Where to Buy a Business in Washington, D.C.

The Opportunity

Washington, D.C. holds 2,412 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 0.2% of the country's buyable market and ranks Washington, D.C. #49 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 Washington, D.C.

Nobody searches Washington, D.C.. 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, District of Columbia deepest among them.

What Trades Run Deepest in Washington, D.C.

• Full-Service Restaurants751 buyable
• Limited-Service Restaurants588 buyable
• Child Day Care Services202 buyable
• Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars196 buyable
• Offices of Dentists156 buyable
• Pharmacies and Drug Stores91 buyable

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

Next Door to Washington, D.C.

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

• Maryland18,216 buyable
• Virginia27,654 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.