Where to Buy a Business in Montana
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
4,435
0.4% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
390
#42 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
221
$186M since FY2020, 40 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Deal
$475k
FY2020 through FY2025
Montana holds 4,435 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 0.4% of the country's buyable market and ranks Montana #42 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 Montana
Nobody searches Montana. 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, Yellowstone deepest among them.
| Yellowstone | 683 | 15.4% |
| Gallatin | 603 | 13.6% |
| Missoula | 488 | 11% |
| Flathead | 487 | 11% |
| Cascade | 300 | 6.8% |
| Lewis and Clark | 248 | 5.6% |
| Silver Bow | 118 | 2.7% |
| Ravalli | 105 | 2.4% |
| Lincoln | 53 | 1.2% |
| Park | 52 | 1.2% |
What Trades Run Deepest in Montana
- Full-Service Restaurants776 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants630 buyable
- Offices of Dentists348 buyable
- Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores335 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars256 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors251 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in Montana'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.
Next Door to Montana
Nobody buys a state. These are the states Montana touches, with the buyable businesses each holds in the same 29 trades.
- Idaho6,843 buyable
- North Dakota2,939 buyable
- South Dakota3,273 buyable
- Wyoming2,350 buyable
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.