Lender Intelligence
Volume league tables tell you who wrote the most SBA paper. They do not tell you who will fund your change-of-ownership deal. Northeast Bank ranked 4th in the country by 7(a) dollars last year — and does not list business acquisition as a loan purpose at all. Its average loan was $168,000. This index separates the two questions and scores lenders on the one that matters when you are the seller.
SOP 50 10 8.1 takes effect October 1, 2026 and resets what “aggressive” means. DSCR on acquisitions and owner buyouts rises from 1.15× to 1.25×, projections can no longer cure a historical shortfall, a lender-commissioned Quality of Earnings report becomes mandatory at purchase prices of $3M or more, the acquisition portion of the loan is capped at 10-year amortization with no balloon, and minority-investor equity moves into a “limited sources” bucket capped at half the required injection. Deals that pencil today may not pencil in October. Rankings below reflect approvals under the current regime.
Size vs. appetite
Horizontal: total 7(a) volume. Vertical: share of that book spent on change-of-ownership. Dot size scales with acquisition dollars. Click any dot to open its row. The 43 lenders with no published acquisition breakout are omitted here and listed in the table.
The Index
Click any lender to open its scoring math, structure notes, and the caveats attached to its data. Sort by any column.
| Rank | Lender | Aggressiveness | Acq. share | Acq. volume | Acq. loans | Avg ticket | Total 7(a) | Loans | Avg rate |
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Methodology
The score is deliberately simple so that any figure on this page can be traced back to a published approval record. Nothing qualitative is folded into the number.
Acquisition dollars as a share of the lender's total 7(a) dollars. min(share / 55, 1) × 55. A bank that puts most of its book into change-of-ownership deals has built the underwriting muscle for them. The scale tops out at a 55% share, so the most concentrated lenders are not rewarded infinitely for being small.
Absolute acquisition volume, log-scaled between $8M and $900M. (log₁₀(av) − log₁₀(8)) / (log₁₀(900) − log₁₀(8)) × 45. Concentration alone is cheap — a lender doing four acquisition deals a year at 100% of its book has no process. Depth is the counterweight.
Equity-injection overlays, seller-note posture, and time-to-close are the three things buyers most want ranked, and no lender in the top 100 publishes any of them. Rather than invent numbers, those appear as sourced notes on each lender and never touch the score.
Acquisition-led is a 40%+ share. Active is 15–40%. Incidental is under 15% — these lenders will quote you, but you are not their business. Volume traps are large lenders by size whose acquisition share is negligible.
Data provenance and its limits. Total 7(a) volume, loan counts, and average rates are FY2025 approvals (Oct 1, 2024 – Sep 30, 2025). The acquisition cut is CY2025, filtered on the SBA FOIA BusinessAge = "Change of Ownership" flag. The two windows do not align perfectly, so a share figure near a tier boundary should be read as approximate. More importantly, the four public re-publishers of this FOIA extract do not reconcile with each other — reported market totals range from 3,743 to 7,003 loans and $4.33B to $8.29B for what is nominally the same filter, because none publishes a reproducible query. Rank order is consistent across sources and is trustworthy; absolute counts are not, and no single lender-level integer on this page should be quoted in isolation. Figures here follow the largest consistent extract. Two lenders in the top 100 have since changed status: BayFirst National Bank exited SBA 7(a) entirely in September 2025, selling $103M of balances to Banesco USA, and Brookline Bank became Beacon Bank following the Berkshire Hills merger, with SBA still originated through its 44 Business Capital division. Neither is reflected in FY2025 approval data. This page is market intelligence, not a recommendation, a credit opinion, or financial advice.
ExitsIQ
Which lenders will fund a buyer for your business is a function of your numbers, not your broker. ExitsIQ tracks the ten signals that move that answer.
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