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By Travis Yule — CEO & Founder, Full Send Funding
In FY2025 the SBA guaranteed 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion, about $477,000 a loan; at a 6.75% prime the variable-rate cap runs from 13.25% down to 9.75%.
In one sentence: The SBA guaranteed 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion in fiscal year 2025 — about $477,000 a loan — and prices them by a spread over prime that narrows with size, so at a 6.75% prime the cap runs from 13.25% at or below $50,000 to 9.75% above $350,000, and the program is built for the large loan, not the fast one.
In fiscal year 2025 the SBA guaranteed 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion — about $477,000 a loan — and 6,750 504 loans for $7.8 billion.[1] With prime at 6.75%,[5] the variable-rate cap is 13.25% on a loan of $50,000 or less and 9.75% above $350,000, a spread over the base rate that narrows as the loan grows.[4]
Those two sentences carry most of what a business can actually use, and they contradict the two things most often said about the program. The first is that "the SBA rate" is a number. It is not: it is four spreads over a base rate the banks set, so the cheapest loans in the program are the largest ones and the dearest are the ones a small operating business is most likely to ask for. The second is that a 7(a) loan is one product with one timeline. The SBA publishes a turnaround for its own step in the process; it publishes nothing for the lender's stages before and after it, and the average loan in the program is closer to half a million dollars than to the $50,000 or $150,000 a working-capital applicant usually has in mind.
This page is a statistics reference, built only from figures the SBA and the Federal Reserve publish and confirmed on their own sites in September 2026, with every derived number — every average, every cap at today's prime, every guaranteed-dollar figure — recomputed from its stated inputs. Where an official figure could not be confirmed, the page says so rather than substituting a vendor's estimate, and there are six such gaps named below. The comparison at the end is the honest one: what these numbers mean for a business that needs working capital this month rather than this quarter, and where the program is the right answer anyway.
The SBA's fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30, and its year-end release for FY2025, published September 30, 2025, states the totals plainly: 84,400 7(a) and 504 loans for $44.8 billion, made up of 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion and 6,750 504 loans for $7.8 billion.[1] The agency's annual report, released January 20, 2026, restates the combined figure as 85,000 loans for $45 billion — the same numbers rounded further, not a revision.[2]
Counts and dollars as published by the SBA in its September 30, 2025 year-end release and its January 20, 2026 annual-report release, retrieved from sba.gov in September 2026. The average column is our division of the published dollars by the published count; both inputs are rounded by the SBA, so each average carries about half a percent of rounding either way. The combined count the SBA reports (84,400) differs from the sum of the two program counts (84,350) by rounding.
Three readings of that table.
The 7(a) program is the volume. It is 92% of the loans by count (77,600 ÷ 84,400) and 83% of the dollars (37 ÷ 44.8). The 504 program — long-term fixed-rate financing for major fixed assets, delivered through certified development companies[10] — is a smaller number of much larger loans.
The average 7(a) loan is not a small loan. $37 billion divided by 77,600 loans is $476,804, and because both inputs are published rounded — the count to the nearest hundred, the dollars to the nearest hundred million or so — the true mean sits between $475,853 ($36.95 billion ÷ 77,650) and $477,756 ($37.05 billion ÷ 77,550). Call it $477,000. That is a mean, and a mean is pulled upward by every $5 million loan in the pool, so the median loan is smaller; the SBA's releases do not publish a median, and this page does not guess one.
The 504 average is more than double it. $7.8 billion divided by 6,750 is $1,155,556, which is what a program built around real estate and heavy equipment looks like.
The release also describes the agency's pace: on average it guaranteed 1,600 small business loans a week worth over $860 million, or 320 loans a workday for $170 million.[1] Those are round numbers, and it is worth checking whether they agree with the totals, because a statistics page that does not check its own source is a press release with footnotes.
Weekly and per-workday pace as stated in the SBA's September 30, 2025 release ("1,600 small business loans per week worth over $860 million – or 320 loans per workday for $170 million"), retrieved from sba.gov in September 2026. Dollars per loan is dollars ÷ loans on each row; the yearly scaling multiplies the weekly row by 52 and the workday row by 260 (52 × 5). The reported total is from the same release.
They agree. Fifty-two weeks at 1,600 loans is 83,200, against 84,400 reported; fifty-two weeks at $860 million is $44.7 billion, against $44.8 billion. The per-loan figure from the weekly pace, $537,500, is the combined 7(a)-and-504 average, and it sits within 1.3% of the $530,806 the year-end totals give. The numbers were computed from the same ledger, and they reconcile.
