Where to Buy a Business in Michigan

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

29,696

2.9% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

292.8

#10 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

1,177

$1.22B since FY2020, 270 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$635k

FY2020 through FY2025

Michigan holds 29,696 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 2.9% of the country's buyable market and ranks Michigan #10 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 Michigan

Nobody searches Michigan. 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, Oakland deepest among them.

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The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state

Oakland	4,655	15.7%
Wayne	4,366	14.7%
Macomb	2,531	8.5%
Kent	2,268	7.6%
Washtenaw	1,165	3.9%
Genesee	1,061	3.6%
Ingham	858	2.9%
Ottawa	815	2.7%
Kalamazoo	788	2.7%
Livingston	555	1.9%

What Trades Run Deepest in Michigan

Limited-Service Restaurants6,122 buyable
Full-Service Restaurants5,296 buyable
Offices of Dentists2,833 buyable
Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores1,997 buyable
Insurance Agencies and Brokerages1,245 buyable
Pharmacies and Drug Stores1,184 buyable

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