The SBA Maturity Wall: 66,307 Small-Business Loans and When They Come Due

There is a lot of published analysis of SBA lending. 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: when the loans stop.

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.

This is the first edition of what we're calling the SBA Maturity Wall: a count of how many SBA-financed small businesses reach loan maturity in each calendar year, cut by state, metro, and industry.

Last updated: July 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:

Two features stand out. There is a near-term rise into 2027, and a pronounced peak in 2035 — the largest single year in the series, 33% above the 2029 trough.

What the 2035 peak is, and what it is not

It is substantially an artifact of loan structure, and we want to say that before anyone quotes it as a forecast. SBA 504 loans commonly run 20–25 years and 7(a) real-estate loans up to 25; a 2035 maturity is therefore heavily populated by 504 loans approved around 2010–2015, plus shorter 7(a) paper approved much more recently. The peak reflects when past lending was structured to end, not a prediction that businesses will change hands that year.

It is worth noting only because 2035 is also the horizon in McKinsey's February 2026 analysis, which projects roughly 6 million US businesses facing an ownership transition by 2035, up to $5 trillion in enterprise value, and finds that 92% of small-business exits happen by closure rather than sale. 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 rather than mutual confirmation.

The near-term wall by state

Businesses whose SBA loans reach maturity in 2026–2028:

California carries more near-term maturities than Texas and Florida combined.

By industry

Auto repair and dental carry nearly identical all-year totals but differ in near-term concentration, which is a function of when each industry's lending boom occurred rather than anything about the businesses themselves.

By metro

Top metros by total loans reaching maturity, all years:

Minneapolis–St. Paul is the notable entry: fifth nationally, ahead of Houston and Phoenix, on a metro population well below either.

Methodology, and its limits

Source. SBA 7(a) and 504 loan disclosure data, published quarterly by the U.S. Small Business Administration at data.sba.gov and in the public domain. Maturity year is derived from the approval date and the disclosed term.

Coverage is a subset, not a census. The 66,307 loans here sit within our index of 173,769 businesses in seven industries. That index is not a count of all US small businesses, and these are not all SBA loans — the SBA has disclosed millions since 1991. Any figure here describes this subset only. Treat the geographic and industry cuts as shape, not as market share.

What a maturity date does not tell you. It does not indicate that a business is for sale, that its owner intends to sell, or that it is financially distressed. Loans are also 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 of loans 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 a date arithmetic from a disclosed term. Nothing here is modeled, imputed, or extrapolated. We do not estimate revenue, EBITDA, or owner age anywhere in this analysis — owner age in particular is not present in any 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

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" — linking 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 — a specific metro, a specific industry, a different year range — ask and we'll run it.

Scouly indexes off-market small businesses from public records — SBA loan filings, business longevity, and local market fragmentation — 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; not investment, legal, tax, or brokerage advice.