Resources

The same year of SBA lending can look like 1.7 or 10.1 loans per 1,000 businesses. That swing decides which counties get called lending deserts.

In April 2026, SBA quietly changed how loan status is recorded, and many published charge-off rates now miss about a third of charge-offs.

TMC Financing writes about one of every ten SBA 504 dollars. Beyond that, the CDC scoreboard is full of disputed crowns, outdated counts and claims that their own sources contradict.

Ask who the top SBA lender is in any state and you’ll get a confident answer — and it’ll probably be wrong, or at least only half true. Dollar volume, loan count, fiscal year, calendar year: change any one of those and the “#1 lender” changes too. Here’s what the SBA’s own data actually supports, state by state, and where it doesn’t.

Search “SBA loan interest rate” and every top result shows you the same thing: the legal maximum, often 10% to 15%. But SBA’s own loan-level data tells a different story — most borrowers pay well below that ceiling, and the real number depends far more on loan size and which lender you pick than most guides let on.

Twenty years ago, a typical apartment building had a 71% chance of approval within six months. Today it’s 44%. We priced the wait, city by city, and found that a few months of review can cost more than the lot.

USDA’s REAP Final Rule Takes Effect: Build First, Wait a Year, Then Ask for 25 Percent

Prime is 7.00% and the 504 rate jumped 43 bp in a month. We stress-test both SBA loans on a $3M owner-user warehouse to see which survives underwriting.

SBA acquisition lending has held at a fifth to a quarter of 7(a) dollars through two rate cycles, and the share sitting above the new $3 million diligence threshold has risen every year since 2020. On 1 October the rules change. This is the market as it stands going in, measured from the loan file rather than forecast, so that what happens next can be measured against something real.

USDA does not require a study on every file, and where it does require one, it grades the document against five named components rather than reading it as a narrative. Most conditioned files fail on the same three: economic feasibility treated as a formality, technical feasibility treated as a design detail, and projections built on evidence the reviewer cannot open. The regulation as written, the FY2026 numbers resolved against the Federal Register, and what the May 2026 len

A $9,000 feasibility study is 600 basis points of a $150,000 loan and 26 basis points of a $3.5 million one. Same report, same work. Half of all SBA loans are $150,000 or less. What each of the eight third-party reports on an SBA or USDA file costs in 2026, who is permitted to prepare each, whether it can be financed, and where the whole stack lands against the loan it supports.

On special-purpose property an SBA appraiser must allocate value between land, building, equipment and intangibles. That single judgment sets the collateral position, sizes the 504 debenture, and from 1 October 2026 decides whether a Quality of Earnings report is required at all.

SOP 50 10 8.1 takes effect 1 October 2026 by loan-number date. The four Appendix 15 acquisition categories, the 1.25x historical coverage test, the $3 million Quality of Earnings threshold, the capped equity sources, and the FY2027 fee schedule, with the loan-tape analysis of which asset classes it actually lands on.

The SBA guaranteed a record $44.8 billion in fiscal 2025 and its lending manual never requires a feasibility study for any of it. Lenders ordered thousands anyway. The one permissive clause in the regulation, the five circumstances in which SBA says it will ask, the June 2025 underwriting reset, and how much loan volume runs through the fact patterns where a study is expected.

A $9,000 feasibility study is 180 basis points of a $500,000 loan and 26 basis points of a $3.5 million one. The published fee bands for SBA studies in 2026, the appraisal, valuation and environmental reports they sit beside, what the SOP says about paying for them, and the arithmetic that puts the fee where a credit committee looks at it.

The industry closed 280 stores last year and opened 768 that sell fuel, most of them owned by operators with fewer than ten locations. How the SBA finances a gas station: the environmental file that decides the loan before the credit memo, the special-purpose equity, the franchise rule that returned in June 2025 for branded fuel, and where 7(a) and 504 divide the project.

In 2025 a top-ten chain went bankrupt, the largest automotive services company sold its whole U.S. wash division, and the benchmark operator agreed to go private. On the SBA loan tape, car washes charged off at 5.25 percent against 7.45 percent for all industries. How the SBA finances a tunnel, where 7(a) and 504 split the project, what it costs to build in 2026, and how a credit memo reads a membership base.

Senior housing is at 90 percent occupancy with almost nothing under construction, and the SBA and USDA will finance the next wave on one condition: a state license. How the license decides eligibility under 7(a), 504, Community Facilities and B&I, where each program's loan ceiling stops against $185,000 to $270,000 per unit in hard cost, and what the study has to prove.

USDA's B&I approval rate fell from 89 percent to 53 percent in two years, and SBA's Inspector General keeps naming the same three failures: eligibility, repayment ability, equity injection. The twelve deficiencies that get feasibility studies sent back, why the templates on page one of Google make them worse, and the outline built to the regulations that survives review.

One agency, five programs, five different answers to whether a feasibility study is required. B&I sets a $1 million bright line, Community Facilities splits the report into tiers, REAP has suspended its grants, FIELDS requires a study from every applicant, and Section 538 asks for a market certification instead. The full matrix, plus the 37 factors behind the five components.

Half the top search results say the SBA will finance an apartment building. The regulation says no in one sentence. What the passive real estate rule bars, what the 51 percent exception actually covers, and where rural multifamily money still comes from: USDA Section 538.

The campground industry's fastest-growing revenue line in 2025 was the long-term stay, and it is the one that can make a park ineligible for an SBA loan. The 50 percent transient test as written, the USDA B&I version of the same rule, what the 2026 data say about revenue mix, and what the feasibility study has to prove.

The interconnection queues that supposedly prove America's power crisis are mostly speculative paperwork. Grid operators now expect roughly one gigawatt in five to energize. Deflate the numbers anyway and Texas still has to build a second Texas.

The 75+ population reached 25.7 million in 2024, up 17.6% in four years, but growth is uneven and a state ranking alone underwrites nothing. Every state ranked by size, growth, and concentration, then adjusted for supply per 1,000 residents, the 85+ curve to 2040, income qualification, and the regulatory and labor constraints that decide where projects actually pencil.