Where to Buy a Business in Colorado
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
20,918
2% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
351.1
#18 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
1,401
$1.47B since FY2020, 310 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Deal
$654k
FY2020 through FY2025
Colorado holds 20,918 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 2% of the country's buyable market and ranks Colorado #18 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 Colorado
Nobody searches Colorado. 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, Denver deepest among them.
| Denver | 2,624 | 12.5% |
| El Paso | 2,383 | 11.4% |
| Arapahoe | 2,364 | 11.3% |
| Jefferson | 2,125 | 10.2% |
| Larimer | 1,461 | 7% |
| Adams | 1,410 | 6.7% |
| Boulder | 1,309 | 6.3% |
| Douglas | 1,063 | 5.1% |
| Weld | 949 | 4.5% |
| Mesa | 506 | 2.4% |
What Trades Run Deepest in Colorado
- Full-Service Restaurants3,927 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants3,888 buyable
- Offices of Dentists1,711 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars1,292 buyable
- Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores1,040 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors939 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in Colorado'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 Colorado
Anyone buying an existing retail business withholds enough of the purchase money to cover the outstanding taxes the seller owes until the seller provides a tax status letter showing they are paid, and a buyer of the assets otherwise assumes the unpaid liability. Colorado publishes this under Colorado Department of Revenue, buying or selling a business, and what releases the buyer is the Tax Status Letter, requested on Form DR 0096 for a fee of $7 per tax.
Read at source on tax.colorado.gov. Every state runs 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 Colorado rather than as the answer.
Next Door to Colorado
Nobody buys a state. These are the states Colorado touches, with the buyable businesses each holds in the same 29 trades.
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.