How long does an SBA loan take to fund? What 78,078 approvals show

Ask how long an SBA loan takes and the answer is usually a guess. Part of it can be measured.

SBA's public loan file records two dates for every 7(a) loan: the day SBA approved the guaranty, and the day the lender first paid money out. We took the 78,078 loans approved in SBA's 2025 fiscal year, from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025. By June 30, 2026, the date of the file, each had had at least 9 months to be funded.

What happened to them

• 60,290 were funded.
• 13,982 were cancelled without a disbursement. That is 18% of all approvals.
• 3,806 were still waiting: approved, not cancelled, and not yet funded on the day the file was made.

From approval to the first dollar

Among the loans that were funded, the median wait was 21 days. A quarter were funded within 10 days. Three in four were funded within 43 days, and nine in ten within 83.

Source: The Mercantile Record analysis of SBA 7(a) loan records as of June 30, 2026. Method.

Show the numbers as a table

Days since approval	Share funded
0	1.1%
7	18.2%
14	34.7%
21	47.2%
28	56.9%
35	64.3%
42	70.0%
49	74.2%
56	77.4%
63	79.9%
70	81.9%
77	83.5%
84	84.9%
91	85.9%
98	86.8%
105	87.5%
112	88.1%
119	88.7%
126	89.2%
133	89.6%
140	89.9%
147	90.2%
154	90.5%
161	90.8%
168	90.9%
175	91.1%
182	91.3%

The chart counts every approval that was not cancelled, funded or not. 59% had been funded within 30 days, 79% within 60 and 86% within 90.

Read plainly: about 3 weeks is typical, a quarter of funded loans took more than 6 weeks, and one in ten took more than 12.

What the wait is made of

Between approval and funding the lender closes the loan. SBA's rules add steps of their own.

• Before the first disbursement, the lender must check the tax returns it was given against transcripts from the IRS. SBA Express loans are exempt. If the IRS has no record of a year the lender needs, SBA's manual says no money may go out until that is resolved.
• Where the owners are required to put cash in, the lender must verify that they did.
• On a loan of more than $50,000, the assets pledged as collateral must carry hazard insurance.

Some of that is in the borrower's hands: returns filed and matching what the lender was shown, statements that show where the down payment came from, an insurance agent already engaged.

Lines of credit and mid-length loans take longer

medianmiddle half of loans

010203040506070

Term loans20

Lines of credit28

Repaid over: 5 years or less11

Repaid over: over 5, up to 10 years22

Repaid over: over 10, under 25 years34

Repaid over: 25 years or more22

Source: The Mercantile Record analysis of SBA 7(a) loan records as of June 30, 2026. Method.

Show the numbers as a table

Loans	Funded loans	A quarter within	Half within	Three in four within	Nine in ten within
Term loans	46,417	9 days	20 days	39 days	70 days
Lines of credit	13,873	12 days	28 days	65 days	158 days
Repaid over: 5 years or less	4,458	4 days	11 days	26 days	50 days
Repaid over: over 5, up to 10 years	45,605	10 days	22 days	43 days	83 days
Repaid over: over 10, under 25 years	3,816	16 days	34 days	67 days	124 days
Repaid over: 25 years or more	6,411	12 days	22 days	43 days	78 days

Lines of credit. Term loans were funded in a median of 20 days. Lines of credit took 28, and 18% of them had not been drawn on at all after 9 months or more. That is not a delay in the usual sense. A line exists to be available, and the first draw comes when the business needs it.

Short loans. Loans to be repaid in five years or less were funded fastest: a median of 11 days.

Mid-length loans. Loans of more than 10 but less than 25 years were slowest, at 34 days, and one in ten of them took more than 124. Loans of 25 years or more, the usual term for real estate, took 22 days, close to the overall figure.

The same measures for other groups:

Three things stand out in the table.

• Loan size matters less than you might expect. The fastest group, loans of $50,001 to $150,000, was funded in a median of 17 days. The slowest, $350,001 to $1 million, took 26.
• Banks had the longest tail. Nine in ten of their funded loans were paid out within 86 days. For non-bank lenders the figure was 72 days and for credit unions 67.
• Loans reviewed by SBA took a few days longer after approval than loans approved by a preferred lender: 25 days against 21. That understates the difference a borrower feels, because SBA's review happens before the approval date and so before this clock starts.

It used to be faster

Source: The Mercantile Record analysis of SBA 7(a) loan records as of June 30, 2026. Method.

Show the numbers as a table

Approved in	Approvals	Median days to funding	Three in four within	Nine in ten within	Funded within 30 days	Cancelled
FY2020	42,298	30	50 days	95 days	50%	13.7%
FY2021	51,856	14	30 days	65 days	75%	12.5%
FY2022	47,678	12	22 days	34 days	86%	11.3%
FY2023	57,362	11	20 days	31 days	87%	9.8%
FY2024	70,242	18	36 days	76 days	66%	10.8%
FY2025	78,078	21	43 days	83 days	59%	17.9%

Loans approved in fiscal 2023 were funded in a median of 11 days, and 87% of them within 30 days. For loans approved in fiscal 2025 the median was 21 days and the share funded within 30 days was 59%.

Fiscal 2020, which ran through the first months of the pandemic, was slower still, at 30 days.

The records do not explain the slowdown since 2023. They only show it.

Nearly one approval in five is cancelled

$25,000 or less15%

$25,001–$50,00021%

$50,001–$150,00020%

$150,001–$350,00022%

$350,001–$1 million15%

$1–$2 million12%

$2–$5 million12%

Source: The Mercantile Record analysis of SBA 7(a) loan records as of June 30, 2026. The records do not say who cancelled a loan or why. Method.

Show the numbers as a table

Loan size	Approvals	Cancelled	Share cancelled
$25,000 or less	7,391	1,119	15.1%
$25,001–$50,000	11,331	2,348	20.7%
$50,001–$150,000	19,852	3,929	19.8%
$150,001–$350,000	15,154	3,280	21.6%
$350,001–$1 million	15,392	2,256	14.7%
$1–$2 million	4,628	547	11.8%
$2–$5 million	4,330	503	11.6%

13,982 of the 78,078 approvals in fiscal 2025 were cancelled without a disbursement: 17.9%. For loans approved in fiscal 2023 the figure was 9.8%. The 2025 figure can still rise, because some approvals from that year are neither funded nor cancelled yet.

Cancellation was most common among loans approved by preferred lenders (22%) and least common among loans SBA reviewed itself (8%). SBA Express loans were in between, at 12%.

The file does not record who cancelled a loan or why. The borrower may have found other financing or lost the deal the loan was for. The lender may have withdrawn. SBA itself cancels a guaranty if the lender has not paid the upfront fee within 90 days of approval, or within 10 business days on a loan of a year or less. We cannot tell these apart.

What the number does establish is that an approval is not yet a loan. Until the closing documents are signed and the money moves, treat it as likely, not certain.

What the records cannot tell you

• How long it takes to be approved. The file has no application date. Everything before approval, including the weeks a lender spends on its own decision, is invisible here.
• The exact day in every case. 23% of the disbursement dates in the file fall on the last day of a month, far more than chance would give. Some lenders evidently report the end of the month, not the day itself. That blurs individual loans by up to a few weeks and should not move the medians much.
• When the last dollar arrived. The file gives the first disbursement. A construction loan is paid out in stages over months.
• Why. The records show how long funding took. They do not show what held it up.

This article is general information. It is not an offer of credit, and we are not a lender.