The Convenience Store Paradox

• 

  Snack and candy aisle inside a convenience store, where inside sales set a record in 2025

America closed 280 convenience stores last year and opened 768 new fuel-selling locations. Inside sales hit a record. The threat to the independent operator is not the electric car, it is the commercial kitchen.

On December 31, 2025, California's deadline for single-walled underground storage tanks arrived.

Roughly 50,000 tanks were closed to comply. Ninety-nine percent of them were out by the deadline; about 600 came out in December alone, from operators who had spent years deciding whether to spend the money or stop selling fuel.

Nothing about demand changed that month. A compliance date arrived, and several thousand sites did arithmetic.

That is the cleanest available illustration of what is actually happening to the American convenience store, and it explains a national statistic that otherwise looks like a contradiction. In the year ending December 31, 2025, the US store count fell by 280. Over the same twelve months, the number of locations selling fuel rose by 768, to the highest level in eight years.

Both figures are correct. The industry is not shrinking. It is being sorted, and the sorting criterion is capital.

The three numbers

The convenience industry counted 151,975 stores at the end of 2025, down 280, or two-tenths of a percent. That is the second consecutive annual decline and leaves the count roughly 3,000 stores below the 2018 peak of 154,958, a drawdown of about 1.9 percent over seven years.

Fuel-selling locations went the other way: up 768 to 122,620, meaning 80.7 percent of American convenience stores now sell gasoline. That is the eight-year high.

And inside sales, everything sold across the counter rather than at the pump, reached $341.2 billion, up 1.7 percent from $335.5 billion. It was the twenty-third consecutive year of growth in that line.

Total industry sales did fall, from $837.4 billion in 2024 to $817.5 billion in 2025, and from $906.1 billion as recently as 2022. That decline is almost entirely a price effect and should not be read as contraction. Fuel dollar sales fell 5.4 percent to $476.3 billion because the average pump price dropped 5.9 percent, from $3.30 to $3.11. Gallons sold rose 0.5 percent.

Americans bought more gasoline and paid less for it. Revenue is the wrong lens for this industry. Gross profit is the right one, and the gross profit picture is where the format has quietly inverted.

The inversion

Fuel represents about 65 percent of total industry sales dollars and 38.8 percent of gross profit dollars.

Foodservice represents 28.5 percent of inside sales, and 38.9 percent of inside gross profit.

Read those two lines together and the modern convenience store comes into focus. The pumps out front move two-thirds of the money and earn a bit over a third of the margin. The kitchen in the back moves a quarter of the inside money and earns a bit under two-fifths of the inside margin. Foodservice has become the profit engine of a business still universally described as a gas station.

The trajectory is not subtle. Foodservice accounted for 11.9 percent of inside sales in 2005. Within foodservice, prepared food, pizza, chicken, sandwiches, wraps, salads, now makes up 73.9 percent of sales, up from 66.4 percent as recently as 2021.

Fuel margins, meanwhile, look far healthier than they are. Retail margins averaged above 40 cents a gallon in 2025 against roughly 22 cents before 2020, which reads as a doubling. About half of that is inflation. Card interchange runs near 8.4 cents a gallon and rises mechanically with pump prices, consuming a fifth to a quarter of the gross margin before anything else is paid. After distribution and store-level operating expense, the net is closer to 10 to 15 cents.

The public operators bracket the range. Murphy USA reported total fuel contribution of 30.7 cents a gallon for full-year 2025, rising to 34.3 in the fourth quarter. Casey's reported 41.6 cents in its second fiscal quarter of 2026. Couche-Tard has cited US margins just over 47 cents. For a single-site underwriting, the defensible base case sits at 28 to 32 cents, with anything above the low thirties treated as cyclical upside rather than capitalized into value.

Fuel is now customer acquisition. The margin is inside.

What replaced the cigarette

There is a second inversion running underneath the first, and it may matter more to the individual store.

For four decades, cigarettes were the traffic engine of American convenience retail. They were a low-margin, high-frequency purchase that brought a customer through the door several times a week, at which point he bought a drink and a bag of chips at real margins. The pack was the loss leader that made the rest of the store work.

That engine is gone. Combustible cigarette sales have fallen roughly 26 percent since 2019 to what one large operator described as an eighty-year low, with the category down another two to two and a half percent in 2025 alone. This is not a cyclical dip. It is a generational exit from a product category.

