Where to Buy a Business in New York

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

58,538

5.6% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

294.6

#4 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

1,092

$1.12B since FY2020, 233 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$597k

FY2020 through FY2025

New York holds 58,538 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 5.6% of the country's buyable market and ranks New York #4 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 New York

Nobody searches New York. 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, New York deepest among them. New York City 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

New York	8,537	14.6%
Kings	5,859	10%
Suffolk	5,405	9.2%
Queens	5,156	8.8%
Nassau	4,818	8.2%
Westchester	3,300	5.6%
Erie	3,012	5.1%
Monroe	2,362	4%
Bronx	1,903	3.3%
Onondaga	1,417	2.4%

What Trades Run Deepest in New York

Full-Service Restaurants12,468 buyable
Limited-Service Restaurants9,477 buyable
Offices of Dentists4,390 buyable
Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars4,301 buyable
Child Day Care Services3,109 buyable
Pharmacies and Drug Stores3,005 buyable

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