Where to Buy a Business in Georgia

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

32,450

3.1% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

290.2

#9 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

1,311

$1.90B since FY2020, 262 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$920k

FY2020 through FY2025

Georgia holds 32,450 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 3.1% of the country's buyable market and ranks Georgia #9 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 Georgia

Nobody searches Georgia. 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, Fulton deepest among them.

10 of 10

The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state

Fulton	4,016	12.4%
Gwinnett	3,009	9.3%
Cobb	2,614	8.1%
DeKalb	2,041	6.3%
Chatham	1,215	3.7%
Cherokee	780	2.4%
Forsyth	740	2.3%
Muscogee	669	2.1%
Richmond	625	1.9%
Henry	614	1.9%

What Trades Run Deepest in Georgia

Limited-Service Restaurants7,288 buyable
Full-Service Restaurants5,766 buyable
Offices of Dentists2,422 buyable
Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores1,950 buyable
Child Day Care Services1,925 buyable
Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars1,463 buyable

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