What replaced it is considerably more profitable and considerably less stable. Spitless nicotine, the pouch category, grew 48.9 percent in dollar sales across the convenience channel over the fifty-two weeks ending in April 2025. Philip Morris International's Zyn holds better than 70 percent of the modern oral segment and received FDA marketing authorization for twenty products in January 2025. Altria's On! shipped more than 177 million cans for an 8.2 percent share.

For an operator, that swap is favorable on margin and unfavorable on predictability. Pouches carry better gross profit per transaction than cigarettes did. They also sit inside a regulatory environment that can change on an FDA docket, and a supply chain that is still finding its level. Philip Morris reported US Zyn shipments down 23.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026 on retailer destocking, even as measured consumer demand grew roughly 10 percent over the same period.

Anyone underwriting a store off a nicotine sales line should read that pair of numbers carefully. Shipment data and consumption data diverged by more than thirty points in a single quarter. A pro forma built on either one alone would have been badly wrong.

The broader category picture supports the same conclusion, that the profitable convenience store is now a food and beverage business with a fuel canopy attached. Packaged beverages are the second-largest inside category at 18.7 percent of sales, up eight-tenths of a point. Alternative snacks, jerky, seeds, nuts, grew 7.9 percent, a jump the industry itself attributes partly to protein-seeking behavior among consumers on GLP-1 medications.

The store that thrives in 2026 sells coffee, prepared food, cold drinks and protein. The store that struggles is still organized around a cigarette rack and a pump.

The map

Where stores closed is more informative than how many.

State	Stores	Year change
Texas	16,504	+88
California	12,143
Florida	9,730
New York	7,561	−143
Georgia	7,092	+39
Ohio	5,833	+38
North Carolina	5,799
Michigan	4,957
Pennsylvania	4,784
Illinois	4,708
Massachusetts		−77
New Jersey		−61
Alaska	185 (fewest)	unchanged

Store counts rose in twenty-two states. The three largest gains were Texas, Georgia and Ohio. The three largest losses were New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

That is not a demand map. Nobody in New Jersey stopped buying coffee. It is a cost-of-operation map, dense, high-land-cost, high-regulation Northeastern markets shedding sites while lower-cost Southern and Midwestern markets add them. Texas alone now holds more than one in ten American convenience stores. Nationally there is one store for every 2,257 people.

One methodological caution belongs here, because it will come up. The industry store count and the federal establishment counts do not agree and cannot be reconciled. The association series counts store locations across a broad definition of the format. The Census Bureau organizes the same universe across several separate industry codes, gasoline stations with convenience stores, convenience retailers, and other gasoline stations, and none of them alone equals the industry figure. The latest County Business Patterns vintage is 2023. Both series are legitimate. Anyone citing one should say which.

Who owns them

Two-thirds of American convenience retail is a small-business sector, and that fact drives everything that follows.

Companies operating ten or fewer stores own 95,672 locations, 63 percent of the total. Roughly 60 percent of all stores are single-store operations. At the other end, companies with 500 or more stores own 33,810 locations, or 22.2 percent.

So when the count falls by 280 in a year, the question is not whether Americans want convenience stores. It is which owners can still afford to run one.

The kitchen is the barrier

The industry's existential threat is widely assumed to be the electric vehicle. For the single-store operator in 2026, it is a hood.

A full commercial kitchen buildout runs roughly $250 to $500 per square foot in current pricing. A 1,000-square-foot kitchen commonly lands between $200,000 and $400,000 and frequently above. A Type I hood, with ductwork, make-up air and fire suppression, runs $40,000 to $75,000 by itself for a full cooking line, which is the number owners most often get wrong; budgeting $15,000 for "the hood" and discovering the balance is a well-documented way to stall a project. Equipment adds another $40,000 to $200,000.

Then the operating side, which is worse. Even a modest program with no hood at all, a licensed pizza brand plus a roller grill, adds roughly $60,000 to $67,000 a year in incremental labor, waste, depreciation and utilities. That requires $17,000 to $19,000 a month in food sales simply to break even. A made-to-order kitchen pushes the break-even past $30,000 a month.

For an operator running a single store, this is a bet-the-business decision with a health-department plan review attached to it.

And the payoff is wildly unequal. The top decile of stores earns 46.6 percent of its inside profit from foodservice. The bottom decile earns 8.3 percent. Gross margins on foodservice run around 55 percent before labor and waste, with hot dispensed beverages near 62 percent. The prize is real. So is the failure rate.

The industry's own historical work found that only the top quartile of firms turns a profit on inside sales alone. For the other three quarters, fuel margin subsidizes a box that does not pay for itself.

