Reference
US small business lending, in figures
The headline numbers this site publishes, each stated as a complete sentence with its source and period, so they stay accurate when quoted.
How to cite these figures
Everything here is computed by us from the SBA's loan-level FOIA release. The underlying government data is a public work; our aggregations are free to quote and reuse with attribution to Business Lending Bureau and a link to the page you took them from.
- Source: SBA 7(a) loan-level FOIA data released 2026-06-30
- Period: fiscal years 2023 to 2026, using data released June 2026 for current figures; fiscal 2010-2019 approvals for charge-off rates, because recent loans have not had time to season.
- Scope: SBA 7(a) and 504 lending only. It does not cover conventional bank lending, online lenders or merchant cash advances, none of which publish loan-level data.
- Machine-readable: the aggregates are published as JSON at /data/national.json and the other files listed below.
Open datasets
These are the same numbers that drive every data page on this site, served with an open CORS header so anyone can read them directly.
| File | What it contains |
|---|---|
| national.json | Headline national figures and FY counts |
| by-sector.json | Aggregates for 20 NAICS sectors |
| by-state.json | Aggregates for all 50 states and DC |
| by-county.json | 392 counties with 100+ loans |
| by-industry.json | 67 six-digit NAICS industries |
| by-loan-size.json | Nine loan-size bands |
| lenders.json | 537 lenders with 25+ loans |
| sba-504-by-state.json | 504 CDCs and bank pairings by state |
What these figures are not
- Not an average of all business lending. They describe SBA-guaranteed loans, which skew larger and longer than the wider small business credit market.
- Not offers. A median is what borrowers received, not what you will be quoted.
- Not current to the day. The FOIA release is periodic; the as-of date above is the one that matters.
Our methodology page sets out how we handle figures we cannot verify.