See who actually lends to businesses like yours.
SBA 7(a) and 504 loans, mapped by lender, industry and region, so borrowers can find the right bank, and banks can see their whole market.
Three ways in
If you are trying to borrow
Three things worth knowing before you walk into a bank
The SBA publishes every loan it has approved since 1991: the trade the borrower was in, who lent to them, and what they were charged. That is enough to tell whether businesses like yours get funded, which banks fund them, and roughly what you should expect to pay.
The six trades with the most approvals since FY2021, and the average loan each received across both programmes. An average rather than a median: a handful of large property deals pull it upward.
If you are the one lending
The same record, read from the other side of the desk
Every competitor writes into the same public file. It shows what they charge, where they concentrate, and what their book has actually lost over thirty-five years.
Median spread over Prime, FY2024 onward. The gap between lenders is wider than the gap between sectors.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a small business?
Every loan on this site went to a business the SBA classed as small. But “small” is not one number. The SBA sets a size standard for each of roughly a thousand industries, and a firm qualifies only if it falls under the standard for the industry it operates in.
Two yardsticks are used. Most service, retail, and construction industries are measured on average annual receipts; most manufacturing and mining industries are measured on number of employees. So a builder with $40m of revenue and a factory with 500 staff can both be small, while a consultancy a fraction of either size is not.
The thresholds move. Across the industries tracked here, the median revenue-based standard rose from $5m in 2001 to $20.5m in 2023. That is a rise of roughly 4.1 times, well ahead of inflation over the same period. What counts as a small business has widened substantially, which matters when comparing loans decades apart.
Both the 7(a) and 504 programmes use these same standards, which is why they are explained here rather than filed under either one.
Is this affiliated with the SBA?
No. This is independent analysis of a public record, with no affiliation with or endorsement by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Any analytical errors are mine.
What am I actually looking at, and how current is it?
Every 7(a) and 504 loan the SBA has approved since 1991, as the SBA itself recorded it: the trade the borrower is in, the state, the lender, the amount, the rate, and whether the loan was repaid or written off. Nothing on the site is a survey, a sample or an estimate.
The SBA reissues that file every few months, and this one is as of 30 June 2026. That date lands in the middle of the federal financial year, so FY2026 is a part-year: it will look small beside the full years next to it, and that is where the record stops rather than a collapse in lending.
How does “Find a Lender” rank banks?
It is a ranking of the historical record, not a recommendation and not an application. For the sector, state and loan size you pick, it finds the lenders that actually wrote loans in that combination since FY2016 and orders them by how many.
A lender scores higher when it has real volume in your sector, has lent in your state rather than only nationally, and typically writes loans in the size band you asked for. The score is a summary of those three things and nothing else. It carries no information about whether a given bank would approve you, what it would charge, or whether it is still taking applications.
Why are some loans excluded?
Cancelled loans, and loans approved but never disbursed, are excluded throughout. They were never at risk, and including them would flatter every rate on the site. A handful of records with unusable amounts are also held back.
Can I download the underlying data?
Not from here, for now. The SBA publishes the same source files itself, free, and that is the place to go for the raw loan-level record.
What those files will not give you is the version behind this site: both programmes on one schema, cancelled and undisbursed loans already excluded, and every 7(a) loan matched to the Prime rate on its own approval date. A client-facing API onto that is being built. The contact page is the place to register interest.