The workarounds that exist are instructive precisely because of what they avoid. Hunt Brothers Pizza and Krispy Krunchy Chicken charge no franchise fee and no royalty, supply the equipment, and fit into as little as 59 square feet. Allsup's built a durable business on one item, selling something like 27 million fried burritos a year across 441 mostly rural stores. What does not work at this scale is a conventional franchise layering five to eight percent royalties onto a margin this thin.

Meanwhile the competition is being rebuilt from scratch. A new QuikTrip in Nevada is a brick building with dedicated seating and a security program, a different species of store, built to a cost basis that requires three to four times the average site's fuel volume to work. That is what a single-store operator now faces at the intersection.

The tax nobody legislated

One expense line deserves separate treatment, because it is now the second-largest cost in the industry and almost nobody outside it can name the number.

American convenience retailers paid $21.3 billion in credit and debit card processing fees in 2025, a record, and behind only labor among operating expenses. On the fuel side alone, interchange runs near 8.4 cents a gallon.

The structural problem with that figure is that it is a percentage of a dollar amount rather than a charge per transaction. When pump prices rise, the processing cost rises with them, automatically, without the retailer selling a single additional gallon or receiving any additional service. Operators effectively pay a variable royalty on the volatility of a commodity they do not control.

This is why the 2025 drop in pump prices, from $3.30 to $3.11 a gallon, was quietly good news for the industry despite cutting reported fuel revenue by 5.4 percent. Lower prices mean lower interchange, and gallons rose anyway.

The rest of the operating line held up better than it has in years. Direct store operating expenses rose 4.2 percent, the slowest increase since before the pandemic. Store wages averaged $15.04 an hour across an average of 19.9 employees per store. The channel supported 2.75 million jobs and generated $232 billion in taxes.

But note what that staffing figure implies for the kitchen question. Nineteen employees is a full-service store with a food program. A single-store operator running a traditional box staffs a fraction of that, and adding foodservice does not mean hiring one more person, it means rebuilding the labor model, the scheduling, the training and the food-safety compliance around a category the owner has never run. The equipment cost is the visible barrier. The labor model is the one that actually defeats people.

The loan tape

Which brings the exposure question into focus, because this segment is financed federally.

Analytics.loan's analysis of SBA 7(a) and 504 loan-level data shows gasoline stations with convenience stores as the fourth-largest single-industry category in the history of the 7(a) program, roughly $17.7 billion across some 21,149 loans since 1995, and about $6.5 billion across 4,166 loans since fiscal 2020. Average loan size has risen from roughly $1.4 million to $1.8 million, with about 680 loans in fiscal 2025. Across both programs the sector draws close to $1.3 billion of SBA credit a year, and the 504 program recorded its two largest gas-station years ever in 2024 and 2025.

The default figure depends entirely on which denominator is used, and the two numbers in circulation are both correct.

Measured as dollars charged off against dollars approved, the lifetime rate is about 3.5 percent, below restaurants. Measured as defaults against resolved loans, it runs near 15 percent. High frequency, low severity. When these loans fail, the land, the building and the tanks recover most of the balance, which is a structurally different loss profile from a goodwill-heavy business acquisition. It is also why roughly seven in ten of these 7(a) loans carry terms of 23 years or more, with a median of exactly 25.

One caution on the recent data. Post-2020 vintages have charged off at roughly a quarter of the all-industry rate, about 0.4 percent against 1.9 percent. That is a seasoning artifact and should never be quoted as a lifetime figure. Mature 504 vintages from 2010 to 2016 charged off at about 3.3 percent of disbursed loans against 1.8 percent program-wide.

Geographic concentration is lower than commonly assumed: Texas accounts for roughly 20 percent of deal volume since fiscal 2020 and California about 16 percent, together barely a third of the market.

The regulatory overlay is heavier here than in any other property type in this series. Under SOP 50 10 8, gas stations are one of only three named special-use facility types. A Phase I environmental site assessment is mandatory regardless of loan size. Contamination halts approval or disbursement unless a specific mitigant is documented, state trust fund coverage, a no-further-action letter, indemnification, or an escrow at 150 percent of estimated remediation cost. The appraisal must be a going-concern report allocating value across land, improvements, equipment and intangibles. Equity injection returned to a hard 10 percent on changes of ownership, with seller notes countable only on full lifetime standby and capped at half the injection. And effective July 4, 2026, the 7(a) and 504 programs decoupled, allowing up to $10 million of combined exposure on a single project.

