The SBA Maturity Wall: 66,307 Small-Business Loans and When They Come Due
The SBA maturity wall is the year-by-year schedule on which 66,307 SBA 7(a) and 504 loans held by US small businesses come due, computed from the SBA's public FOIA loan files, with 2,639 loans reaching scheduled maturity in 2026 and 2,737 in 2027. There is a lot of published analysis of SBA lending, and almost all of it looks backward at origination. Who lent, how much, at what rate, with what default history. We could not find anyone publishing the other end of the same records, the date each loan stops.
That end is more interesting for anyone studying small-business ownership transition, because a loan reaching maturity is a dated event. It is the month a monthly obligation disappears from the business's cost structure, and often the month a personal guarantee is discharged. Whatever an owner is going to do next, that date is on their calendar.
State-level cuts live on our SBA loans by state pages, and the full file is a free download on the data page. For a ranked table of every state, see the 2026 state-by-state breakdown.
Last updated: August 2026. Next update: October 2026.
What we measured
We track 173,769 US small businesses across seven industries, assembled from public records. Of those, 66,307 (38.2%) carry an SBA 7(a) or 504 loan whose approval date and term are both present in the SBA's public disclosure data, which is what makes a maturity year computable.
Everything below describes that 66,307-loan subset.
The wall
Loans reaching maturity by year:
| Year | Loans reaching maturity |
|---|---|
| 2024 | 2,099 |
| 2025 | 2,387 |
| 2026 | 2,639 |
| 2027 | 2,737 |
| 2028 | 2,516 |
| 2029 | 2,464 |
| 2030 | 2,589 |
| 2031 | 2,651 |
| 2032 | 2,598 |
| 2033 | 2,410 |
| 2034 | 3,056 |
| 2035 | 3,510 |
| 2036 | 1,992 |
The table covers 2024 through 2036. The full series in the CSV runs from 1993 to 2056. Two features stand out inside this window. There is a near-term rise into 2027, and a pronounced peak in 2035, the largest single year anywhere in the series and 42% above the 2029 low of 2,464.
Reading the 2035 peak
It is substantially an artifact of loan structure, and we want to say that before anyone quotes it as a forecast. SBA 504 loans are written with 10, 20, and 25 year maturities, and 7(a) loans cap at 25 years under 13 CFR 120.212, which also holds anything not financing real estate or long-lived equipment to ten years or less. So a 2035 maturity is heavily populated by 504 loans approved around 2010 to 2015, plus shorter 7(a) paper approved much more recently. The peak records when past lending was structured to end. It does not predict that businesses will change hands that year.
2035 also happens to be the horizon in McKinsey's February 2026 report on small-business ownership transfer, which projects roughly 6 million US small and medium-size businesses facing an ownership transition by 2035, worth up to $5 trillion in enterprise value, and finds that 92% of small-business market exits occur through closure, against 5% completed as sales and 3% transferred to a new owner (Fortune's summary of the report). Those are survey- and model-based estimates. This series is a count of executed loan contracts. They are different kinds of evidence about the same decade, and the fact that they land on the same year is a coincidence of loan-term arithmetic.
The corporate maturity wall and this one
Credit analysts coined "maturity wall" for the stack of corporate bonds and leveraged loans that all need refinancing inside the same window. We borrowed the name. The two walls behave differently.
| Corporate maturity wall | SBA maturity wall | |
|---|---|---|
| What comes due | Corporate bonds and leveraged loans | Individual SBA 7(a) and 504 loans |
| Unit of measure | Dollar volume of debt | Count of small businesses |
| What maturity forces | Refinancing at current market rates | Nothing. The final payment clears and the guarantee is discharged |
| Why anyone watches it | Refinancing and default risk | A dated decision point in a business's ownership |
| Underlying data | Aggregated issuance databases | Named-borrower FOIA records in the public domain |
The near-term wall by state
Businesses whose SBA loans reach maturity between 2026 and 2028:
| State | 2026 to 2028 |
|---|---|
| California | 1,348 |
| Texas | 559 |
| Florida | 474 |
| Illinois | 324 |
| Ohio | 320 |
| Minnesota | 286 |
| Michigan | 280 |
| New York | 279 |
| Colorado | 273 |
| Wisconsin | 261 |
| Arizona | 238 |
| Georgia | 229 |
California carries more near-term maturities than Texas and Florida combined. Every state has its own page under /sba-loans with maturity counts by year and median loan size.
By industry
| Industry | 2026 to 2028 | All years |
|---|---|---|
| Niche manufacturing | 2,279 | 16,485 |
| Auto repair | 1,700 | 16,262 |
| Dental practices | 1,678 | 13,932 |
| HVAC & plumbing | 760 | 6,365 |
| Veterinary practices | 624 | 5,787 |
| Landscaping | 620 | 4,896 |
| Funeral homes | 231 | 2,580 |
Manufacturing and auto repair carry nearly identical all-year totals, 16,485 and 16,262, yet manufacturing has about a third more loans coming due in the next three years. That gap is a record of when each industry's lending boom happened. It says nothing about how the two sectors compare today.
