NAICS 5411 · 114 financed acquisitions
$101MCapital deployed
Legal Services
114 of these businesses were bought with SBA 7(a) acquisition financing since FY2019. The median carried $624,250 of bank debt; the middle half ran $260k to $1.1M. That range is the closest thing to a public price record this part of the market has.
What this is and is not. These figures are loan amounts, not sale prices. A buyer typically funds an acquisition with bank debt plus an equity injection plus, very often, a note from the seller. The SBA file records only its own loan. Read the median here as the debt-financeable portion of a typical deal in this industry, and assume the enterprise value was higher.
Volume and price
What legal services financed by an SBA 7(a) acquisition loan actually cost, and how many of them there were.
Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA loan-level extract, change-of-ownership approvals, FY2019 onward. Data as of 30 June 2026. n = 114 financed acquisitions.
| Size band | Acquisitions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under $250k | 22 | 19.3% |
| $250k to $500k | 30 | 26.3% |
| $500k to $1M | 30 | 26.3% |
| $1M to $2M | 18 | 15.8% |
| $2M to $3.5M | 12 | 10.5% |
| $3.5M to $5M | 1 | 0.9% |
| $5M and above | 1 | 0.9% |
| All | 114 | 100.0% |
The 7(a) programme caps a single loan at $5M, so the top band is a ceiling of the instrument, not of the market. Deals above it are financed conventionally and do not appear in this file at all.
How the paper was structured
Loan terms here are not spread smoothly. They spike at exactly ten years and again at exactly twenty-five, with very little in between. Those two points are the programme's maturity ceilings, and which one applies depends on what secures the loan, so a term running past ten years indicates real property was financed alongside the business.
| Term | What it indicates | Acquisitions | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10 years | Shorter than the goodwill maximum | 16 | 14.0% |
| Exactly 10 years | The standard goodwill-only note | 83 | 72.8% |
| 10 to 20 years | Mixed collateral | 7 | 6.1% |
| 20 years and over | Real property financed with the business | 8 | 7.0% |
72.8% of loans here run exactly ten years and 7.0% run twenty years or more. n = 114 loans with a recorded term.
What happened next
Two outcomes are visible in the file: approvals that never funded, and funded loans that later charged off. Both are facts about deals, not forecasts.
The charge-off share is cumulative as of 30 June 2026 for loans approved in FY2019-FY2021. Those loans are five to seven years into terms that are usually ten years, so the figure is a floor and the lifetime rate will be higher. It is not comparable to a rate computed over a fully matured cohort, and the site does not publish one for later years for that reason.
By fiscal year
* FY2026 is incomplete. The extract closes 30 June 2026, nine months into a fiscal year that ends 30 September, and some FY2026 approvals have not yet disbursed. Do not read the last column as a decline.
Concentration
| State | Acquisitions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| WA Washington | 16 | 14.0% |
| FL Florida | 16 | 14.0% |
| CA California | 11 | 9.6% |
| MN Minnesota | 7 | 6.1% |
| IL Illinois | 6 | 5.3% |
| CO Colorado | 6 | 5.3% |
| MI Michigan | 4 | 3.5% |
| PA Pennsylvania | 4 | 3.5% |
| OH Ohio | 4 | 3.5% |
| AZ Arizona | 4 | 3.5% |
| Lender | Acquisitions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Live Oak Banking Company | 12 | 10.5% |
| Heritage Bank | 11 | 9.6% |
| The Huntington National Bank | 10 | 8.8% |
| U.S. Bank | 5 | 4.4% |
| First National Bank of Pennsylvania | 5 | 4.4% |
| Plumas Bank | 4 | 3.5% |
| KeyBank | 3 | 2.6% |
| Byline Bank | 3 | 2.6% |
The top lender here wrote 10.5% of the financed acquisitions in this industry. Concentration matters to a seller because a buyer's financing contingency is only as good as the small number of banks that understand the business.
Other industry groups in Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
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