Where to Buy a Business in Alaska
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
2,269
0.2% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
306.6
#51 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
65
$75.8M since FY2020, 8 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Deal
$699k
FY2020 through FY2025
Alaska holds 2,269 businesses a searcher could realistically buy across the trades this site covers: establishments with 5 to 99 employees, big enough to have something to sell, small enough to finance. That is 0.2% of the country's buyable market and ranks Alaska #51 among the states. The number that decides a search, though, is not the state total but where inside the state those businesses sit.
The Deepest Counties in Alaska
Nobody searches Alaska. They search a metro they can drive across to meet an owner. These are the counties with the most buyable targets in the covered trades, Anchorage Municipality deepest among them.
| Anchorage Municipality | 1,000 | 44.1% |
| Matanuska-Susitna Borough | 293 | 12.9% |
| Fairbanks North Star Borough | 275 | 12.1% |
| Kenai Peninsula Borough | 191 | 8.4% |
| Juneau City and Borough | 100 | 4.4% |
| Sitka City and Borough | 19 | 0.8% |
| Ketchikan Gateway Borough | 14 | 0.6% |
| Kodiak Island Borough | 13 | 0.6% |
| Chugach Census Area | 6 | 0.3% |
| Southeast Fairbanks Census Area | 3 | 0.1% |
What Trades Run Deepest in Alaska
- Full-Service Restaurants350 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants325 buyable
- Offices of Dentists222 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars209 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors119 buyable
- Child Day Care Services108 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in Alaska's SBA acquisition-lending profile. The same counts industry by industry across every state are in Where the Businesses Are, and several of these trades restrict who can own at all: the Ownership & License Rules table names which.
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 29 covered trades, summed from the Census County Business Patterns (2023). A county total is a lower bound: Census suppresses cells thin enough to identify a single business, and a trade we have not written a guide for is not counted. SBA figures are change-of-ownership 7(a) approvals (FY2020 through FY2025), approvals rather than closings.