Where to Buy a Business in Florida

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

66,950

6.4% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

286.5

#3 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

2,629

$3.17B since FY2020, 628 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$769k

FY2020 through FY2025

Florida holds 66,950 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.

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The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state

Miami-Dade	7,407	11.1%
Broward	5,930	8.9%
Palm Beach	5,020	7.5%
Orange	4,740	7.1%
Hillsborough	4,338	6.5%
Duval	3,273	4.9%
Pinellas	3,266	4.9%
Lee	2,582	3.9%
Brevard	1,925	2.9%
Volusia	1,781	2.7%

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 Day 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.

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.