How to Estimate What a Private Business Is Worth From Public Records Alone (SBA Loan, PPP, Form 5500, Age)

A private small business publishes nothing. No revenue, no headcount, no financial statements. And yet if you're a searcher trying to decide whether an off-market HVAC contractor or dental practice is worth a letter, you need some sense of its size before you write.

Four public records get you most of the way there. A PPP loan encodes payroll. A Form 5500 filing encodes current headcount. An SBA 7(a) or 504 loan tells you what a bank was willing to lend against the business. A state registry tells you how long it has survived. None of these is a valuation, and anyone who converts them into a precise dollar figure is selling you confidence they don't have. Combined honestly, though, they produce a defensible size range and a rough floor on deal size, which is all you need at the sourcing stage. The method, record by record, with the error bars stated out loud.

Signal 1: PPP loan amount, the payroll snapshot

The SBA and its lenders originated more than 11.7 million PPP loans, and after FOIA litigation the loan-level records for the whole program went up on data.sba.gov for anyone to download. PPP loan sizes weren't negotiated. Under the program's rules, a first-draw loan was calculated by multiplying the borrower's average monthly payroll costs by 2.5, with compensation above $100,000 annualized per employee left out of the calculation. That formula runs in reverse:

Monthly payroll ≈ loan amount ÷ 2.5
Annual payroll ≈ monthly payroll × 12

A company that borrowed $350,000 was running about $140,000 a month, roughly $1.68 million a year, in payroll costs at the time of its application. The record also carries a jobs-reported field, the employee count the borrower stated on a federal application. So one row gives you a payroll dollar figure and a headcount, each self-reported to a lender under program rules.

The error bars. This is a 2020 to 2021 snapshot and the company is now five-plus years past it, so always carry the filing year with the number: "about $1.68M in annual payroll as of its 2020 PPP filing." The $100k cap, set out in the SBA's January 2021 interim final rule, also means high-wage firms show less payroll than they actually run. A dental practice with three associate dentists is the classic case. Treat the figure as a floor in those verticals. The full mechanics, including screening on loan status, are in our guide to reading PPP data for payroll estimates.

Signal 2: Form 5500 participants, the current headcount floor

PPP is frozen in time. The Form 5500 refreshes every year. Any company sponsoring an employee benefit plan, a 401(k) most commonly, files this report annually with the Department of Labor through EFAST2, and the filings are public. Bulk files are published one per form and plan year, the 2023 full-form file among them, and individual filings are searchable by sponsor name or EIN through the free Form 5500 Series Search on EFAST2.

The number you want is active participants: employees eligible for and enrolled in the plan. Some employees opt out and new hires may wait on eligibility, so read 34 participants as "at least around 34 employees." Two or three consecutive plan years also give you a trend, and a count that holds steady or climbs is evidence of a stable operation.

The error bars. Absence tells you nearly nothing, since most small businesses sponsor no plan at all. And when one sponsor files multiple plans in a year, take the maximum participant count as your floor, never the sum, because summing double-counts everyone enrolled in both plans. The full reading guide is in what Form 5500 filings tell you about a target.

Signal 3: SBA loan size, the lender-underwritten floor

An SBA 7(a) or 504 loan in the SBA's FOIA files means a bank put real money behind the business after reviewing actual financials you'll never see. The loan amount is the residue of that underwriting. Revenue stays invisible. What you learn is the scale of commitment a lender found financeable, and that makes a useful floor when you're sizing a potential deal.

To make loan sizes meaningful you need the distribution, and that varies a lot by industry. Across the SBA borrowers Scouly tracks in its seven verticals, the peak-loan quartiles:

Vertical	Borrowers	25th pct	Median	75th pct	Share over $1M
Funeral homes	2,580	$367,000	$697,250	$1,370,000	36%
Veterinary	5,787	$334,000	$632,000	$1,230,000	32%
Manufacturing	16,487	$300,000	$558,000	$1,140,000	30%
Dental	13,932	$315,000	$518,250	$935,000	23%
Auto repair	16,262	$250,000	$404,000	$738,000	16%
HVAC & plumbing	6,366	$248,000	$380,000	$774,000	19%
Landscaping	4,896	$217,000	$350,000	$680,000	15%

These are loan sizes, never valuations. But the spread is informative: the median funeral home borrower carries nearly double the loan of the median landscaping borrower, largely because funeral homes usually own their building. A target whose loan sits at the 75th percentile of its vertical is a top-quartile operation by the one financial yardstick a bank left in the public record. The full study behind the table is SBA loan sizes across small-business verticals, and you can place any specific loan or asking price against these quartiles with the free deal benchmark tool.

Signal 4: registry age, the survival record

Every state's business registry records a formation date. A company formed in 1997 has survived the dot-com bust, 2008, and a pandemic. That's twenty-nine years of evidence that the operation works through good years and bad. It doesn't prove the customer base is sticky or that the owner is anywhere near a transition, but it does narrow the range of stories that fit. Registry age also dates every other record in your stack. A 2020 PPP filing from a firm formed in 2018 describes a startup. The same filing from a firm formed in 1985 describes an institution.