About $477,000 in fiscal year 2025: $37 billion of approvals divided by 77,600 loans.[1] The figure is a mean, not a median, and it describes the whole program — a $4 million hotel acquisition and a $40,000 Express line both count once.
The number matters because it corrects a picture. A business owner searching for an "SBA loan" is usually picturing a modest working-capital facility at a low rate. The program's centre of gravity is elsewhere: real estate, acquisitions, equipment, and refinancing at sizes where the rate cap is lowest. That is not a criticism of the program; it is the reason the program's headline rate and the rate a small applicant is offered are different numbers, and the section on the rate cap below shows exactly how different.
One comparison for scale, and it is stated as scale rather than as a competitor's claim: we fund from $5,000 to $10 million, sized at 80% to 150% of a business's monthly revenue, so a business depositing $50,000 a month is typically looking at $40,000 to $75,000 — between a twelfth and a sixth of the 7(a) mean. The two products serve different sizes of need as much as different speeds, and the full comparison of funding options sets them side by side.
The SBA has said, for two fiscal years running, that growth in the program has been driven by its smallest loans. Its FY2024 Capital Impact Report, released October 24, 2024, reported that loans under $150,000 had doubled since FY2020 and grown 33% since FY2023, and that for the first time since 2008 the agency made more than 100,000 financings across its core programs in a year — 103,000, a 22% increase over FY2023, with an annual capital impact of $56 billion.[11]
What those releases do not carry is the thing a reference would most like to print: the count and dollar share of FY2025 7(a) loans at or under $150,000, or at or under $350,000 — the 7(a) Small Loan threshold. The SBA does publish that breakdown, in its 7(a) and 504 activity reports on data.sba.gov and its lender-report pages, by size band, by state and by lender. We could not confirm the FY2025 size-band figures in an extract from the agency's own site for this page, so they are not stated here, and no vendor's restatement of them is used in their place. A reader who needs the share of small loans should take it from the activity report directly and cite that.
The same discipline applies to the prior year. The FY2024 release states program-wide totals — 103,000 financings, $56 billion of capital impact — and not the 7(a) program's own count and dollars.[11] We have not stated an FY2024 7(a) figure, so this page carries no year-over-year growth rate for the program; the SBA's monthly and yearly activity report is where that series lives.
Interest rates on 7(a) loans are negotiated between the borrower and the lender, subject to SBA maximums.[3] The maximums for a variable-rate loan are in the Code of Federal Regulations, and they are spreads over a base rate that step down with loan size: for loans of $50,000 and less the rate may not exceed 6.5 percentage points over the base rate; for loans of more than $50,000 up to and including $250,000, 6.0 points; for more than $250,000 up to and including $350,000, 4.5 points; and for loans of more than $350,000, 3.0 points.[4] The first rate change may occur on the first calendar day of the month following initial disbursement, using the base rate in effect on the first business day of that month, and changes may occur no more often than monthly after that.[4]
The base rate most lenders use is the prime rate. The prime rate is not set by the Federal Reserve; it is the rate posted by a majority of the twenty-five largest insured U.S.-chartered commercial banks, and the Board reports it on its H.15 release.[6] As of the week of August 26, 2026, that rate was 6.75%.[5]
Spreads from 13 CFR §120.214 as published on ecfr.gov; prime rate of 6.75% from the Federal Reserve's bank prime loan rate series as of the week of August 26, 2026 (FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, sourced from the Board's H.15 release). Cap = 6.75 + spread. Both retrieved September 2026. Lenders may price below the cap; the upfront guaranty fee is not part of the rate.
The maximum spread over the base rate falls from 6.5 points at or below $50,000 to 3.0 points above $350,000, so at the current 6.75% prime the smallest loans may be priced 3.5 points higher than the largest.
Spreads from 13 CFR §120.214 (ecfr.gov); prime rate of 6.75% from the Federal Reserve's bank prime loan rate series for the week of August 26, 2026 (FRED). Cap = 6.75 + spread. The prime rate moves; the spreads do not unless the regulation is amended.
Two things to read off the table. First, the smallest loans are the dearest by design: a $45,000 loan may be priced at 13.25% today and a $400,000 loan at 9.75%, a difference of 3.5 points on the same base rate on the same day. The program's reputation for single-digit rates is earned at the top of the size range and does not travel down it. Second, these are ceilings. A lender may price below the cap, and a strong file at a competitive bank often is; the cap is the number to hold a quote against, not the number to expect. What the cap excludes is the upfront guaranty fee, covered below, which the lender may pass on to the borrower and which is a cost of the loan even though it is not part of the rate. That gap between a quoted rate and the total cost of the money is what the state disclosure statutes address on the non-bank side of the market, where the duty is to state the price rather than to cap it: the disclosure a commercial financing offer must carry, state by state sets out which states impose one and what each form has to show.
