In this article, we analyse stylized facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55 000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales growth regime switching to another regime in the next period, e.g. whether a firm that has witnessed a high growth rate is likely to stay in a regime of high growth or is bound to switch to a regime of low growth in the subsequent period. We find that these probabilities depend on the business cycle position.