SBA loans in NYC by borough: 7,597 loans and $3 billion since 2020

By Solomon Wiesen, editor. Updated October 2026. Editorial standards | How this site is funded

SBA lenders approved 7,597 7(a) loans worth $3.02 billion for businesses in New York City’s five boroughs between October 1, 2019 and June 30, 2026. Brooklyn took 39% of them and the Bronx 7%, and one bank, TD, made more than one loan in four. Every figure on this page is our own count from the SBA’s public loan-level file; the method is at the end.

• The city gets fewer 7(a) loans per resident than the country does: 8.6 per 10,000 residents over the period, against 10.2 nationally. The Bronx got 3.4 and Manhattan 12.4.
• The median loan was $150,000 and the average $397,000. Loans above $1 million were 9% of the count and 56% of the dollars.
• TD Bank made 2,092 of the loans, with a median of $50,000. The top five lenders made 56% of all loans.
• The median starting interest rate was 10.50% in fiscal 2025 and 9.75% in the first nine months of fiscal 2026.
• Of the loans approved in fiscal 2020 through 2022, 10.2% had been charged off by June 2026, against 3.6% nationally. The whole gap is in loans of $350,000 or less.
• Approvals in the first nine months of fiscal 2026 were down 39% from the same months a year earlier. Nationally the drop was 29%.

Loans by borough

The Bronx has 17% of the city’s residents and 7% of its 7(a) loans. Queens is under its share too, with 27% of residents and 22% of loans. Brooklyn, with 31% of residents, took 39%. Manhattan and Brooklyn are the only boroughs above the national rate of 10.2 loans per 10,000 residents, and Manhattan’s figure is flattered by the measure, since it has far more businesses per resident than the other four.

The city as a whole is underweight inside its own state. It has 44% of New York State’s population and received 37% of the state’s 7(a) loans: 7,597 of 20,619.

Year by year

SBA fiscal years run from October through September, so fiscal 2026 below covers nine months.

Approvals almost doubled between fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2024, from 845 to 1,657, and the growth came from small loans: the median stayed between $100,000 and $132,100 through those three years. In every year the city’s median loan was smaller than the national median and its median rate was higher, by 0.25 to 1.65 points.

Fiscal 2026 is running well behind. From October 2025 through June 2026 lenders approved 763 loans in the city, against 1,246 in the same nine months a year earlier. The national count fell from 50,216 to 35,641 over the same windows. The loans that were approved are larger: the city’s median reached $175,000, its highest since fiscal 2021.

Loan size

Fifty-eight percent of the city’s loans were for $150,000 or less, against 47% nationally, and 55% went through SBA Express, the program in which the lender makes the credit decision itself, against 39% nationally. Sixty-one loans were approved at the program maximum of $5 million. Nine loans in ten carry a variable rate, 41% are revolving lines of credit, and the median term is 120 months.

The lenders

One hundred eighty-three lenders had at least one loan approved in the city over the period. TD Bank was first in all five boroughs.

Ranked by dollars the order changes. FinWise Bank is second with $200.1 million from 134 loans, and NewBank is fourth with $183.5 million from 120. A rate in this table reflects the size of a lender’s loans as much as its pricing: FinWise and NewBank made large loans, and large loans carry lower rates. The SBA file lists Newtek Small Business Finance, which made 82 loans, separately from Newtek Bank.

In the most recent period, fiscal 2024 through June 2026, 142 lenders made 3,980 loans. The ten most active were TD Bank (996), JPMorgan Chase (478), Readycap Lending (295), Newtek Bank (241), BayFirst (207), Lendistry (197), M&T Bank (174), Northeast Bank (153), Huntington (95) and Webster Bank (74). Loan sizes, rates and requirements for the city, state and community lenders that sit outside this file are on our NYC small business loans page.

What kinds of businesses

The most common single lines of business were full-service restaurants (379 loans), residential remodelers (200), limited-service restaurants (193), beauty salons (137), law offices (120) and plumbing and HVAC contractors (118). Restaurants and bars lean toward Manhattan, with 304 of 755 loans, while construction leans toward Brooklyn (311 of 811) and Queens (280). The local detail for three of these sectors is on the restaurant, contractor and retail store financing pages.

Three loans in four went to a business more than two years old. New businesses of two years or less took 13%, startups using the loan to open took 7%, and changes of ownership 2.5%.

Charge-offs

A charge-off is the SBA’s label for a loan the lender has written off after default. Recent loans have had little time to fail, so the fair comparison is an older group: loans approved in fiscal 2020, 2021 and 2022, as they stood on June 30, 2026.

Above $350,000 the city’s loans performed the same as the country’s. At $150,000 or less they were charged off at about two and a half times the national rate. SBA Express loans account for most of it: 190 of the 1,251 Express loans in this group were charged off, or 15.2%, against 5.4% for Express loans nationally. By borough the rates were 11.7% in Brooklyn, 11.1% in the Bronx, 10.9% in Queens, 7.4% on Staten Island and 7.4% in Manhattan.

Small loans dominate the count but not the money. The amount charged off on these 2,166 loans was $20.2 million, or 1.7% of the $1.2 billion approved. The file records the status and the amount; it does not say why a loan failed, and these three years include the pandemic.

Where the borrowers are

The ZIP code is the borrower’s address in the file, and the area names are approximate. One Brooklyn ZIP code, 11219, has two-thirds as many 7(a) loans as the entire Bronx.

If you are applying

The typical 7(a) loan in the city is a variable-rate loan or line of about $150,000 from a large bank, with a median starting rate of 11.25% since fiscal 2024. If you need $50,000 or less, TD Bank made 57% of the loans that size, and a credit union such as Brooklyn Cooperative, with 80 loans at a median of $15,000, is the other route. If you need $350,000 or more, the most active lenders are different ones: Readycap, JPMorgan Chase, FinWise, NewBank and Huntington. The SBA lender finder shows the lenders for your own borough, industry and loan size.

Even at the top of that range, an SBA loan costs a fraction of a merchant cash advance. The arithmetic is on our page comparing SBA loans and merchant cash advances.

Method and limits

• Source: the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 FOIA dataset, using the file that covers 7(a) loans from fiscal 2020 to the present, as of June 30, 2026. The national file has 388,338 rows.
• New York City means a project state of New York and a project county of New York (Manhattan), Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Bronx or Richmond (Staten Island). That gives 9,121 approvals dated October 1, 2019 through June 30, 2026.
• We removed the 1,524 loans marked cancelled, which were approved but never used. That is 16.7% of the city’s approvals, against 12.9% nationally. All national figures on this page exclude cancelled loans the same way.
• Dollar figures are gross approval amounts as recorded by the SBA. They are not disbursed amounts and are not adjusted for inflation.
• Interest rates are the initial rates in the file. Most of these loans are variable, so the rate a borrower pays today is different.
• Per-resident figures use 2020 Census counts for each borough, the city, the state and the country, from the Census Bureau.
• Sectors follow the first two digits of each loan’s NAICS code. Where the file carries an old and a new label for the same line of business, we combined them.
• The file covers 7(a) loans only. SBA 504 loans and microloans are published separately and are not counted here.
• Lender names are as reported to the SBA. The lender’s home office may be outside New York.

You may reuse these figures and tables with a link to this page. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it.