About SBA Ledger

SBA Ledger is an independent public-data reference site. It totals the Small Business Administration's public 7(a) and 504 loan files by lender, state, county, industry, franchise brand and fiscal year: 342,825 approvals in FY2021–FY2025 alone, and every approval back to fiscal year 1991 in the long-run series. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

What it is for

Business owners comparing SBA lenders, loan brokers, economic-development staff, reporters and lenders benchmarking their own volume all start from the same SBA files, which run to about two million rows and a gigabyte of CSV. This site does the adding up: who lends where, in what sizes, to which industries, how that has moved over ten fiscal years, and how loans from earlier years turned out, each figure placed beside the state or program figure it should be read against.

What it leaves out

• Borrowers. The SBA files name every borrower and give a street address. Those fields are discarded as the files are read and are never stored. There are no borrower pages and no loan-level listings, and dollar figures that rest on fewer than three approvals are blanked. Why.
• People. Pages exist for lenders, development companies, places, industries and franchise brands. A lender name that reads as a person's name is dropped at ingest.
• Verdicts. Tables are sorted by volume. The site does not grade lenders, does not say which lender anyone should use, and describes loan outcomes only in SBA's own status terms: paid in full, charged off, cancelled.
• Advice. Nothing here is financial advice or an offer of credit.

Funding

The site is free to use and funded by advertising that is clearly labelled. Advertisers and sponsors have no influence over which lenders appear or how their figures are presented. Sponsor placements, when present, appear on state pages only, are marked "Sponsored", and never appear on a lender's own page.

Updates and corrections

SBA refreshes its files each quarter, about a month after the quarter ends; the site is rebuilt from the current files and shows the data-through date in the footer of every page. Where a figure here differs from SBA's file, SBA's file is authoritative. See corrections, the methodology and the contact page.