The tank question sits underneath all of it. There are roughly 533,277 active underground storage tanks at about 190,000 facilities nationally, and approximately 275,000 of them are already thirty years old or more. Tank age, material and wall construction are underwriting fields now, not appendix trivia. California demonstrated what happens when a state simply sets a date.

The consolidation machine

The capital markets have read all of this correctly and are acting on it.

Alimentation Couche-Tard withdrew its roughly $47 billion bid for Seven & i on July 16, 2025, citing what it called a calculated campaign of obfuscation and delay; the target pivoted to a large buyback, asset sales and a planned US listing of its North American 7-Eleven business. Sunoco closed on Parkland on October 31, 2025 for about $9.1 billion, adding 3,600-plus North American sites and becoming the largest independent fuel distributor in the Americas. Casey's paid $1.145 billion for 198 CEFCO stores at roughly eleven times adjusted EBITDA and entered Texas as its seventeenth state. Couche-Tard separately took GetGo for $1.6 billion.

The listings followed. ARKO carved out its wholesale arm in a February 2026 offering. Yesway priced in April at about $1.2 billion. EG Group filed its US business, rebranded Cumberland Farms, in July at a reported valuation above $9 billion.

The arbitrage driving all of it is visible in the multiples. A single independent station trades at roughly 2.5 to 4 times earnings on the business alone, or 4 to 7 times including real estate. A fifty-store platform commands high single to low double digits. Casey's trades near 25 times EBITDA. Buy at four, sell into a vehicle valued at twenty-five, and repeat.

The real estate market prices the same hierarchy explicitly. Single-tenant net lease cap rates across all sectors averaged 6.80 percent in the first quarter of 2026. Convenience and gas is the tightest category in the entire net-lease market: Wawa trades at 4.90 to 5.20 percent, 7-Eleven at 5.00 to 5.40, and Circle K at 5.35 to 5.65 on fifteen-year deals.

The credit tenant gets a sub-5.5 percent cap rate. The independent does not get a cap rate at all. He gets an earnings multiple.

And leverage still kills. Mountain Express Oil went from 828 fueling centers to Chapter 7 in five months of 2023.

What cuts against this

Four things complicate the reading above and deserve to be stated rather than buried.

The first is that some of the store-count decline is genuine demand softness, not composition. When Seven & i announced the closure of 444 underperforming North American stores in October 2024, it cited a 7.3 percent August traffic decline following six consecutive monthly declines. Industry-wide, daily transactions per store fell 2.7 percent in 2025 to roughly 1,484, while spend per transaction rose to about $12.13. Fewer visits, bigger baskets. That is a customer-base story, not purely a real estate one. The retail analyst Neil Saunders characterized the 7-Eleven closures as a gentle pruning to keep the chain efficient and profitable, which is fair, and also an admission that a meaningful share of the base had stopped working.

The second is that electric vehicles matter more than this article's framing implies, even if not yet. US finished gasoline supplied peaked in 2018 near 9.33 million barrels a day and ran roughly 4 percent below pre-pandemic levels in 2025. Electric vehicles are about 2 percent of the on-road fleet. New-vehicle EV share peaked at 10.5 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and fell to 5.8 percent in the fourth after the federal purchase credit expired on September 30; one federal read had monthly share touching 12 percent in September before dropping below 6 percent. Near-term volume erosion is small and policy-reversible. A reinstated federal or state mandate would steepen it quickly, and high-adoption coastal metros already justify negative 2 to negative 4 percent annual gallon assumptions in a pro forma.

The third is that foodservice is not a universal answer. The bottom decile of stores earns 8.3 percent of inside profit from food and continues to operate. Quick-service value menus at four and five dollars and drive-thru coffee formats, one of which grew units roughly 87 percent in a single year, are attacking the same daypart with better equipment and better labor models. Adjusted for inflation, convenience foodservice sales reportedly declined in 2025.

The fourth is that the SBA data itself resists the asymmetric-risk framing on recent vintages, where gas station loans currently look better than the program benchmark. That will likely change as the cohort seasons, but it has not yet.

What we are watching

Five measurable things will settle this.

Whether the fuel-selling site count reverses is the first. It has risen for a year into a falling total count. If it turns down, the composition-shift reading fails and this becomes a straightforward contraction.

Electric vehicle new-sales share is the second. A durable return above 10 percent, or a reinstated mandate, moves fuel volume from a background variable to a foreground one.

