GREAT FALLS — Great Falls experienced significant business expansion in 2025, with more than 50 new businesses opening and over a dozen existing businesses expanding throughout the region, according to local development officials.
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The Great Falls Development Alliance worked closely with entrepeneurs on business startups and expansions throughout the year.
"We had over 50 businesses start in our region over the last year, and we had over a dozen expansions," said Jolene Schalper, executive vice president of the Great Falls Development Alliance. "A lot of our team's time is just spent working through that starting whether it's a business plan or permitting or those expansions, making sure that our entrepreneurs get talked to the right people. It's been a great year."
Director of Planning and Community Development Brock Cherry noted the private sector invested a significant amount of money into the community this year.
"The total amount of permit valuation, which is the value of overall projects of permits that have been issued up to today, is $180 million, which is a significant investment in our community," Cherry said. "I think we're seeing a significant portion of that, which is commercial development."
However, single-family home development has been limited in recent years.
"Where I get nervous is when it comes to our single family home development. We only issued 38 single family, home permits this last year. Which isn't the greatest thing because we need a lot more single family homes. So out of that 180 million, that's only like 10% of the overall development that we're seeing," said Cherry.
Growth advocates expect to see that change in 2026, with developers working to advance their projects and create more housing units in the coming year.
"We need to see more units going vertical. We do expect to see that in 2026," Schalper said. "We're working hard behind the scenes with the city and county and with the developers, of course, to make sure that they can get their projects vertical, because we need more housing to support our quality of life."
The Great Falls Development Alliance is also working to bring new businesses to the area, expanding community access to high-paying jobs.
"We're working behind the scenes with a couple of different companies that are in different sectors, that are eyeballing Great Falls for growth, which we're really excited about," Schalper said. "Could lead to some additional very high wage, industry specific jobs with great benefits and increasing our tax base across our community."
Leaders say they hope to build on current success and development momentum while addressing housing needs in the coming year.
"I'm really hoping that we see a lot of the same that we experienced this year. This year was a very high level of commercial projects," Cherry said. "We also have some more housing projects that are being discussed that we hope to see come to fruition. But the thing that I hope to see the most is more single family home construction."
