Every explainer online tells you an SBA rate is “prime plus a spread, capped by SBA”, which is true and useless. These are the rates recorded on 61,580 real 7(a) approvals over the last twelve months, plus every quarter since 2018.
This is the single most important thing on the page: the rate is not a number, it is a moving target. It nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024. Any “SBA loan rate” quoted without a date attached is worthless.
SBA caps the spread a lender may add in tiers by loan size, and the effect is clean and monotonic. A $40,000 loan and a $3,000,000 loan are not remotely the same product. Last twelve months of approvals:
Based on 61,580 7(a) approvals with a recorded rate in the trailing twelve months.
By far the biggest factor, and the one you control least. Rates track the base rate, so the same borrower would have paid roughly half as much in 2021 as in 2024.
The tiered spread cap means small loans price higher. If you are near a band boundary it is worth asking what the rate looks like on either side of it.
Most 7(a) loans are variable and reset with the base rate. A fixed rate usually starts higher and is priced for the certainty. The public data records only the rate at approval, so it cannot tell you which a given loan was.
Real, but smaller than people expect. Within a size band, most of the spread is set by lender policy rather than by you.
Two lenders will quote the same borrower differently. Worth two or three conversations, but never at the cost of an approval.
A 504 project has two loans. The bank piece is priced conventionally. The SBA piece is funded by a debenture sold to investors, and its rate is set at the bond sale, after approval. So it never enters the approval record, and any site showing you a “504 rate” from public data is showing you something else.
What the data does show for 504 is term: the debenture runs 10, 20, or 25 years, and the median in the last twelve months was 25 years on the largest projects. That long amortisation is the actual point of the program.
Guide: which program you needPut in an amount, industry, and state and the calculator seeds itself with the real median rate and term for that slice, then shows the monthly payment.
Open the payment calculator