The seasoning of the post-2020 SBA cohorts is third, and the most consequential for lenders. If those loans resolve at or below the all-industry benchmark once matured, the sector's credit reputation improves materially.

Inflation-adjusted inside sales are fourth. Two consecutive real declines would break a twenty-three-year growth record that currently underwrites a great deal of optimism.

The fifth is ownership concentration. Sixty-three percent of stores currently sit with operators running ten or fewer. If that share breaks below sixty, the small-business character of this industry, and the federal credit exposure attached to it, is changing faster than the store count suggests.

Until then, the accurate description is that the American convenience store is not disappearing. It is being replaced, one intersection at a time, by a larger and considerably more expensive version of itself.

The barrier to entry was never the fuel pump. It is the hood.

Methodology

Figures on SBA lending volume, loan size, term structure, default rates, geographic concentration and program requirements are Analytics.loan's analysis of the Small Business Administration's 7(a) and 504 loan-level FOIA datasets, filtered to the relevant gasoline station and convenience retail industry codes. Note that these codes were revised in the 2022 NAICS update, gasoline stations with convenience stores moved from 447110 to 457110, other gasoline stations from 447190 to 457120, and convenience stores from 445120 to 445131, so any historical series must be constructed across both code sets. Default rates are reported on two bases, dollars charged off against dollars approved and defaults against resolved loans, because the two produce materially different figures and both are in circulation. Post-2020 approval cohorts are unseasoned and their favorable charge-off rates should not be read as lifetime figures.

Store counts, sales, category and gross profit figures are from the 2026 NACS/NIQ TDLinx Convenience Industry Store Count, released January 26, 2026, and the NACS State of the Industry release of April 15, 2026. Readers should note that the industry store count and federal establishment counts from County Business Patterns measure different universes and will not reconcile; the latest CBP vintage is 2023, released in mid-2025. Fuel demand, pump price and electric vehicle share figures are from the Energy Information Administration; new-vehicle EV share also from Cox Automotive. Operator results are from Casey's General Stores, Murphy USA and Alimentation Couche-Tard public disclosures. Net lease cap rates are from published Q1 2026 net-lease market reporting. Kitchen buildout, equipment and operating-cost ranges reflect published 2025 and 2026 practitioner estimates and vary substantially by market and scope.

Key figures for citation

Metric	Value
US convenience stores, Dec 31 2025	151,975, down 280 (−0.2%), second straight annual decline
Fuel-selling locations	122,620, up 768, an eight-year high
Share of stores selling fuel	80.7%
Inside sales, 2025	$341.2bn (+1.7%), 23rd consecutive year of growth
Total industry sales	$817.5bn, down from $837.4bn (2024) and $906.1bn (2022)
Fuel sales	$476.3bn (−5.4%) on a 5.9% pump-price decline; gallons +0.5%
Fuel: share of sales vs share of gross profit	65% vs 38.8%
Foodservice: share of inside sales vs inside gross profit	28.5% vs 38.9%
Foodservice share of inside sales, 2005	11.9%
Stores owned by companies with ≤10 units	95,672, 63%
Retail fuel margin, 2025 vs pre-2020	Above 40 cpg vs ~22 cpg; net 10-15 cpg after costs
Card interchange	~8.4 cpg; $21.3bn industry-wide, second-largest expense after labor
Full commercial kitchen buildout	$250-$500/sq ft; $200,000-$400,000+ typical
Type I hood package alone	$40,000-$75,000
Break-even food sales, modest hot program	$17,000-$19,000/month
Foodservice share of inside profit, top vs bottom decile	46.6% vs 8.3%
SBA 7(a) gas station lending since 1995	~$17.7bn across ~21,149 loans, 4th-largest category
Lifetime charge-off: dollar-weighted vs resolved-loan	~3.5% vs ~15%
Active underground storage tanks	~533,277 at ~190,000 facilities; ~275,000 are 30+ years old
Net lease cap rates: branded c-store vs all sectors	4.90%-5.65% vs 6.80%
Independent station vs platform vs public multiple	2.5-4x vs high single-digit vs ~25x EBITDA

Frequently asked questions

How many convenience stores are there in the United States?

There were 151,975 convenience stores in operation in the United States as of December 31, 2025, down 280 stores from the prior year. That is the second consecutive annual decline and leaves the count roughly 3,000 stores below the 2018 peak of 154,958. Of those stores, 122,620 sell fuel, the highest number in eight years, meaning 80.7 percent of US convenience stores now have pumps.

Is the convenience store industry declining?

