17% compared to pre-announcement weeks, and peaked at +23% during the shows.
• Staffing followed at ~14% , with the number of employees on the clock later hitting +23%.
• More business started opening up closer to the shows, climbing by ~8% at peak.

The line charts tell the same story: the “this year” curves (solid purple) started to edge above last year’s dotted baselines in February — a sign of businesses preparing for demand months before the concerts.

While 2024 levelled off, the 2025 curve bent upward in the weeks leading into July, then surged during the shows themselves.

Digging deeper: Isolating Bad Bunny’s impact on local businesses

Year-over-year comparisons are good, but they still reflect seasonal shifts. To really understand the residency’s impact, we use a method called Difference-in-Differences (DiD):

• We compare San Juan’s business activity in 2025 (the “treatment group”) to the same weeks in 2024 (the “control group”).
• We mark periods as before the announcement, after the announcement, and during the concerts.
• Then we ask: did 2025 grow faster than 2024 during those windows?

In code, it looks like this: we regress the business outcome (hours worked, employees, etc.) on whether it’s this year or last, whether it’s before or after the event, and the interaction of the two. That interaction — treat × post — is the residency effect.

Here’s what we found:

• During the shows: the lift increased further, with hours up to ~10%, employees up to ~13%, and locations up to ~3%.

So while the raw spike was north of 20%, the residency’s true, causal effect was closer to 10–13%.

The takeaway

Bad Bunny’s residency wasn’t just a cultural moment. It was an economic engine. The data shows that San Juan didn’t just welcome fans, but it  mobilized its workforce and local businesses to meet the moment.

Shifts went up, staffing expanded, and more locations stayed open. While hours worked surged nearly 23% in raw comparisons, deeper analysis shows   that even after accounting for seasonal growth, the city saw a 13% net lift in small business employment and 10% lift in local business activity.

That means the concerts didn’t just create buzz – they created jobs, paychecks, and opportunities across the city. Restaurants filled, hotels thrived, and everyday workers benefited from longer schedules and new shifts. In other words: the music reverberated well beyond the stadium, echoing through San Juan’s economy.

Methodology

This analysis is based on small businesses operating on Homebase in San Juan, Puerto Rico, looking at hours worked, businesses open, and employees working on Homebase. 

Homebase looks monthly at more than 100,000 businesses and 2 million hourly employees active in the US on our platform in August 2025. We are one of the largest and most trusted sources of real-time, quality data on employment growth across the small business landscape. Find our monthly reports at joinhomebase.com/data