Where to Buy a Business in California
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
123,188
11.9% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
312.4
#1 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
3,788
$4.30B since FY2020, 754 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Deal
$640k
FY2020 through FY2025
California holds 123,188 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 11.9% 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 within two hours by loans closed, median size, and seasoned charge-off.
| Los Angeles | 29,777 | 24.2% |
| Orange | 12,019 | 9.8% |
| San Diego | 10,989 | 8.9% |
| Riverside | 6,686 | 5.4% |
| Santa Clara | 6,610 | 5.4% |
| San Bernardino | 5,700 | 4.6% |
| Alameda | 5,206 | 4.2% |
| Sacramento | 4,717 | 3.8% |
| San Francisco | 3,674 | 3% |
| Contra Costa | 3,571 | 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 Day 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.
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.