What $159.7 billion in SBA 7(a) loans reveals about who gets funded — and who defaults
Every year the SBA publishes loan-level records for the 7(a) program — the backbone of guaranteed small-business lending. We analyzed every approved loan from fiscal 2020 through 2025: $159.7 billion across 304,320 businesses. Here is what it shows about who gets funded, at what cost, and which industries actually pay it back.
Between 2021 and 2024 the average starting rate on a 7(a) loan nearly doubled, from 5.5% to 11.1%. Businesses responded not by borrowing less often — approvals kept climbing to record highs — but by borrowing smaller. The average loan shrank by roughly a third at the peak before recovering.
Average starting interest rate
Initial rate at approval, by fiscal year
Loans approved per year
Count of approved 7(a) loans
Average loan size
Gross approval amount
Food service and retail dominate the dollars, but construction files the most loans of any sector — just at smaller ticket sizes. The gap between loan count and loan volume is itself a signal: capital-heavy sectors borrow big and rarely; service sectors borrow small and often.
Top sectors by total financing
Sum of gross approvals, FY2020–FY2025 · hover for detail
Top states by total financing
Borrower state · sum of gross approvals
Getting approved is not the same as paying it back. Measured on a seasoned cohort (loans approved FY2020–FY2022, given years to mature), the spread between the safest and riskiest industries is more than threefold — and it maps directly onto how lenders price rate and demand collateral.
Charge-off rate by sector
Share of seasoned FY2020–FY2022 loans that charged off · hover for cohort size
The same dataset, narrowed to the industries we finance most. Trucking borrows the smallest amounts and defaults the most; equipment manufacturers borrow the largest at the lowest rates. Approval size, cost of capital, and default risk move together — and they define what a lender will actually do for each vertical.
| Industry | Loans funded | Avg. approval | Avg. rate | Default rate* |
|---|
*Charge-off rate on the seasoned FY2020–FY2022 cohort. Industries mapped by NAICS: auto repair (8111), security & guard services (5616), truck transportation (484), restaurants (7225/722), construction contractors (236–238), machinery manufacturing (333).
The SBA approved $159.7 billion across 304,320 7(a) loans in fiscal years 2020 through 2025. Annual volume grew from roughly 36,500 loans in FY2020 to over 65,000 in FY2025 — record demand even as borrowing got more expensive.
About $525,000 across all industries from FY2020 to FY2025. It ranges from roughly $240,000 for trucking companies to about $770,000 for machinery manufacturers. The average peaked near $709,000 in FY2021 and fell as interest rates climbed.
Measured on a seasoned FY2020–FY2022 cohort, transportation and warehousing charges off at 5.7% — the highest of any major sector — followed by construction and wholesale trade at about 4.0%. Health care and working-capital-backed sectors sit lowest, near 1.8%.
The average starting rate on a 7(a) loan nearly doubled, from 5.5% in FY2021 to 11.1% in FY2024, before easing to 10.2% in FY2025 — tracking the Federal Reserve's rate cycle. See current ranges in our 2026 business loan rates guide.
We broker across equipment, auto repair, restaurants, trucking and more — and match you to lenders who actually fund your sector.
See If You QualifyFigures are computed directly from the U.S. Small Business Administration's public 7(a) FOIA loan dataset (loan-level records), filtered to fiscal years 2020–2025 and excluding cancelled authorizations that were never disbursed. Interest rate is the initial rate recorded at approval. Charge-off rates use a seasoned cohort — loans approved in FY2020–FY2022 — so that recent originations, which have not had time to default, do not understate risk. Industries are grouped by NAICS code. The dataset reflects federally guaranteed lending only and is a strong proxy for — but not the entirety of — the small-business credit market.