Where to Buy a Business in California
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
137,681
11.8% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
349.2
#1 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
3,788
$4.30B since FY2020, 754 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Loan
$640k
FY2020 through FY2025
California holds 137,681 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 11.8% of the country's buyable market and ranks California #1 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 California
Nobody searches California. 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, Los Angeles deepest among them. Los Angeles is scanned in Metro Target Scans, which ranks the strongest industries in each region by loans approved, median loan size, and seasoned charge-off.
| Los Angeles | 33,732 | 24.5% |
| Orange | 13,494 | 9.8% |
| San Diego | 12,232 | 8.9% |
| Riverside | 7,397 | 5.4% |
| Santa Clara | 7,261 | 5.3% |
| San Bernardino | 6,403 | 4.7% |
| Alameda | 5,769 | 4.2% |
| Sacramento | 5,357 | 3.9% |
| Contra Costa | 4,016 | 2.9% |
| San Francisco | 3,947 | 2.9% |
What Trades Run Deepest in California
- Limited-Service Restaurants26,359 buyable
- Full-Service Restaurants22,999 buyable
- Offices of Dentists12,332 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars9,299 buyable
- Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores5,117 buyable
- Child Care Services4,471 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in California'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.
Before You Close in California
The buyer withholds enough of the purchase price to cover the seller's liability until the state issues a certificate, and a buyer who does not withhold becomes personally liable up to the purchase price. California publishes this under California Revenue and Taxation Code sections 6811 and 6812, and what releases the buyer is the Certificate of tax clearance from the CDTFA.
Read at source on cdtfa.ca.gov. Most states run a version of this rule and the wording decides what a closing has to do, so treat it as the question to put to a lawyer in California rather than as the answer. What every state requires is one table.
Next Door to California
Nobody buys a state. These are the states California touches, with the buyable businesses each holds in the same 36 trades.
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 36 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.