Market Depth

Most of Them Cannot Be Bought

There are 18,564 lessors of miniwarehouses and self-storage units in the country, and only 1,521 have five or more employees; the rest are a job attached to a person, and above a hundred employees the price has left SBA range. The market a searcher can actually hunt in is the middle band, a fraction of the number anyone quotes.

So every rate on this page is computed against the buyable count rather than the headline one. A rate whose denominator includes businesses nobody can buy is a rate about the wrong thing.

The Industries We Have Guides For

Lessors of Miniwarehouses and Self-Storage Units changes hands 38 times as often, per buyable business, as offices of optometrists does. A year spent hunting in a market that does not trade is a year, whatever the multiples look like.

For several trades at once, across the states you would actually buy in, size the whole box in Deal Box Depth.

Every Industry

Every industry with at least 200 buyable businesses, sorted by how often one of them is bought with SBA money. Sort by All Businesses to see the crowded markets, by Buyable to see the real ones, and by Per 1,000 to see which actually move.

What This Rate Is Not

It is not how often a business sells. SBA acquisition lending is one financing channel. Cash deals, seller-financed deals, and conventional bank loans are all absent from it, and there is no reason to think they are absent evenly: a dental practice is far more likely to be sold with practice-specific bank debt than a laundromat is, which is part of why dentistry looks thin here and is not.

So the rate is a floor, not a measurement, and it is worth reading between industries rather than as a level. That an industry trades three times as often as another, in the one channel we can actually count, is a real thing to know when you are choosing where to spend a year. What the number cannot tell you is what fraction of that industry is for sale.

What the Market Reports

• A search fund typically takes around 20 months to acquire a company, and 58% of all search funds since 1996 have gone on to buy one at all.

  Source: Stanford GSB, Search Funds Keep Offering a Proven Path to Ownership

• Businesses sold through BizBuySell's network reached $7.95 billion in total enterprise value in 2025, up 3% from 2024, with transaction counts roughly flat.

  Source: BizBuySell Insight Report, 2025 fourth quarter

• The median closed sale price on BizBuySell rose 2% to $350,000 in 2025; median cash flow of sold businesses was $158,950 and median revenue $703,000.

  Source: BizBuySell Insight Report, 2025 fourth quarter

• 44% of business brokers report increased private-equity activity in the small-business market, but only 12% say PE buyers move faster than individual buyers.

  Source: BizBuySell broker survey, 2025 fourth quarter

• SBA lenders approved 7,533 change-of-ownership 7(a) loans totaling $8.82 billion in FY2025, the highest of the last six fiscal years; the median acquisition loan was $700,000.

  Source: Acquisition Lending by State (SBA 7(a) FOIA, our computation)

• Acquisition borrowing costs swung hard with rates: the average initial rate on SBA change-of-ownership loans was 5.31% in FY2021, 10.17% in FY2024, and 9.38% in FY2025.

  Source: Acquisition Lending by State (SBA 7(a) FOIA, our computation)

• The whole 7(a) program approved 78,078 loans for $37.3 billion in FY2025, up from 70,242 loans and $31.1 billion in FY2024.

  Source: SBA Loan Statistics (SBA 7(a) FOIA)

The Retirement Wave Behind the Supply

The figures above are the demand side. The supply side is demographic: how many owners are at retirement age, and how few have a transfer plan.

Method & Source

Business counts: Census County Business Patterns (2023). Loan counts: the SBA's loan-level FOIA data (FY2020 through FY2025, annualized over 6 years). How often these loans go bad is a different question, answered in Default Rates by Industry, and where they happen is in Where the Businesses Are.

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