Where to Buy a Business in Florida
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
74,917
6.4% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
320.5
#3 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
2,629
$3.17B since FY2020, 628 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Loan
$769k
FY2020 through FY2025
Florida holds 74,917 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 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 | 8,204 | 11% |
| Broward | 6,591 | 8.8% |
| Palm Beach | 5,723 | 7.6% |
| Orange | 5,193 | 6.9% |
| Hillsborough | 4,870 | 6.5% |
| Pinellas | 3,720 | 5% |
| Duval | 3,662 | 4.9% |
| Lee | 2,867 | 3.8% |
| Brevard | 2,151 | 2.9% |
| Volusia | 1,984 | 2.6% |
What Trades Run Deepest in Florida
- Full-Service Restaurants12,665 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants11,904 buyable
- Offices of Dentists5,209 buyable
- Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores3,439 buyable
- Child Care Services3,436 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors3,414 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in Florida'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 Florida
The buyer withholds enough of the purchase money to cover the seller's unpaid tax, interest and penalties, and a buyer who does not becomes personally liable for them. Florida publishes this under Florida Statutes section 212.10, and what releases the buyer is the Certificate of Compliance, or a transferee-liability audit requested on Form DR-843.
Read at source on flsenate.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 Florida rather than as the answer. What every state requires is one table.
Next Door to Florida
Nobody buys a state. These are the states Florida 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.