8,191 Business Acquisitions: What SBA Data Reveals About the 2024–2025 Market

Every quarter, the SBA publishes a public record of every 7(a) loan they’ve approved — hundreds of thousands of rows including a field that specifically flags “Change of Ownership” transactions. Most people ignore this data. We didn’t.

We downloaded the full FY2020–FY2025 dataset, filtered to acquisition loans, mapped each transaction to one of 40 service business industries, and ran the numbers. What came back was the clearest picture of the lower-middle market we’ve seen anywhere — not estimates, not broker surveys, but actual closed transactions.

Here’s what we found.

What We Did and Why

Valuation multiples — the X times earnings that determines what your business is worth — are widely published. The problem is they’re mostly backward-looking, aggregated, and disconnected from what’s actually happening in specific industries right now.

The SBA 7(a) loan program finances a huge portion of lower-middle-market acquisitions (deals under roughly $5M). When a buyer takes out an SBA loan to buy an HVAC company, that transaction gets recorded in a federal database. It’s public. And the loan amount gives us a reliable proxy for purchase price, since SBA rules typically require the buyer to put in 10–15% equity, meaning the loan covers about 85% of the transaction value.

This is not a perfect dataset — all-cash deals and PE acquisitions don’t go through SBA financing. But for the kinds of businesses most service business owners are thinking about selling (sub-$5M deals, individual and small PE buyers), the SBA data captures a significant slice of real market activity.

Key Findings at a Glance

What’s Hot: The Fastest-Moving Industries

The headline story in the FY2023–FY2024 data is a broad acceleration in deal activity. The interest rate environment that suppressed dealmaking in 2022–2023 started to ease, and buyers came back hard. But not evenly across industries.

A few things stand out here.

IT managed services is the standout story. MSPs (managed service providers) have been acquisition targets for PE firms for years at the larger end of the market. What the SBA data shows is that the same dynamic has now hit the sub-$2M deal range. Buyers are acquiring small MSPs at more than double the rate they were two years ago, paying a median of $1.1M. These businesses have what every buyer wants: recurring monthly revenue, multi-year contracts, low customer concentration, and margins that hold up in a downturn.

Electrical contractors jumped hard. An 85% increase in one year is unusual for a mature, established trade. Our read: the infrastructure build-out — data centers, EV charging infrastructure, commercial retrofits — created a surge in demand for electrical capacity that made these businesses strategically valuable to both larger contractors and PE-backed platforms buying up trades businesses.

HVAC keeps compounding. It was already the most actively acquired trade in the dataset (691 deals over five years), and it accelerated further. FY2025 data, while partial, is tracking even higher. Buyers understand that HVAC has recurring service revenue (maintenance contracts), essential demand that doesn’t disappear in recessions, and a retirement wave of boomer owners who built solid businesses and are ready to exit.

What Buyers Are Actually Paying

Multiples are interesting. Dollar amounts are what matters when you’re deciding whether to sell. Here’s what the SBA data shows for estimated purchase prices (loan amount ÷ 0.85) across industries with meaningful sample sizes.

Notice the wide spread in every row. The distance between the 25th and 75th percentile — what we call the middle 50% of deals — is large in every category. In HVAC, half of all deals priced between $412K and $1.97M. That’s a $1.5M gap for businesses that are presumably in the same industry.

That gap exists because purchase price isn’t just a function of revenue or earnings. It’s a function of how well the business is prepared. The businesses at the top of the HVAC range are not just bigger — they have recurring maintenance contracts, documented processes, management that doesn’t depend on the owner, and clean books. The ones at the bottom of the range are businesses where the buyer is essentially paying for a job, not an asset.

The same pattern holds in every industry. Exit readiness — the degree to which a business can run and grow without its owner — determines where in that range you land.

Where the Action Is

Deal activity is not evenly distributed across the country. Three states account for a disproportionate share of SBA-financed acquisitions in our dataset.

Florida and California leading is expected given population and business density. Texas at number three reflects both size and the strong pool of acquisition-hungry buyers in the Sun Belt. The surprise is Minnesota at fourth — a relatively small state that punches well above its weight in lower-middle-market deal activity, driven by a mature business owner demographic and an active SBA lending community.

What this means practically: if your business is in Florida, Texas, or California, you’re operating in the most liquid buyer markets in the country. More buyers competing for deals means better terms, faster closings, and in many cases higher prices. If you’re in a less active market, you may need to think more deliberately about how to attract out-of-state buyers or PE platforms that are actively building in your region.

What’s Cooling Off

Not every category is accelerating. A few industries saw declining deal volume from FY2023 to FY2024, which is worth paying attention to if you’re in one of them.

Commercial janitorial softening is notable because it was a strong category coming out of COVID (cleaning demand surged). The pullback may reflect some market saturation as buyers who paid aggressive prices in 2021–2022 aren’t finding the returns they expected, making new buyers more cautious.

Senior living is more complicated. The long-term demand thesis — aging baby boomers, shortage of capacity — remains intact. But rising labor costs and regulatory complexity have made operators more selective, and financing has gotten harder for smaller facilities. The category hasn’t gone cold; it’s just more selective. Buyers are paying more attention to operator quality and census fill rates than they were a few years ago.

A declining deal count in your industry isn’t necessarily catastrophic — it can mean the window for easy exits is narrowing, which is exactly when being exit-ready matters most. A well-prepared business in a cooling market still sells. An unprepared one in a cooling market sits.

What This Means If You’re Thinking About Selling

A few things stand out from this data that are worth sitting with.

The market is more active than most people think. Business owners often assume there aren’t many buyers for a company like theirs. The SBA data says otherwise. In HVAC alone, there were 152 acquisitions in FY2025. That’s not a thin market. That’s a market with real buyer demand, and if your business isn’t positioned to attract it, you’re leaving money on the table.

The spread between median and top-quartile is where preparation lives. In almost every industry, the gap between the median deal price and the 75th percentile is $1M or more. That gap doesn’t close by accident. It closes because a seller did the work beforehand: cleaned up their financials, reduced owner dependency, documented their processes, built recurring revenue, and hired a broker who knew how to run a competitive process.

Timing matters more than most people act like it does. The industries showing accelerating buyer demand in 2024–2025 may not look the same in 2027. Interest rates, PE capital cycles, and industry-specific dynamics shift. If you’re in an industry that’s hot right now, that’s not an argument to rush — it’s an argument to start preparing now so you can go to market when conditions are still favorable.

Geography is a lever, not a given. If your business is in a high-activity state, you may have more natural buyer interest than you realize. If you’re in a low-activity market, a good broker will know how to reach out-of-state buyers and PE firms that are actively expanding in your region.

Methodology