Where to Buy a Business in Texas
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
70,561
8.3% of the U.S. total
Rank by Targets
#2
Of the 10 deepest states
SBA Acquisition Loans
2,815
$3.80B since FY2020
Median SBA Deal
$890k
FY2020 through FY2025
Texas holds 70,561 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 and small enough to finance. That is 8.3% 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.
| Harris | 11,509 | 16.3% |
| Dallas | 6,964 | 9.9% |
| Tarrant | 5,501 | 7.8% |
| Bexar | 4,686 | 6.6% |
| Travis | 3,777 | 5.4% |
| Collin | 3,164 | 4.5% |
| Denton | 2,209 | 3.1% |
| El Paso | 1,967 | 2.8% |
| Fort Bend | 1,807 | 2.6% |
| Williamson | 1,635 | 2.3% |
What Trades Run Deepest in Texas
- Limited-Service Restaurants19,199 buyable
- Full-Service Restaurants14,216 buyable
- Offices of Dentists7,034 buyable
- Child Day Care Services4,392 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars3,947 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors3,727 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side of Texas is in its SBA acquisition-lending profile.
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 21 covered trades, summed from the Census County Business Patterns (2022). 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. Free to cite with attribution.