Where to Buy a Business in Florida
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
54,260
6.4% of the U.S. total
Rank by Targets
#3
Of the 10 deepest states
SBA Acquisition Loans
2,626
$3.16B since FY2020
Median SBA Deal
$769k
FY2020 through FY2025
Florida holds 54,260 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 6.4% of the country's buyable market and ranks Florida #3 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 Florida
Nobody searches Florida. 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, Miami-Dade deepest among them.
| Miami-Dade | 6,135 | 11.3% |
| Broward | 5,036 | 9.3% |
| Palm Beach | 4,227 | 7.8% |
| Orange | 3,843 | 7.1% |
| Hillsborough | 3,542 | 6.5% |
| Pinellas | 2,730 | 5% |
| Duval | 2,692 | 5% |
| Lee | 2,094 | 3.9% |
| Brevard | 1,552 | 2.9% |
| Volusia | 1,448 | 2.7% |
What Trades Run Deepest in Florida
- Full-Service Restaurants12,710 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants11,238 buyable
- Offices of Dentists5,174 buyable
- Child Day Care Services3,375 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors3,310 buyable
- Landscaping Services2,838 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side of Florida 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.