Methodology
Where the numbers come from, what counts as an acquisition loan, and how lenders are grouped.
Where the data comes from
Every number on this site comes from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s public 7(a) loan data, released under the Freedom of Information Act. We use the release dated as of September 30, 2026, which covers loans approved through that date. We refresh the site each quarter when SBA posts a new file.
What counts as an acquisition loan
SBA records a “business age” for each 7(a) loan. We count a loan as a business acquisition loan when SBA lists it as “Change of Ownership”, meaning the loan helped someone buy an existing business. SBA started using that label on December 8, 2017, so acquisition history on this site starts in fiscal year 2018. Rankings and lender pages use loans approved in fiscal years 2024 to 2026 (October 2023 through September 2026). SBA’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30.
What the dollar figures mean
Dollar amounts are the gross amount SBA approved for each loan, including both the part SBA guarantees and the part the lender keeps. They are not the amount actually disbursed. Rankings are shown for the three most recent fiscal years combined and for the latest fiscal year on its own.
Cancelled loans
Loans that SBA marks as cancelled were approved but never made, so we leave them out of every count and total. In recent years, including them would add about 8 to 10 percent to each year’s loan count.
How we group lenders
We group loans by SBA’s own lender ID, not by the lender’s name, because many different banks share a name (there are seven different banks named “First Bank” in the data). Where the lender is a bank, we also match it to its FDIC certificate number, and for credit unions to the NCUA charter. Each bank brand that SBA lists separately gets its own page; we do not combine banks that share a holding company. Where two lenders share a display name we add the city and state.
Bank mergers
When banks merge, the surviving bank takes the full history of both. SBA usually moves the acquired bank’s loans to the survivor itself. Where it has not, we follow the FDIC’s official merger records, but only for completed voluntary mergers. Banks that failed and were sold by the FDIC are kept separate. Mergers that close after the date of SBA’s file are applied at the next refresh, not before. Where a lender has absorbed a well-known bank, the lender page lists the former names.
What this site never shows
We publish lender-level and market-level totals only. We never publish the names, addresses or any other details of individual borrowers, even though they appear in SBA’s file.
Loans of $3 million or more
Some pages count acquisition loans of $3 million or more because of a new SBA rule: under SBA SOP 50 10 8.1 (effective Oct 1, 2026), Appendix 15, C.1 Business Valuation Requirements, (a)(ii) Quality of Earnings, when the purchase price of an Initial Acquisition or Business Expansion deal is $3 million or more, the lender must also get an independent quality-of-earnings report. The $3 million is the purchase price, measured before buyer equity, seller debt or other financing, not the loan size. Owner Buyout and ESOP & Cooperative transactions are exempt. SBA’s file does not include the purchase price or the deal type, so our $3 million counts use the loan amount. That is only a rough guide: it misses deals whose price is $3 million or more but whose loan is smaller, and it includes some exempt owner buyouts.
Corrections
If you think a figure is wrong, tell us at hello@buyoutlenders.com and we will check it against SBA’s file.
Maps
State shapes come from the us-atlas project by Mike Bostock (ISC license), which is derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s public-domain cartographic boundary files. Maps shade states by the number of loans to businesses located there; Alaska and Hawaii are shown as insets and Puerto Rico as a small square.