Small firms are most of the business population in both countries EQ Funding serves — and they punch far above their weight in job creation.
The US small business count passed 36 million in the 2025 Small Business Profiles — an all-time high.
Small firms employ nearly half of America’s private workforce.
Small businesses created roughly nine out of every ten net new jobs in the most recent measured year.
98.1% of all Canadian employer businesses are small businesses; SMEs contributed 34.2% of GDP on average from 2018–2022.
Half of new businesses don’t reach year five, and access to working capital is a recurring factor in the ones that don’t.
The Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) — 6,500+ employer firms, published March 2026 — is the definitive read on who applies for financing and why.
Six in ten firms applied for a loan, line of credit, cash advance, trade credit, or equity in the year before the 2025 survey.
Working capital — not growth — is the single most common reason small businesses borrow. 46% sought funds for expansion or a new opportunity.
Cost pressure was the most common financial challenge in the 2025 survey — most acute in retail and manufacturing.
Another 15% planned to adopt AI within 12 months — a signal of how fast small-business operations are modernizing.
Full approval is the exception, not the rule — and the odds swing dramatically with firm age and lender type. This gap is the reason financing marketplaces exist.
36% received only some of what they asked for, and 22% were approved for none at all.
Age is the sharpest divide in small-business credit: young firms are fully funded at half the rate of established ones.
Community banks remain the most generous approvers, but they also decline more marginal files upfront.
Canadian approval ratios run high, but request rates are low: only 26% of SMEs requested debt financing in 2023.
The lender mix is shifting online fast, and the Fed’s data shows the hidden price of taking the first offer instead of comparing several.
Versus 37% at small banks and 32% at large banks. Comparing real offers side-by-side before accepting is the direct antidote.
Fiscal year 2025 (Oct 2024–Sep 2025) was one of the strongest years in SBA history, with volume tilting toward smaller loans.
Nearly double the 42,298 loans approved in FY2020.
Quarterly approvals ran $8.7–10B+ all year — Q2 FY2025 was the second-highest quarter in program history.
More than 80% were under $500K — the program’s center of gravity is genuinely small loans.
The 504 program finances owner-occupied real estate and heavy equipment at long fixed rates.
Benchmark rates as of July 2026 — what pricing is anchored to.
Prime is the base for most variable-rate business credit, including SBA 7(a) pricing.
Spreads are tiered by loan size: larger loans cap at prime + 2.25–3%, loans under $50K at prime + 6.5%.
The spread between products is exactly why matching the product to the use case matters.
Beyond bank loans, the specialty products EQ Funding brokers are large, established markets in their own right.
Roughly eight in ten US businesses use some form of financing when acquiring equipment.
The highest level recorded since the index began in 2006.
Invoice factoring converts outstanding receivables into working capital — a mainstream tool in trucking, staffing, and manufacturing.
Fast but expensive capital — the segment where cost-transparency problems are most concentrated (see the 60% cost-surprise stat above).
All figures come from the primary sources below; where a figure is an industry estimate rather than government data, the card says so. This page is reviewed and refreshed quarterly (next: October 2026).
EQ Funding, “Small Business Lending Statistics 2026,” eqfunding.com, updated July 2026. https://www.eqfunding.com/small-business-lending-statistics
Journalists and researchers: you’re welcome to reuse any figure with a link back. Questions or corrections — hello@eqfunding.com.