Why borrower names are excluded

The SBA files behind this site are public and they are loan-level: each row carries the borrower's name, street address, city and ZIP code alongside the amount, the lender and the loan's status. This site publishes none of that. There are no borrower pages, no lists of loans and no search by business name.

What is dropped, and when

The borrower name, street address, city and ZIP code columns are discarded by the file parser itself, before a row exists as data in the program. What remains of each row (lender, project state and county, industry code, franchise code, fiscal year, amount, status) is added into running totals and then let go. No file this site writes, keeps or publishes contains a loan-level record.

One further step protects against totals that are really single loans. Where a dollar figure or a median would rest on fewer than three approvals, it is blanked and only the count is shown.

Why

• Many borrowers are people. A large share of small businesses are sole proprietors or carry their owner's name. A page that says a named person borrowed a given sum, and whether the loan was later charged off, is a page about a person's finances. This site does not publish pages about people.
• A loan record is not a verdict. A charged-off loan can follow a flood, an illness or a recession. Attached to a name and indexed by search engines, it reads as an accusation that the record does not make.
• The questions worth answering are aggregate ones. Which lenders are active in a county, how large loans in an industry tend to be, whether lending in a state is rising, how loans from earlier years turned out: none of these needs a borrower's name.

What about lenders and franchise brands?

Lenders and certified development companies are regulated institutions taking part in a federal program, and their SBA lending is a matter of public interest; they have pages. A lender name that reads as a person's name would be dropped at ingest. Franchise brands are organisations and have pages at 50 or more approvals, but those pages describe the brand in aggregate: they say nothing about any individual franchise owner.

If you need the loan-level files

They are published by SBA under the Freedom of Information Act at data.sba.gov. This site's choice not to republish them does not restrict anyone's access to the official source.

Found a name?

If a person's name appears anywhere on this site, report the URL through the contact page. It will be removed immediately.