Methodology

Every figure on this site is a count, a sum, a median or a share computed from the Small Business Administration's 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan files, data through 30 Jun 2026. This page says exactly how.

What is counted

• An approval is one row of the SBA file: one loan SBA approved. Approvals that were later cancelled are still approvals and are included in counts and dollars, as they are in the file; outcome figures treat them separately (below).
• Dollars are SBA's gross approval amount. For 7(a) that is the whole loan. For 504 it is the development company's portion only; the bank loan that sits beside it in a 504 project is not an SBA loan and is not counted.
• Fiscal years are federal fiscal years, 1 October to 30 September: FY2025 ran from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. Approvals are placed in the fiscal year SBA assigns. FY2026 is open and shown to 30 Jun 2026 only; it is marked with an asterisk and left out of every five-year figure.
• The five-year window is the five latest complete fiscal years, FY2021–FY2025. Rankings, medians, mixes and "most active" tables use it. Trend tables show ten complete fiscal years.
• Jobs supported is SBA's field for jobs created plus jobs retained, as reported on the loan application. SBA states that it does not review, audit or validate the numbers. They are shown as reported and never used to rank anything.

Borrower fields

The files carry each borrower's name, street address, city and ZIP code. The parser is configured to discard those columns before a row is assembled, so they never reach the program's memory as data, and nothing derived from them is stored. Rows are added into totals in the same pass; no loan-level record is written to any file. Where a dollar total or a median would rest on fewer than three approvals it is blanked, because a total of one is a loan. More on this policy.

Lenders

• Lenders are identified by SBA's lender location ID, not by name, so the several banks called "First Bank" stay separate. The name, city and state shown are those on the lender's most recent approvals.
• SBA's file lists each loan under the lender it is currently assigned to. After a merger or a portfolio purchase the acquiring lender's history includes the loans it took over, and a lender that no longer holds any loans disappears. Read every lender figure with that in mind.
• 7(a) lenders get a page at 50 or more approvals in FY2021–FY2025; 504 certified development companies at 25 or more. 646 lenders qualify out of 2,366 active. Smaller lenders appear, unlinked, in state, county and industry tables.
• A lender name that reads as a person's name and carries no FDIC or NCUA number is dropped at ingest. Third-party lenders in 504 projects can be private parties, so only names that are plainly a bank or credit union are tabulated, and only at five or more projects.

Places

• State and county are those of the project (the business), not of the lender.
• Counties get a page at 30 or more approvals in FY2021–FY2025. County names are matched to Census names; SBA uses Connecticut's eight historical counties on older approvals and the nine planning regions on newer ones, so Connecticut has both.
• Approvals per 1,000 establishments divides approvals in FY2021–FY2025 by the establishment count in the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns 2023. It is a five-year count over a one-year stock, useful for comparing places and industries with each other, not as an annual rate. CBP leaves out most farms, government, private households and businesses with no employees, and its county file does not cover Puerto Rico or the island territories, where the figure is blank.
• State fiscal-year pages are built where a state had 30 or more approvals that year.

Industries and franchise brands

• Industries use the NAICS code on the SBA record at two, three and four digits, with pages at 30 or more approvals in FY2021–FY2025. SBA records the code in force at approval. The 2022 NAICS revision renumbered parts of retail trade and information, so a few lines of business sit under one code before FY2023 and another after.
• Franchise brands use SBA's franchise code and name. SBA has used more than one code for many brands over the years; codes whose brand names reduce to the same short name are added together. Pages exist for brands with 50 or more approvals since FY2010. Brand pages describe loans to independent franchise owners in aggregate; they say nothing about any franchisee or about the franchisor's own finances.

Charge-off rates

• SBA gives each loan a status: paid in full, charged off, cancelled, undisbursed, or "exempt", which SBA uses for loans that have been disbursed and are still outstanding, because their current status is exempt from disclosure under FOIA Exemption 4.
• A rate is computed only on matured cohorts: loans approved in FY2010–FY2021, at least five fiscal years before the current one. Newer loans are excluded everywhere because few have had time to be paid off or charged off, which would make any recent lender or fast-growing industry look better than it will.
• The denominator is disbursed loans: paid in full, charged off or still outstanding. Cancelled and never-disbursed approvals are left out. The rate by count is charged-off loans over disbursed loans; the rate by dollars is SBA's gross charge-off amount over dollars approved on disbursed loans.
• No rate is shown on fewer than 30 disbursed loans.
• A rate is a description of a portfolio, not a grade. It moves with loan size, industry, geography, the years a lender was active (loans approved in FY2006 to FY2008 met the recession) and with loans acquired from other lenders. Every rate is shown beside the program-wide rate for the same approval years, and tables are never sorted by it.
• Status for approvals before FY2020 is as of 30 Jun 2026; for later approvals, 30 Jun 2026.

Wording

Sentences on entity pages are assembled by fixed templates from the figures; nothing is machine-written. The site uses SBA's terms ("approved", "paid in full", "charged off") and does not characterise lenders beyond the numbers.

Known limits

• The files cover approvals since FY1991 under 7(a) and 504 only. Disaster loans, microloans and the pandemic programmes (PPP, EIDL) are separate and not included.
• Interest rates are in the 7(a) file but are initial rates at approval and are not summarised here.
• Lender names are printed as SBA writes them, including its abbreviations and capitalisation.

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