Where to Buy a Business in Pennsylvania

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

38,936

3.8% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

297.7

#5 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

1,269

$1.21B since FY2020, 278 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$519k

FY2020 through FY2025

Pennsylvania holds 38,936 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 3.8% of the country's buyable market and ranks Pennsylvania #5 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 Pennsylvania

Nobody searches Pennsylvania. 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, Allegheny deepest among them.

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The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state

Allegheny	4,483	11.5%
Philadelphia	3,592	9.2%
Montgomery	3,136	8.1%
Bucks	2,414	6.2%
Delaware	1,775	4.6%
Chester	1,735	4.5%
Lancaster	1,690	4.3%
York	1,208	3.1%
Berks	1,151	3%
Westmoreland	1,124	2.9%

What Trades Run Deepest in Pennsylvania

Full-Service Restaurants6,626 buyable
Limited-Service Restaurants6,171 buyable
Offices of Dentists2,903 buyable
Child Day Care Services2,571 buyable
Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores2,121 buyable
Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars1,934 buyable

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