The trade or business needs to meet the Section 162 standard and then be “past” the startup phase.

This longer blog post discusses these issues and might be helpful: https://evergreensmallbusiness.com/recovery-startup-business-employee-retention-credit-nine-awkward-questions/

Hi Susan,

So a tentative “yes”… If you began carrying on a trade or business after February 15, 2020, you qualify for the recovery startup business credits in Q3 and Q4 of 2021.

The one wrinkle here is, did you really start a new trade or business. Or did you move an existing trade or business. This shouldn’t be a hard question to answer. And you may be able to answer yourself. if you operated, say, a restaurant in CA and then opened a construction firm in NV, that surely works. But if you operated an IT consulting firm from CA and you closed that location and reopened same business basically in NV, say you even sell same services or products to the same customers or clients, that seems like it doesn’t work.

Hope that helps!