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Where to Buy a Business in West Virginia

The Opportunity

Buyable Businesses

5,258

0.5% of the U.S. total

Per 100k Residents

297.1

#40 of 51 states by buyable count

SBA Acquisition Loans

87

$122M since FY2020, 14 of them in FY2025

Median SBA Deal

$832k

FY2020 through FY2025

West Virginia holds 5,258 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 0.5% of the country's buyable market and ranks West Virginia #40 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 West Virginia

Nobody searches West 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, Kanawha deepest among them.

10 of 10
The counties with the most buyable businesses in the state
Kanawha65312.4%
Monongalia3787.2%
Cabell3186%
Wood2594.9%
Berkeley2484.7%
Harrison2164.1%
Raleigh1973.7%
Ohio1613.1%
Putnam1563%
Marion1302.5%

What Trades Run Deepest in West Virginia

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

Next Door to West Virginia

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

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.