By metro
Top metros by total loans reaching maturity, all years:
| Metro | Loans |
|---|---|
| Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA | 3,767 |
| Chicago–Naperville–Elgin, IL–IN–WI | 2,327 |
| New York–Newark–Jersey City, NY–NJ–PA | 2,196 |
| Dallas–Fort Worth, TX | 1,694 |
| Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington, MN–WI | 1,588 |
| Houston, TX | 1,332 |
| Phoenix–Mesa–Chandler, AZ | 1,332 |
| San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley, CA | 1,285 |
| Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario, CA | 1,243 |
| Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Alpharetta, GA | 1,232 |
Minneapolis–St. Paul is the notable entry, ranking fifth nationally and ahead of both Houston and Phoenix, each of which is a considerably larger metro.
Methodology, and its limits
Source. SBA 7(a) and 504 loan disclosure data, published at data.sba.gov under a U.S. Government Works license. The SBA states there that the 7(a) and 504 FOIA files are updated quarterly and run from fiscal 1991 forward. Maturity year is derived from the approval date and the disclosed term.
Coverage is a subset. The 66,307 loans here sit within our index of 173,769 businesses in seven industries. That index does not cover every US small business, and the SBA's FOIA files reach back to fiscal 1991 and cover far more lending than we index, so any figure here describes this subset only. Treat the geographic and industry cuts as shape. None of them measure market share.
What a maturity date does not tell you. It does not mean a business is for sale or that its owner intends to sell. Loans also get refinanced and prepaid, and neither event is visible in the approval-time disclosure, so the true count of loans still outstanding at maturity is lower than the count scheduled to mature. We report the scheduled date because that is what the public record supports.
No estimates. Every number on this page is a count of records or date arithmetic from a disclosed term. Nothing is modeled or extrapolated. We do not estimate revenue, EBITDA, or owner age anywhere in this analysis. Owner age in particular is absent from every public dataset, and any product claiming to sell you an "owners aged 65+" list has inferred it.
Reproducibility. The analysis script is scripts/analyze/maturity-wall.ts
in our repository. It reads production through the same public key the website
uses.
Using this data
Download the full dataset:
sba-maturity-wall.csv, 4,218 rows, one per
dimension/key/year, covering the national series, all 50 states plus DC, seven
industries, and the 40 largest metros. Long format, so it loads straight into
a spreadsheet pivot or pandas without reshaping. Columns are
dimension,key,maturity_year,companies.
Cite this dataset. The canonical CSV lives at https://scouly.com/data/sba-maturity-wall.csv and is mirrored on GitHub, Hugging Face, and Kaggle.
The underlying SBA data is public domain and yours to use. If you cite this analysis, please attribute it and link on first reference, e.g. "according to Scouly, which indexes off-market small businesses from public records", with the link pointing to this page. That link is the entire reason we can afford to keep publishing it.
We update quarterly, following the SBA's own disclosure cadence. If you're a journalist or researcher who needs a cut we haven't published, say a specific metro or a different year range, email nishkal.dachepelly@gmail.com and we'll run it. No cost and no conditions. We would rather the number be public and cited than sit unused.
To see the businesses behind a number, the counts above are aggregates of companies indexed individually. Browse the market pages for a vertical and metro, or start an acquisition thesis to see the highest-scoring companies nationally with their signals attached. Identities are withheld until you make a free account, but the underlying signals are visible either way, so you can judge the data before deciding whether it's worth one.
Scouly indexes off-market small businesses from public records, with a source URL on every signal. We are not a broker, we never contact business owners, and nothing in this analysis identifies an individual business. Informational only. This is not investment, legal, tax, or brokerage advice.
Frequently asked questions
When do SBA 7(a) loans mature?
At the end of the term disclosed at approval. SBA 504 loans carry 10, 20, and 25 year maturities. A 7(a) loan runs ten years or less unless it finances real estate or equipment with a useful life past ten years, and 25 years is the regulatory ceiling either way. Across the 66,307 loans we track, scheduled maturity years span 1993 to 2056, and 2035 is the single largest at 3,510 loans.
What happens when an SBA loan matures?
The final payment clears, the monthly debt service disappears from the business's cost structure, and the personal guarantee tied to the loan is discharged. Maturity does not mean the business is for sale or in financial trouble. Many loans are refinanced or prepaid before the scheduled date, and neither event shows up in the SBA's approval-time disclosure files.
How many SBA loans mature in 2026?
Within the 66,307 loans we track across seven industries, 2,639 reach scheduled maturity in 2026, followed by 2,737 in 2027 and 2,516 in 2028. These are counts of executed loan contracts from the SBA's FOIA files, and they cover our seven-industry index only, so the figure for all SBA lending nationally is larger.
Which states have the most maturing SBA loans?
California leads with 1,348 loans maturing between 2026 and 2028, more than Texas (559) and Florida (474) combined. Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, and Michigan follow. Each state has its own page under /sba-loans with maturity counts by year and median loan size, and the 2026 state breakdown ranks every state.
Can I get a list of businesses with maturing SBA loans?
The aggregate dataset is free at sba-maturity-wall.csv, and the underlying SBA records are public domain. Scouly indexes the individual companies behind these counts with a source URL on every signal. A free Explorer account includes 10 full profile unlocks, and you can start an acquisition thesis to see the highest-scoring companies first.
Sources
- SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan data, data.sba.gov
- SBA 504 loan program, sba.gov
- SBA 7(a) loan program, sba.gov
- 13 CFR 120.212, limits on 7(a) loan maturities, govinfo.gov
- Fortune on McKinsey's February 2026 ownership-transfer report
- sba-maturity-wall.csv, the full dataset
- GitHub mirror
- Hugging Face mirror
- Kaggle mirror