Bar Rescue, by the numbers

The survival curve

The share of rescued bars still trading, by years since the episode aired. Bars still open are counted up to today and then censored — they widen the curve’s evidence without pretending we know their final lifespan. On this basis, 76% of bars survive their first year, 68% reach two years, 51% reach five and 39% reach ten.

23 bars had already closed before their episode aired; they enter the curve as failures at the outset, since the rescue never had a chance to take hold. 11 closed bars have no recorded closing date and are likewise excluded from lifespan figures rather than estimated.

How long rescued bars last

Distribution of final lifespans for the 117 bars that closed after airing with a recorded date:

The long tail is real but thin: 7 bars lasted more than eight years before closing, and the longest, Second Base Bar and Grill, survived 12.3 years.

Beating the odds

108 of the 133 bars still open have already outlived the 1.75-year median lifespan; 73 have passed five years and 39 have passed ten. The fifteen longest-running rescues:

Closure by season

Raw closure rates flatter recent seasons — their bars have had less time to fail. The fair comparison is the share closed within three years of airing, shown only for seasons whose three-year window has fully elapsed:

Closure by region and state

States with at least eight rescues:

Regional closure shares are raw proportions over very different time spans — the show visited the Northeast mostly in its early seasons — so treat them as descriptive, not as league tables.

The sold effect

Bars that changed hands after their rescue closed at far higher rates than bars that stayed with the owners Taffer coached:

A bar has to survive long enough to be sold at all, which makes the gap more striking rather than less — though a sale is often itself a distress signal, so this is an association, not a verdict on selling.

What the ratings say

Current Yelp ratings exist for 140 bars. Bars still open average 3.69 stars; bars that closed average 3.09. The pattern holds across the range:

A closed bar’s rating is frozen at closure while an open bar’s keeps moving, so this shows association, not prediction — but there is no rating band in which closed bars outnumber open ones by much, and the top band is overwhelmingly still trading.

The neighbourhood effect: census demographics

Each bar’s location was matched to its census tract, and the tract’s demographics taken from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2024 5-year estimates). 212 of the 284 bars could be matched. The income pattern is subtler than the usual assumption: closure rates are nearly flat across the income quartiles, but bars in richer tracts take measurably longer to close — the median lifespan rises from 2.5 years in the poorest quartile of tracts to 4.0 years in the richest:

Density, by contrast, tracks closure itself: the denser the tract, the more likely the bar is gone:

Amber rings are bars still open (years survived so far); filled dots are closed bars (final lifespan). A census tract is not a bar’s trade area, and the survey describes the neighbourhood as it is now, not as it was when each bar closed — so read these as associations across 212 bars, not as causes.

Methodology

Statuses, sales and closing dates are compiled from Reality TV Revisited and Reality TV Updates, cross-checked against each bar’s own web presence and local reporting (see the sources line on each bar page); figures here were computed in October 2026. Lifespan is measured from the episode’s air date to the recorded closing month. The survival curve is a Kaplan–Meier estimate over the 117 dated post-air closures and the 133 open bars censored at their current tenure. Ratings are Yelp figures as of October 2026. Neighbourhood demographics are ACS 2024 5-year estimates for each bar’s census tract.