No. The store count is falling while sales and gross profit are not. Inside sales reached $341.2 billion in 2025, up 1.7 percent and the twenty-third consecutive year of growth. Total industry sales fell to $817.5 billion, but that decline is a fuel price effect: pump prices dropped 5.9 percent while gallons sold rose 0.5 percent. The industry is re-sorting rather than contracting, with sub-scale and non-fuel locations closing while larger fuel-and-foodservice sites open.

How much of a convenience store's profit comes from fuel?

Less than most people assume. Fuel accounts for roughly 65 percent of total industry sales dollars but only 38.8 percent of gross profit dollars. Foodservice generates 28.5 percent of inside sales and 38.9 percent of inside gross profit. Retail fuel margins averaged above 40 cents per gallon in 2025, but after card interchange of roughly 8.4 cents, distribution and store-level operating expense, the net is closer to 10 to 15 cents. For single-site underwriting, a defensible base case is 28 to 32 cents per gallon.

How much does it cost to add foodservice to a convenience store?

A full commercial kitchen buildout runs roughly $250 to $500 per square foot, putting a 1,000-square-foot kitchen between $200,000 and $400,000 or more. A Type I hood with ductwork, make-up air and fire suppression alone costs $40,000 to $75,000, with equipment adding another $40,000 to $200,000. On the operating side, even a modest program with no hood adds roughly $60,000 to $67,000 a year in labor, waste, depreciation and utilities, requiring $17,000 to $19,000 in monthly food sales just to break even. A made-to-order kitchen pushes break-even past $30,000 a month.

What is the SBA default rate for gas stations and convenience stores?

It depends on the denominator, and both figures in circulation are correct. Measured as dollars charged off against dollars approved, the lifetime rate is about 3.5 percent, below restaurants. Measured as defaults against resolved loans, it runs near 15 percent. The profile is high frequency, low severity: when these loans fail, the land, building and tanks recover most of the balance. Post-2020 vintages currently show charge-offs near 0.4 percent against an all-industry 1.9 percent, but those cohorts are unseasoned and that figure should not be read as a lifetime rate.

What does SBA SOP 50 10 8 require for gas station loans?

Gas stations are one of only three named special-use facility types under SOP 50 10 8. A Phase I environmental site assessment is mandatory regardless of loan size. Where contamination is identified, approval and disbursement are blocked unless a specific mitigant is documented: state trust fund coverage, a no-further-action letter, indemnification, or an escrow at 150 percent of estimated remediation cost. The appraisal must be a going-concern report allocating value across land, improvements, equipment and intangibles. Equity injection returned to a hard 10 percent on changes of ownership. Effective July 4, 2026, the 7(a) and 504 programs decoupled, allowing up to $10 million of combined exposure on a single project.

Are electric vehicles hurting convenience store sales?

Not yet, and less than the headlines suggest. Electric vehicles are about 2 percent of the on-road US fleet. New-vehicle EV share peaked at 10.5 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and fell to 5.8 percent in the fourth after the federal purchase credit expired. US finished gasoline supplied peaked in 2018 and ran roughly 4 percent below pre-pandemic levels in 2025, a decline driven more by fleet efficiency than by electrification. The near-term risk is policy-contingent rather than structural, though high-adoption coastal metros justify negative 2 to negative 4 percent annual gallon assumptions.

Analytics.loan produces lender-grade feasibility and market analysis for SBA, USDA and conventional commercial real estate credit.

Sources:

• NACS/NIQ TDLinx Convenience Industry Store Count, released January 26, 2026, stores in operation as of December 31, 2025

• NACS State of the Industry release, April 15, 2026, sales, category and gross profit data

• U.S. Small Business Administration, 7(a) and 504 loan-level FOIA datasets, gasoline station and convenience retail NAICS codes

• U.S. Small Business Administration, SOP 50 10 8, effective June 1, 2025, and the July 4, 2026 program decoupling

• U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, establishment counts

• U.S. Energy Information Administration, gasoline demand, pump prices and electric vehicle share

• Cox Automotive, new-vehicle electric share

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators, underground storage tank data

• California State Water Resources Control Board, single-walled tank closure deadline

• Casey's General Stores, Murphy USA and Alimentation Couche-Tard public financial disclosures

• Philip Morris International and Altria, nicotine category disclosures

• Boulder Group, Q1 2026 net lease market report, convenience and gas cap rates

• Published 2025 and 2026 practitioner estimates, commercial kitchen buildout and equipment costs