The prime rate moves. Every cap in the table is 6.75% plus a fixed spread, so if prime changes by a quarter point every cap changes by exactly a quarter point in the same direction; the spreads do not move unless the regulation is amended. A reader in a later month should substitute the current H.15 figure and add the spread.
A 7(a) loan is a bank's loan with a federal guaranty on part of it. For most 7(a) loans the SBA guarantees up to 85% of loans of $150,000 or less and up to 75% of loans above $150,000; on SBA Express loans the guaranty is 50%; on Export Express, Export Working Capital Program and International Trade loans it is 90%.[3]
The guaranty is a promise to the lender, not to the borrower — the borrower owes the whole loan regardless — but it explains the program's economics and, indirectly, its timeline. On a $500,000 standard loan the SBA stands behind $375,000 and the lender carries $125,000 of unguaranteed exposure; on a $150,000 loan the lender's exposure is $22,500. The lender is still a lender, underwriting its own money on its own credit policy, and the guaranty reduces its loss on a default without changing its judgement about whether one is likely.
At 85% up to $150,000 and 75% above, the lender's unguaranteed exposure on a $150,000 loan is $22,500 and on a $5 million loan is $1.25 million — the lender is still lending its own money.
Guaranty percentages from the SBA's 7(a) terms, conditions and eligibility page: 85% on loans of $150,000 or less, 75% above. Guaranteed portion = loan × percentage; exposure = loan − guaranteed portion. Standard 7(a) only; SBA Express carries 50%.
At the program level the same arithmetic gives a sense of the federal exposure: if every one of the $37 billion of FY2025 7(a) approvals carried the 75% guaranty, the guaranteed amount would be $27.75 billion, and the true figure is somewhat higher because loans of $150,000 or less carry 85% and somewhat lower because Express loans carry 50%. The SBA does not publish the blended figure in its year-end release, so we do not state one.
Two fees attach to every 7(a) loan, and they are paid by different people. Lenders must pay an upfront fee — the SBA guaranty fee — for each loan guaranteed under the program, and are permitted to pass the cost of that fee on to the borrower. Lenders must also pay an annual service fee based on the outstanding principal balance of the guaranteed portion of the loan, and that fee cannot be charged to the borrower.[3]
Both are set for each fiscal year by notice. The notice for FY2026 — Information Notice 5000-872051, effective for all 7(a) loans approved from October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026 — sets the lender's annual service fee at 0.55% of the outstanding balance of the guaranteed portion of each loan, and sets the upfront fee as a percentage of the guaranteed portion in tiers by loan size.[7] For FY2026 the agency also waived the upfront fee entirely on 7(a) manufacturing loans of up to $950,000, and set both the upfront fee and the annual service fee to 0% on 504 manufacturing loans, for the same October-to-September window.[8]
Who pays each fee is from the SBA's 7(a) terms, conditions and eligibility page; the FY2026 annual service fee and the notice's effective window are from Information Notice 5000-872051; the manufacturing waivers are from the SBA's September 18, 2025 release. All retrieved from sba.gov in September 2026. The upfront fee tiers were not confirmed in an extract and are deliberately left to the notice.
We have not reproduced the upfront fee tiers themselves, because we could not confirm the schedule in an extract from the notice, and a fee table that is one tier wrong is worse than a pointer to the notice; the notice is one page and it is the document a lender will quote from. What can be said with confidence is the shape: the fee is a percentage of the guaranteed portion, not of the loan, so on a $500,000 loan guaranteed at 75% it is levied on $375,000, and a lender that passes it through is adding a closing cost the rate cap does not include. The annual service fee, by contrast, is the lender's own cost: on that same $375,000 guaranteed balance it is $2,062.50 in the first year at 0.55%, falling as the balance amortizes, and it is one reason a lender's margin on a 7(a) loan is thinner than the rate suggests.
This is information, not legal advice; the regulation, the SBA's standard operating procedure and the loan documents control, and your lender's SBA department or an attorney should read yours.
