Where to Buy a Business in Illinois

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

37,406

3.6% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

294.3

#6 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

1,320

$1.53B since FY2020, 310 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$691k

FY2020 through FY2025

Illinois holds 37,406 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 3.6% of the country's buyable market and ranks Illinois #6 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 Illinois

Nobody searches Illinois. 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, Cook deepest among them. Chicago is scanned in Metro Target Scans, which ranks the strongest industries within two hours by loans closed, median size, and seasoned charge-off.

10 of 10

The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state

Cook	14,285	38.2%
DuPage	3,380	9%
Lake	2,155	5.8%
Will	1,977	5.3%
Kane	1,530	4.1%
McHenry	924	2.5%
Madison	837	2.2%
Winnebago	811	2.2%
St. Clair	675	1.8%
Sangamon	651	1.7%

What Trades Run Deepest in Illinois

Limited-Service Restaurants7,628 buyable
Full-Service Restaurants6,878 buyable
Offices of Dentists3,181 buyable
Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores2,215 buyable
Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars1,927 buyable
Child Day Care Services1,870 buyable

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