Combining the four into a range

Now the assembly. The defensible chain runs headcount first, dollars second:

Establish headcount. Latest Form 5500 participant count if one exists (current, a floor), else the PPP jobs-reported figure (older, self-stated). If you have both, check they roughly agree. A big gap means the company changed, which is worth knowing before outreach.
Convert headcount to a revenue band. Multiply by your industry's receipts-per-employee from the Census Bureau's SUSB tables, and name the vintage you used. SUSB carries employment and payroll every year but includes receipts only for years ending in 2 and 7, so the revenue side of your arithmetic is always a few years stale. What comes out is a labeled band, "likely low seven figures for a shop this size in this NAICS," and the label is the honest part.
Sanity-check with the PPP payroll figure. Annual payroll from the ÷2.5 × 12 arithmetic should be a plausible fraction of the revenue band for that industry. If payroll exceeds your revenue estimate, one of your inputs is wrong.
Bound the deal size with the SBA loan. The loan amount against the vertical quartiles above tells you what tier of business you're looking at and roughly what a lender has already proven financeable. It anchors your expectations before the owner ever names a number.
Date everything with registry age. Attach the formation year and the year of every filing to the estimate itself.

The output reads something like: formed 1998, at least 22 employees per its 2023 5500, about $1.68M in annual payroll as of its 2020 PPP filing, carried a $380,000 SBA loan (the median for HVAC borrowers), likely low-to-mid seven figures in revenue per SUSB receipts-per-employee. Every clause carries its source and its date. That's a sized target, from your desk, for free.

What this method will never give you

EBITDA. Margins. Owner earnings. The purchase price. No public record discloses profitability, and no arithmetic on payroll or headcount produces it. Two HVAC shops with identical payroll can have wildly different margins depending on their service-versus-install mix, and nothing in a FOIA file distinguishes them. Any tool that hands you an earnings figure from public data alone is guessing. Size is knowable. Earnings are what diligence and the owner conversation are for, and pretending otherwise gets sourcing methods dismissed by the people you most need to take you seriously.

Where Scouly fits

Scouly runs this cross-referencing at scale across 173,769 companies in seven verticals. Each company profile carries the PPP payroll snapshot, the 5500 participant count, the SBA loan history and the registry formation date, every input dated and named. Size evidence stays evidence: it adds zero points to the deterministic 0 to 100 score, which rests only on loan maturity, registry longevity and market fragmentation. Sources and formulas are documented on the data page. Nothing on Scouly is listed for sale and it never estimates earnings.

If you'd rather run the method on a ranked list than a raw CSV, build your acquisition thesis for free and see every tracked company in your metro sized this way.

Frequently asked questions

How do you estimate the revenue of a private company? Start from headcount, using the latest Form 5500 participant count or the PPP jobs-reported figure, then multiply by the industry's receipts-per-employee from Census SUSB tables, naming the data vintage. Cross-check against annual payroll derived from the PPP loan (amount ÷ 2.5 × 12). The result is a labeled revenue band with dated inputs, never a precise figure.

Can you find out how much a private business makes in profit? No. No public record discloses profit, and none supports deriving it. Payroll and headcount describe scale; margins depend on pricing, mix and cost structure that never appear in any filing. Treat any tool showing an EBITDA estimate from public data as guessing. Profitability is what diligence, tax returns and the owner conversation eventually establish.

Is a company's PPP loan amount public? Yes. After FOIA litigation, the SBA published loan-level data for the entire program, which the agency says ran to more than 11.7 million loans. Each record carries borrower name, city, state, loan amount, jobs reported and loan status, and it's downloadable free from data.sba.gov. Because first-draw loans were calculated at 2.5 times average monthly payroll, the amount converts directly to a payroll estimate dated 2020 to 2021.

What does a company's SBA loan size tell you about its value? It sets a floor on scale rather than a value. A bank reviewed real financials and committed that amount, so the loan marks what was financeable. Context comes from the vertical distribution: the median tracked funeral home borrower is at $697,250 while the median landscaping borrower is at $350,000, so the same loan means different things in different industries.

How accurate is a headcount from Form 5500 filings? It's a reliable floor. Active participants are employees enrolled in the plan, so opted-out staff and recent hires push true headcount somewhat higher. It refreshes annually, which makes it the most current public signal available. When one company files multiple plans, use the largest participant count, never the sum, or you'll double-count enrolled employees.

Why does registry age matter in valuing a business? Age is survival evidence. A firm formed in the 1990s has operated through several recessions, which supports assumptions about customer durability that a five-year-old firm can't. It also dates your other records: knowing whether a 2020 PPP filing describes a young company or a decades-old institution changes how you read every number attached to it.

Sources

By Nishkal Dachepelly, founder of Scouly. Published 2026-08-27. Updated August 2026.