Most 7(a) loans carry a maximum of $5 million; loans made under the SBA Express and Export Express delivery methods carry a maximum of $500,000.[3] Loan terms are ten years or less unless the loan finances or refinances real estate or equipment with a useful life exceeding ten years, in which case the maximum is twenty-five years including extensions.[3] A 504 loan carries a maximum of $5.5 million, or up to $5.5 million per project for up to three projects, not exceeding $16.5 million in total, for certain energy projects, with ten-, twenty- and twenty-five-year maturities.[10] The SBA's third business loan program, the Microloan program, lends up to $50,000 through non-profit intermediary lenders.[13]
The limit that changed this year is the combined one. Since July 2026 a qualified borrower that secures a 7(a) loan first may access up to $5 million through the 7(a) program and up to $5 million through the 504 program, for a combined total of $10 million in SBA-backed financing, where the previous cumulative limit was $5 million.[9]
Standard 7(a), Express and export figures from the SBA's 7(a) terms, conditions and eligibility page; 504 figures from the SBA's 504 loans page; the Microloan ceiling from the SBA's loans overview page; the combined limit from the SBA's July 7, 2026 release. All retrieved from sba.gov in September 2026.
To keep the eligibility screen in one place: the terms page states that a business must be an operating business that operates for profit, be located in the United States, be unable to obtain the desired credit on reasonable terms from non-federal sources, and be creditworthy and demonstrate a reasonable ability to repay the loan.[3] The credit standard that applies since the SBA sunset its SBSS pre-screen in January 2026 — the lender's own conventional credit analysis above a published debt service coverage floor — is covered in how the SBSS sunset changed 7(a) small loans and is not repeated here.
The SBA publishes a maximum turnaround time for its own step, stated in business days and broken out by delivery method, on its Types of 7(a) loans page — the same page that describes SBA Express as an expedited processing option in which the lender uses its own procedures in exchange for the lower 50% guaranty.[12] We do not restate the figures here, and the reason is worth stating plainly: searches of the agency's own site returned two different ranges for that turnaround and neither resolved to a page we could name, so a reader who needs the number should take it off the SBA's page rather than off ours. What survives without a number is the part that matters — the published time covers the SBA's step, the guaranty decision on a file the lender has already underwritten, and nothing else.
What the SBA does not publish is any measure of the time from a borrower's first conversation with a lender to money in the account. The lender's stages — assembling two to three years of returns and financial statements, packaging, underwriting, credit approval, ordering appraisals where there is collateral, closing — are not reported by any agency, and they are where the weeks go. Our working model of that whole path, stated stage by stage as a range so a reader can substitute their own lender's figures, is in the honest 7(a) timeline; its total is five to thirteen weeks for a complete, eligible file, and it is an estimate, not a survey. The SBA's published turnaround is one row of that model, and it is the only row any agency measures.
The FY2025 pace figures put the SBA's own throughput in perspective: 320 loans a workday is a large machine, and it is not the bottleneck.[1] A file that has cleared the lender's underwriting and credit approval is, by the SBA's own published turnaround, a matter of business days from a guaranty. A file that has not is not in the queue yet.
A landscaping company with $60,000 of average monthly deposits needs $75,000 to buy two trucks' worth of spring inventory and carry payroll through the first six weeks of the season. It has two full years of filed returns and a clean last twelve months. The request is under $150,000, so it sits in the 85% guaranty band, and under $250,000, so its variable-rate cap is 6.0 points over base — 12.75% at a 6.75% prime.
The 7(a) loan at the cap. $75,000 at 12.75% on a ten-year amortization is a payment of $1,108.80 a month. In the first twelve months the business pays $13,306, of which $9,336 is interest and $3,970 is principal, and it still owes $71,030 at the end of the year. The SBA's guaranteed portion is $63,750; the lender's exposure is $11,250. The upfront guaranty fee, if the lender passes it through, is a closing cost on top, computed on the $63,750 guaranteed portion at the FY2026 tier for that size.[7] Over the full ten years the interest is $58,056 — but the like-for-like figure against a one-year product is what a year of the capital costs, and that is $9,336.
The alternative. $75,000 from us at a 24% cost of capital on a twelve-month term — cost of capital meaning total cost as a share of the amount funded, so the payback is $93,000 and the cost is $18,000 — collected as fifty-two weekly remittances of $1,788.46 against weekly deposits of about $13,846. That is 12.9% of receipts, which clears a normal week with room; the decision comes within 24 business hours of a complete file and the money within 24 hours of approval. No federal guaranty stands behind it; we file no UCC-1 lien against the business and our agreements carry no confession of judgment.
