Where to Buy a Business in California
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
104,976
12.4% of the U.S. total
Rank by Targets
#1
Of the 10 deepest states
SBA Acquisition Loans
3,787
$4.30B since FY2020
Median SBA Deal
$640k
FY2020 through FY2025
California holds 104,976 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 and small enough to finance. That is 12.4% 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 | 25,768 | 24.5% |
| Orange | 10,324 | 9.8% |
| San Diego | 9,401 | 9% |
| Santa Clara | 5,718 | 5.4% |
| Riverside | 5,437 | 5.2% |
| San Bernardino | 4,773 | 4.5% |
| Alameda | 4,522 | 4.3% |
| Sacramento | 3,991 | 3.8% |
| San Francisco | 3,299 | 3.1% |
| Contra Costa | 3,057 | 2.9% |
What Trades Run Deepest in California
- Limited-Service Restaurants25,948 buyable
- Full-Service Restaurants22,815 buyable
- Offices of Dentists12,337 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars8,686 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors4,374 buyable
- Child Day Care Services4,261 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side of California is in its SBA acquisition-lending profile.
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 21 covered trades, summed from the Census County Business Patterns (2022). 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. Free to cite with attribution.