What Banks Lend Against Main Street: SBA Loan Sizes Across 66,310 Small Businesses (2026 Data Study)
Last updated: July 2026
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 default financing for small-business acquisitions in the United States. Loan sizes are not purchase prices, but they are underwritten commitments: a lender examined revenue, collateral, and cash flow and put a number on it.
Scouly's database tracks 66,310 US companies with SBA borrowing history across seven verticals. This study reports what that borrowing actually looks like — medians, quartiles, and how much of each industry borrows past $1M. Every number below is computed directly from our live database of public SBA records; nothing is estimated.
The headline: capital intensity ranks the verticals
Median peak SBA loan per borrower, by vertical:
| Vertical | Borrowers | Median peak loan | 25th–75th percentile | Share ≥ $1M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Funeral homes | 2,580 | $697,250 | $367k – $1.37M | 36% |
| Veterinary practices | 5,787 | $632,000 | $334k – $1.23M | 32% |
| Niche manufacturing | 16,487 | $558,000 | $300k – $1.14M | 30% |
| Dental practices | 13,932 | $518,250 | $315k – $935k | 23% |
| Auto repair | 16,262 | $404,000 | $250k – $738k | 16% |
| HVAC & plumbing | 6,366 | $380,000 | $248k – $774k | 19% |
| Landscaping | 4,896 | $350,000 | $217k – $680k | 15% |
Three things stand out.
Real estate drives the top of the table. Funeral homes are the most capital-intensive borrowers on Main Street — 36% of tracked borrowers took loans of $1M or more, and the 90th percentile is $2.24M. The reason is the building: funeral homes own purpose-built facilities, and SBA 504 exists precisely for owner-occupied real estate. Veterinary practices follow the same logic — clinic buildouts, surgical suites, imaging equipment — with a $632k median and nearly a third of borrowers past $1M. Our funeral home and veterinary sourcing guides cover what that asset intensity means for buyers.
The trades run leaner than their reputation. HVAC & plumbing — the vertical private equity has consolidated hardest — shows a median of just $380k, with 60% of borrowers in the $150k–500k band. The business model is trucks, tools, and licensed labor, not buildings. The same is true of landscaping ($350k median, the leanest entry point in the study) and auto repair ($404k — lifts and diagnostic equipment, but the building is often leased).
Dental sits in the middle for a structural reason. A $518k median tracks the standard practice-acquisition loan: SBA 7(a) is how most dentists buy their first practice, and lenders treat dental as one of their safest categories. The distribution is tighter than any other vertical (interquartile range $315k–935k), consistent with a market where the financed asset is usually the practice itself rather than real estate.
How to read this as a buyer
Loan size is a scale signal, not a price tag. 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, not as valuations. (No public data source reports small-business profitability — our position on that is permanent: anyone claiming to compute EBITDA from public records is guessing.)
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.
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: it separates documented, revenue-verified operators from names on a map.
Methodology
- Source: public SBA 7(a)/504 loan-level disclosure data (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, not across loans.
- 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 — the acquisition-relevant population — not every business with any SBA history.
- Freshness: database snapshot of July 2026. Browse any company's underlying records on its profile via the Markets index.
FAQ
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 an acquisition. They sketch the capital scale of each vertical, and since SBA 7(a) is the standard acquisition-financing vehicle, they are a useful anchor — but valuation is a separate exercise.
Why do funeral homes and vet practices borrow the most? Owner-occupied real estate and clinical buildout. SBA 504 specifically finances buildings, and both verticals typically own purpose-built facilities. The trades (HVAC, landscaping) borrow least because their assets are vehicles and equipment.
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 is free and ranks every tracked company in a metro against your criteria, loan history included.
Does a bigger loan mean a better acquisition target? No — it means a bigger business or a building in the deal. For target quality, timing signals (loan maturity, owner tenure) and market structure matter more than loan size.