What Banks Lend Against Main Street: SBA Loan Sizes Across 66,310 Small Businesses (2026 Data Study)

If you want to know what it takes to buy or build a Main Street business, one of the most honest public windows is what banks have actually been willing to lend against them. SBA 7(a) and 504 loans are disclosed at the loan level (borrower, amount, program), and SBA 7(a) is the SBA's primary business loan program, with "changes of ownership (complete or partial)" sitting on its published list of eligible uses. Loan sizes are underwritten commitments. A lender examined the revenue and the cash flow and put a number on it. What a business would sell for is a separate number, and this study keeps the two apart.

Scouly's database tracks 66,310 US companies with SBA borrowing history across seven verticals. This study reports what that borrowing actually looks like: the medians and quartile bands per vertical, plus how much of each industry borrows past $1M. Nothing is estimated. Every number below is computed directly from our live database of public SBA records. Companion studies cut the same dataset by state and by metro.

The headline: capital intensity ranks the verticals

Median peak SBA loan per borrower, by vertical:

The ranking is really a ranking of what the loan is buying.

Real estate drives the top. Funeral homes are the most capital-intensive borrowers in the study. 36% of tracked funeral home borrowers took $1M or more, against 15% in landscaping. The reason is the building. Funeral homes own purpose-built facilities, and SBA 504 finances exactly that, covering "the purchase, construction or renovation of existing buildings or land" plus long-life machinery. Veterinary practices follow the same logic. Clinic buildouts and imaging equipment push the median to $632k, with nearly a third of borrowers past $1M. Our funeral home and veterinary sourcing guides cover what that asset intensity means for buyers.

Manufacturing has the widest spread. 16,487 tracked borrowers, the largest group here, and a $558k median that lands just under the two clinical verticals. Measured against its own median, the $300k to $1.14M quartile band is the widest of the seven. A two-person job shop and a plant with real square footage both live in that bucket, so the median is a poor description of the typical target. Our manufacturing sourcing guide covers how to size one of these from public records before you make contact.

The trades run leaner. HVAC & plumbing sits at a $380k median, landscaping at $350k, the lowest in the study, and auto repair at $404k. Between 15% and 19% of borrowers in those verticals clear $1M, against 36% for funeral homes. The plain reading is that trucks, lifts, diagnostic gear and licensed labor finance smaller than a building does, and trades premises are more often leased than owned.

Dental has the tightest distribution. A $518k median tracks the standard practice-acquisition loan. Measured against its own median, dental's $315k to $935k quartile band is the narrowest of the seven, with auto repair a hair behind it. That fits a market where the financed asset is usually the practice itself and the real estate belongs to a landlord.

How to read this as a buyer

Loan size is a scale signal. A company whose peak SBA borrowing was $700k passed underwriting for $700k of debt. That tells you the rough scale of assets and cash flow a bank believed in. It does not tell you what the business would sell for. Treat the bands above as context for what deals in each vertical typically finance at. (The SBA files carry loan amounts and dates. They carry no revenue and no profit, so anyone computing EBITDA out of them is guessing.) To place a specific number against these bands, our free deal size benchmark puts an asking price or loan amount into the quartile for its vertical and state, no signup required.

The timing layer matters more than the amount. Every loan in this dataset carries a maturity date, and owners approaching payoff are at a natural reinvest-or-exit decision point. That is the single most actionable public signal in small-business sourcing. The full argument is in our pillar guide to SBA loan data as an acquisition-timing signal, and the counts by year, state, metro, and industry are in the SBA Maturity Wall.

Borrowing proves the business is real. Every company in this study cleared bank underwriting at least once. For off-market sourcing, finding businesses before they're listed, that is the core filter. A bank looked at the books and lent, which separates documented operators from names on a map.

Methodology

• Source: public SBA 7(a)/504 loan-level FOIA data from data.sba.gov, as ingested into Scouly's database of 173,769 US and UK companies. This study covers the 66,310 US companies with at least one SBA loan on record.
• Metric: "peak loan" is each company's largest single SBA loan on record. Medians and percentiles are computed per vertical across borrowers, so a company with five loans counts once.
• Skew note: our ingest focuses on acquisition-relevant operators, and tracked borrowers skew toward loans of roughly $150k and above. Micro-loans are under-represented. Read the bands as describing established, bank-underwritten businesses, which is the acquisition-relevant population.
• Freshness: database snapshot of July 2026. Browse any company's underlying records on its profile via the Markets index.

Frequently asked questions

Are these numbers purchase prices for these businesses? No. They are the largest SBA loans each business took, which reflect what a bank underwrote: equipment, real estate, working capital, or a change of ownership. They sketch the capital scale of each vertical, and because 7(a) proceeds can fund a change of ownership, they anchor roughly where acquisition debt in that vertical tends to sit. Valuation is a separate exercise and no public file supports it.

Why do funeral homes and vet practices borrow the most? Owner-occupied real estate and clinical buildout. SBA 504 finances the purchase, construction or renovation of buildings and land, and both verticals typically operate out of purpose-built facilities. Funeral homes show a $697,250 median peak loan and veterinary practices $632,000, the top two of the seven verticals tracked. The trades borrow least, and the likeliest explanation is that their assets are vehicles and equipment while the premises are leased.

Can I see the loan history for a specific business? Yes. The underlying data is public at data.sba.gov, and every company profile on Scouly links its source records. The thesis builder gives you one free thesis parse a day and ranks tracked companies against the criteria you describe, loan history included. The free Explorer tier includes 10 full profile unlocks.

Why does the study cover 66,310 companies when Scouly tracks 173,769? The 173,769 figure is every US and UK company in the database. This study only uses the 66,310 US companies that have at least one SBA 7(a) or 504 loan on record, because those are the only ones with a lender-verified number attached. The rest come in from state registries, UK Companies House, PPP records and DOL Form 5500 filings, and they carry no loan history to measure.

Does a bigger loan mean a better acquisition target? No. It usually means a bigger business or a building in the deal. For target quality, timing signals like loan maturity and owner tenure matter more than loan size, and so does market structure. A $400k borrower nearing payoff can be a better call than a $2M borrower who refinanced last year.

Sources

• SBA 7(a) & 504 FOIA loan-level data, data.sba.gov
• SBA 7(a) loan program, sba.gov
• SBA 504 loan program, sba.gov