The Best States to Buy a Business
Ranked by Buyable Targets
The ranking is a count, not an opinion: how many businesses in each state a searcher could actually buy, meaning an establishment with 5 to 99 employees in one of the 21 trades this site writes buy guides for. Below five employees is a job with nothing to sell; above a hundred the price has left SBA range. Every state is measured the same way, so the order is a fact about supply. The bigger states lead because they hold more businesses, which is exactly why the county list on each page matters more than the rank: a searcher operates in a metro they can reach on a Tuesday, not a state.
| # | State | Buyable Businesses | Share of U.S. | Deepest Metro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 104,976 | 12.4% | Los Angeles |
| 2 | Texas | 70,561 | 8.3% | Harris |
| 3 | Florida | 54,260 | 6.4% | Miami-Dade |
| 4 | New York | 48,124 | 5.7% | New York |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | 32,063 | 3.8% | Allegheny |
| 6 | Illinois | 30,985 | 3.7% | Cook |
| 7 | Ohio | 29,881 | 3.5% | Franklin |
| 8 | North Carolina | 28,477 | 3.4% | Wake |
| 9 | Georgia | 26,507 | 3.1% | Fulton |
| 10 | Michigan | 23,709 | 2.8% | Oakland |
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 21 covered trades, from the Census County Business Patterns (2022). The financing figures on each state page are SBA change-of-ownership 7(a) approvals from the SBA 7(a) FOIA loan-level dataset (FY2025 year-end file), covering FY2020 through FY2025. The count is a lower bound on the market: cash and conventionally financed deals are not in the SBA file, and a trade we have not written a guide for is not in the total. Industry pricing and diligence live in the Industry Buy Guides.