The U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy
First published September 2018
The growth and survival of U.S. small businesses depend on how depository lending institutions and other financial intermediaries are attending to the credit needs of small firms. The financing and credit needs of small firms vary by business size, type of lender, business owner, and age of the business. Thus, all these components tend to contribute to the challenges small firms face when seeking access to credit. Nonetheless, 99.7 percent of firms with paid employees are small businesses, employing 47.5 percent of the private workforce in 2015 (SBA Advocacy, 2018). These tenacious businesses accounted for roughly 40 percent of U.S. private nonfarm output (Petkov, 2016), and for 63 percent share of net jobs between 2010 and 2016 (SBA Advocacy, 2017). This study predominantly uses public sources of information on U.S. banks to analyze the patterns in small business lending by evaluating aggregate data of depository lending institutions.
Similar to last year’s report, this report incorporates a brief analysis of minority depository lending institutions. Second, detailed listings and information on all depository lenders for each state is available solely on Advocacy’s webpage in a user-friendly format. Most importantly, an effort has been made to present the information in this report in a more digestible and visual manner in the form of summary tables and figures.