US small-business credit outcomes — SBA 7(a)/504
A free reference of historical loan-level credit outcomes on US small businesses, from public SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA data (approvals since FY1991), with point-in-time vintage capture from 2026 onward (the FOIA feed carries a current outcome per loan; we snapshot each vintage as it publishes). The failed loans stay in the set — survivorship-bias-free, which is exactly what makes a credit-outcome benchmark usable. Descriptive only; a charge-off is a late, loan-level outcome, not a company default.
Source: U.S. Small Business Administration 7(a) & 504 FOIA data, vintage as of 2026-03-31 · data.sba.gov · 2,168,733 loans.
Gross charge-off rate by program
| program | loans | resolved (observability) | charge-off rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 504 | 227,202 | 125,503 (55%) | 9.7% |
| 7(a) | 1,941,531 | 1,386,694 (71%) | 15.8% |
Charge-off rate = charge-offs / resolved, where resolved = paid-in-full + charged-off (loans still exempt / undisbursed are excluded from the denominator). Observability = resolved / all loans — the share of the cohort that has actually reached an outcome.
7(a) charge-off rate by approval cohort
The by-cohort curve traces the credit cycle: pre-2008 vintages charged off far above the benign post-2011 cohorts. Recent cohorts are too young to read — most of their loans have not yet reached an outcome, so a rate would be doubly selected (early charge-offs and early payoffs both). Those cohorts show their observability but no rate.
| approval FY | loans | resolved (observability) | charge-off rate (of resolved) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | 18,433 | 16,185 (88%) | 12.8% |
| 1992 | 23,646 | 20,952 (89%) | 9.1% |
| 1993 | 26,282 | 23,184 (88%) | 8.2% |
| 1994 | 36,034 | 31,879 (88%) | 10.2% |
| 1995 | 55,539 | 48,344 (87%) | 12.7% |
| 1996 | 45,836 | 39,497 (86%) | 13.1% |
| 1997 | 45,250 | 38,598 (85%) | 12.5% |
| 1998 | 42,174 | 35,806 (85%) | 13.5% |
| 1999 | 43,508 | 36,911 (85%) | 14.1% |
| 2000 | 43,718 | 37,510 (86%) | 14.8% |
| 2001 | 42,917 | 37,192 (87%) | 14.6% |
| 2002 | 51,616 | 45,017 (87%) | 13.5% |
| 2003 | 67,183 | 58,883 (88%) | 15.5% |
| 2004 | 81,045 | 70,940 (88%) | 18.6% |
| 2005 | 95,784 | 83,919 (88%) | 24.7% |
| 2006 | 97,142 | 85,915 (88%) | 32.4% |
| 2007 | 99,422 | 87,555 (88%) | 37.1% |
| 2008 | 69,273 | 60,811 (88%) | 30.7% |
| 2009 | 41,087 | 36,030 (88%) | 15.0% |
| 2010 | 46,596 | 39,133 (84%) | 9.4% |
| 2011 | 53,219 | 44,365 (83%) | 7.1% |
| 2012 | 43,940 | 37,507 (85%) | 6.5% |
| 2013 | 45,971 | 38,517 (84%) | 6.3% |
| 2014 | 51,805 | 43,636 (84%) | 6.7% |
| 2015 | 63,179 | 51,811 (82%) | 7.3% |
| 2016 | 63,856 | 50,494 (79%) | 8.0% |
| 2017 | 62,209 | 46,540 (75%) | — too young to read |
| 2018 | 60,188 | 41,458 (69%) | — too young to read |
| 2019 | 51,768 | 30,608 (59%) | — too young to read |
| 2020 | 42,104 | 22,120 (53%) | — too young to read |
| 2021 | 51,637 | 19,013 (37%) | — too young to read |
| 2022 | 47,423 | 11,676 (25%) | — too young to read |
| 2023 | 57,220 | 8,443 (15%) | — too young to read |
| 2024 | 70,153 | 4,842 (7%) | — too young to read |
| 2025 | 77,956 | 1,387 (2%) | — too young to read |
| 2026 | 26,418 | 16 (0%) | — too young to read |
Why this is here
A free, transparent reference built directly from public SBA data, with explicit observability and maturity controls — a benchmark to score any distress signal against. (Commercial SBA-loan datasets exist; the differentiator here is the honest denominator, the censoring of immature cohorts, and the cross-register entity links.) The full loan-level dataset — with dated vintage-capture labels and those entity links — is licensed direct; contact us to evaluate it.
Aggregated and non-nominative: individual borrowers and lenders are not named on this page. Descriptive counts only — no conclusions.