Where to Buy a Business in Virginia

The Opportunity

Virginia holds 27,654 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 2.7% of the country's buyable market and ranks Virginia #11 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 Virginia

Nobody searches Virginia. 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, Fairfax deepest among them.

What Trades Run Deepest in Virginia

• Limited-Service Restaurants5,418 buyable
• Full-Service Restaurants5,227 buyable
• Offices of Dentists2,272 buyable
• Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores1,654 buyable
• Child Day Care Services1,360 buyable
• Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors1,180 buyable

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

Before You Close in Virginia

The successor withholds enough of the purchase money to cover the tax, penalties and interest until the former owner produces a receipt or a certificate that none are due, and a purchaser who does not is personally liable for them. Virginia publishes this under Virginia Code section 58.1-629, and what releases the buyer is the Tax Commissioner's receipt, or a certificate that nothing is due.

Read at source on law.lis.virginia.gov. Every state runs a version of this rule and the wording decides what a closing has to do, so treat it as the question to put to a lawyer in Virginia rather than as the answer.

Next Door to Virginia

Nobody buys a state. These are the states Virginia touches, with the buyable businesses each holds in the same 29 trades.

• Washington, D.C.2,412 buyable
• Kentucky13,452 buyable
• Maryland18,216 buyable
• North Carolina35,566 buyable
• Tennessee21,354 buyable
• West Virginia5,258 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.