Independence
How this works, and how we make money
A site that publishes default rates about named businesses owes you its method. Here is all of it.
What we take money for
Display advertising. Advertisers have no say in anything you read.
Affiliate links for services a new owner needs — bookkeeping, insurance, payroll, entity setup. Never lenders.
A paid course on buying a business with an SBA loan.
What we will not take money for
Lender referral fees. No bank pays to appear, to rank higher or to be recommended. If that ever changes it will be disclosed at the point of recommendation, and we will still publish their bad numbers.
Your application. We take no applications and sell no details. Nothing you type into a calculator leaves your browser.
Removing a number. Any business may publish a response on its own page, unedited. Requests to delete accurate public data are declined.
How the default rates are calculated
the part that mattersLoans are never pooled across years. SBA charge-offs surface three to five years after approval, so a brand or lender that grew recently looks spotless on an all-time average. Every figure groups loans by the year they were approved and compares cohorts at the same age.
Only funded loans count. Cancelled and never-funded approvals are excluded. Leaving them in the denominator deflates every rate, and it is the most common way these numbers get published wrong.
Rates are dollar-weighted — charged-off dollars divided by approved dollars — and measured within seven years of approval for franchises, five for lenders.
Nothing thin gets a page. A brand needs 30 loans old enough to judge before it is published. Below that the number is noise.
Brand names are merged by hand. SBA's franchise field contains many spellings of the same brand and several brands that merely look alike. A curated alias list resolves them; Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express are deliberately kept apart, because they are different investments.
What we deliberately do not publish
Borrower names. The federal files contain the name and address of every borrower. A searchable index of who in your town took an SBA loan helps nobody here. We publish aggregates only.
Advice dressed as data. We publish numbers and explain terms. We are not your banker, lawyer or accountant.
Corrections
If you believe a figure is wrong, write to us with the detail and we will re-run it against the source file and publish the outcome either way. Any business described here may submit a response for publication on its own page, unedited. The full policy.