Where to Buy a Business in Texas

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

87,112

8.4% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

278.4

#2 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

2,815

$3.80B since FY2020, 666 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$890k

FY2020 through FY2025

Texas holds 87,112 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 8.4% of the country's buyable market and ranks Texas #2 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 Texas

Nobody searches Texas. 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, Harris deepest among them.

10 of 10

The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state

Harris	13,729	15.8%
Dallas	8,256	9.5%
Tarrant	6,661	7.6%
Bexar	5,746	6.6%
Travis	4,525	5.2%
Collin	3,810	4.4%
Denton	2,687	3.1%
El Paso	2,376	2.7%
Fort Bend	2,223	2.6%
Williamson	2,078	2.4%

What Trades Run Deepest in Texas

Limited-Service Restaurants19,913 buyable
Full-Service Restaurants14,535 buyable
Offices of Dentists6,986 buyable
Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores5,669 buyable
Child Day Care Services4,673 buyable
Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars4,536 buyable

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