Loan: $75,000 at 12.75% — the 6.0-point cap for a loan of $50,001 to $250,000 over a 6.75% prime — amortized over 120 months; interest and principal are summed over months 1–12 of that schedule and the ten-year interest is 120 payments less principal. The upfront guaranty fee is excluded. Guaranteed portion = $75,000 × 85%. Advance: cost of capital means total cost as a share of the amount funded, so payback is $75,000 × 1.24 = $93,000, cost $18,000, and the weekly remittance is $93,000 ÷ 52.
The difference. $18,000 less $9,336 is $8,664, and that is the price of the difference in speed. It is worth paying if the six weeks of season the loan would miss are worth more than $8,664 of contribution, and not otherwise; on a 60-day wait the break-even is $4,332 a month of margin foregone, on 90 days it is $2,888. A landscaping company that cannot buy inventory until the loan closes is not choosing between 12.75% and 24%; it is choosing between a season and part of a season, and the arithmetic of waiting is the tool for that choice. A company with no deadline on the money should take the loan, and we would say so.
The program's numbers are a portrait of what it is for, and the portrait is consistent.
For a business that needs capital this month, that portrait resolves into a sequence rather than a choice. Take the capital that reads the bank account — fast working capital sized to deposits, decision within 24 business hours, one to three business days end to end — for the need with a deadline, run the season, and apply for the 7(a) loan with the results in the file for the permanent base at the program's rate. A small business loan from us on a longer term is sometimes the middle instrument. The mistake is treating the two as competitors for one decision, and the statistics on this page are the reason: they describe a program that funds half-million-dollar loans in weeks, superbly, and was never designed to fund a $75,000 gap in days.
What we look at, for the record, is the same question the bank asks — will this business make the payments — answered from different evidence: three months of bank statements, deposit consistency, average daily balance, negative days and existing positions, on a soft credit pull only. How working capital underwriting actually works is the long version; roughly 90% of applicants are approved, and the cost of capital runs from 4.5% to 45% depending on qualifications and term length, which is why the worked example's 24% is one point in a range and not the range.
A 7(a) loan is the wrong tool for a need that closes before the loan can; for a business that cannot yet produce the two to three years of statements the file requires; for an amount at or below $50,000, where the cap is 6.5 points over base[4] and the program's price advantage is at its narrowest; for a borrower unwilling to sign a personal guarantee or pledge collateral where the lender asks for either; and as a bridge, because a ten-year loan taken for a sixty-day gap leaves the business carrying nine years and ten months of a facility it did not need.
Our capital is the wrong tool for a need with no deadline and no margin attached — a refinance, a permanent cushion, an owner buy-out — where the rate difference is the whole cost and the loan wins; for an amount large enough and a horizon long enough that the 3.0-point spread above $350,000 compounds for a decade; for a business whose receipts are too lumpy to size a fixed weekly remittance against the worst normal week; as a second or third position on top of an existing one, which is stacking and is a decline here; and for a structural loss, where borrowing at any rate adds a payment to a business that already spends more than it makes. When borrowing is the wrong answer is the test to run before either application.
And this page is the wrong tool for anything it does not source. It carries no FY2025 loan-size shares, no FY2024 7(a)-only totals, no median loan size, no blended guaranty figure, no upfront fee tiers and no turnaround measured in days, because none of those appeared in an official extract we could confirm; each gap is named where it falls, and the SBA's activity reports, its FY2026 fee notice and its Types of 7(a) loans page are where the figures live.
In fiscal year 2025 the SBA guaranteed 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion — about $477,000 a loan — and 6,750 504 loans for $7.8 billion, at a pace of 1,600 loans and $860 million a week.[1] The variable-rate cap is a spread over the base rate that narrows with size, 6.5 points at or below $50,000 down to 3.0 points above $350,000,[4] which at the current 6.75% prime[5] is 13.25% down to 9.75%. The SBA guarantees up to 85% of loans of $150,000 or less and 75% above, 50% on Express, 90% on the export programs;[3] the lender pays an upfront fee it may pass to the borrower and a 0.55% annual service fee it may not;[3][7] the standard maximum is $5 million, Express $500,000,[3] and a 7(a) and a 504 loan may now combine to $10 million.[9] The SBA publishes a maximum turnaround for its own guaranty step in business days, by delivery method,[12] and publishes nothing about the lender's weeks on either side of it.
For a business with a deadline this month, those are the statistics of a program that will fund its permanent base next quarter, not its gap this week. If you want to know where your own numbers land, check what you would qualify for — a minute, soft pull only — or call 518-312-0382 and ask us directly whether you should be waiting for the bank.
