Every other page here tells you who got funded. This one tells you what happened after. If you are about to sign a personal guarantee, it is the number that matters most, and almost nobody shows it to borrowers.
The best guide to a normal economy: old enough that most loans have finished, recent enough to still be relevant.
When a loan was approved matters more than anything about the borrower. These are the same measure, computed the same way, on three cohorts:
A borrower who took an SBA loan in 2007 was roughly four times more likely to lose it than one who borrowed in 2014. Neither number describes the other era, and anyone quoting a single “SBA default rate” without a date is guessing.
Yes, but by less than the folklore suggests, and the gap is much smaller than the gap between two economic eras. Loans approved 2011–2017 that have resolved:
Put plainly: being brand new raised the odds of losing the loan from 6.2% to 9.1%. That is a real difference and worth respecting, but it is not the wall that most advice implies. It is also survivorship-adjusted in a useful way: these are all borrowers a lender already said yes to.
See which lenders fund brand-new businessesHighest charge-off rate among industries with at least 500 resolved loans.
Lowest charge-off rate on the same basis.
The denominator is resolved loans, not all loans. A loan that is still being repaid has not succeeded or failed yet. Counting it as a success would make recent years look artificially safe, which is exactly the mistake that makes most published default rates useless.
Cancelled and undisbursed approvals are excluded entirely. Nearly 300,000 approvals in the record never became loans. Leaving them in the denominator would dilute the rate with things that never happened.
“Charged off” combines two SBA status codes. CHGOFF and the legacy CLSLN code, because 99.8% of CLSLN rows carry a charge-off amount and the code stops appearing after January 2024. Treating CLSLN as a benign “closed loan” would understate losses by roughly a third.
A charge-off is not a moral verdict. It means the lender wrote the balance off, which can follow a sale, a death, an illness, a pandemic, or simple bad luck. These are real named businesses in a public record and we present the outcome, not a judgement.