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Where to Buy a Business in Delaware

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

3,870

0.3% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

367.9

#45 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

90

$90.8M since FY2020, 20 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Loan

$472k

FY2020 through FY2025

Delaware holds 3,870 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 0.3% of the country's buyable market and ranks Delaware #45 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 Delaware

Nobody searches Delaware. 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, New Castle deepest among them.

4 of 4
The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state
New Castle2,21357.2%
Sussex93724.2%
Kent58915.2%
1099930.1%

What Trades Run Deepest in Delaware

Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in Delaware'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 Delaware

Delaware asks a buyer for nothing at closing, with no bulk sale notice, no escrow and no clearance condition anywhere in its revenue title. A transferee's liability for the seller's tax is assessed, paid and collected in the same manner and under the same limitations as the tax itself, with one extra year in which to assess an initial transferee. The Certificate of Tax Clearance the Division of Revenue does issue covers corporate and personal income taxes rather than this. Delaware publishes this under 30 Del. C. section 560, and names no document that releases a buyer, because it asks for none.

Read at source on delcode.delaware.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 Delaware rather than as the answer. What every state requires is one table.

Next Door to Delaware

Nobody buys a state. These are the states Delaware 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.