Every count, dollar total and pace figure on this page is quoted from the SBA's own releases — the September 30, 2025 year-end release for fiscal year 2025,[1] the January 20, 2026 annual-report release,[2] and the October 24, 2024 release of the FY2024 Capital Impact Report[11] — and every rate rule, guaranty percentage, program maximum and fee rule from the SBA's published terms,[3] the Code of Federal Regulations,[4] the FY2026 fee notice,[7] the manufacturing fee-waiver release,[8] the July 7, 2026 combined-limit release,[9] the 504 and loans overview pages[10][13] and the Types of 7(a) loans page.[12] The prime rate is from the Federal Reserve's bank prime loan rate series for the week of August 26, 2026,[5] and the description of what the prime rate is from the Board of Governors.[6] Every source was last verified against an extract from sba.gov, ecfr.gov or a Federal Reserve host on September 5, 2026. The one time figure the SBA publishes is the maximum turnaround on its own step, and this page cites the page that carries it without restating the number, because sba.gov extracts returned two different ranges for it and neither named the page it came from.
Everything derived is arithmetic on those inputs and nothing else: each average is the published dollars divided by the published count; each rate cap is 6.75 plus the regulatory spread; each guaranteed-dollar figure is the loan multiplied by the published percentage; the pace check multiplies the weekly figures by 52 and the workday figures by 260; and the worked example amortizes $75,000 at 12.75% over 120 months and sums the first twelve months, against an advance at a 24% cost of capital on a twelve-month term with cost of capital meaning total cost as a share of the amount funded. The SBA rounds every input it publishes, so each average carries about half a percent of rounding either way, and the combined count it reports (84,400) differs from the sum of the two programs (84,350) by that rounding. The site's arithmetic audit recomputes every table and figure value from these stated inputs before publication.
Six figures a statistics page would ordinarily carry are deliberately absent because no official extract confirmed them: the FY2025 count and dollar share of 7(a) loans at or under $150,000 and at or under $350,000, the FY2024 7(a)-only count and dollars (and therefore any year-over-year growth rate for the program), the median loan size, the blended guaranteed share of FY2025 approvals, the FY2026 upfront guaranty fee tiers, and the SBA's own maximum turnaround time in business days. The prose names each gap where it falls and points to the SBA document that carries it. The firm's own figures — the $5,000 to $10 million range, the 80% to 150% of monthly revenue sizing rule, the 24 business-hour decision, roughly 90% of applicants approved, and the 4.5% to 45% cost of capital range — are its published bar and are not attributed to any source on this page.
77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion, according to the SBA's September 30, 2025 year-end release. Adding 6,750 504 loans for $7.8 billion, the agency guaranteed 84,400 loans for $44.8 billion in the fiscal year — restated in its January 2026 annual report as 85,000 loans for $45 billion.
About $477,000 in fiscal year 2025: $37 billion of approvals divided by 77,600 loans is $476,804. That is a mean, pulled upward by the largest loans; the SBA does not publish a median, so the typical loan is smaller. The average 504 loan was about $1,155,556.
13.25% for loans of $50,000 or less, 12.75% up to $250,000, 11.25% up to $350,000 and 9.75% above $350,000. The regulation sets the cap as 6.5, 6.0, 4.5 and 3.0 percentage points over the base rate, and the bank prime rate was 6.75% as of late August 2026. Lenders may price below the cap.
Up to 85% of loans of $150,000 or less and up to 75% of loans above $150,000 for most 7(a) loans; 50% on SBA Express loans; 90% on Export Express, Export Working Capital Program and International Trade loans. The guaranty protects the lender — the borrower owes the whole loan regardless.
The lender pays the upfront guaranty fee and may pass the cost to the borrower, so it is usually a closing cost. The lender's annual service fee — 0.55% of the outstanding guaranteed balance in fiscal year 2026 — cannot be charged to the borrower. For FY2026 the upfront fee is 0% on 7(a) manufacturing loans up to $950,000.
Yes, in its 7(a) and 504 activity reports on data.sba.gov, broken out by size band, state and lender. Its year-end press releases state only totals, and its FY2024 report said loans under $150,000 had doubled since FY2020 and grown 33% since FY2023 without giving the share; take the size-band figures from the activity report itself.
Travis Yule founded Full Send Funding in 2021 and leads it from Middle Grove, New York. He writes about working capital from the underwriting side of the table — what the numbers actually have to say before a business gets funded.