Timeline & Process

How Long Does an SBA Loan Take to Fund? The Approval Gap, Measured

By David Jones, MAI, CCIM

Half of all SBA 7(a) loans disburse within 15 days of approval, and three-quarters within a month. But 12.25% of approvals never fund at all — and in FY2025 that figure jumped to 16.55% while median time-to-funding nearly doubled.

What this article can and cannot tell you

A borrower's real question is usually "what are my odds, and how long will it take." The first half of that is not answerable from public data, and it is worth being direct about why.

The SBA's FOIA release contains approvals only. There is no record of an application that a lender declined, or of a borrower who never applied because no lender in their county writes SBA paper. Any published SBA "approval rate" is either derived from a lender's own disclosed pipeline or is invented.

What is recorded is the approval date, the first disbursement date, and whether the loan was subsequently cancelled. That supports two measures nobody publishes: how long funding actually takes, and how often an approval fails to become money.

The second is the more useful of the two. An approval is not a loan. Roughly one in eight does not survive to disbursement.

Time to funding

Across 256,422 FY2021–FY2025 loans with a recorded disbursement date:

• 28.0% disburse within a week.
• 76.1% within 30 days.
• 94.5% within 90 days.
• 98.1% within six months.

The mean of 28 days is nearly double the median of 15, because a long tail of complex files pulls it upward. Most SBA loans fund quickly; a minority take months, and those are the ones borrowers hear about.

Cancellations: the number nobody publishes

Of 305,216 7(a) approvals in FY2021–FY2025:

• 37,390 were cancelled — 12.25%
• 11,249 remain approved but undisbursed — 3.69%
• The cancelled approvals represent $17.9 billion

Every headline SBA lending figure includes these. When the agency reports approving $31 billion in a fiscal year, roughly an eighth of that will not become a loan. This is why the analysis across this site excludes cancelled approvals — including them overstates lending by a consistent 10 to 13%.

Cancellations happen for ordinary reasons. The borrower finds better terms elsewhere, a purchase agreement collapses, an appraisal comes in short, a condition cannot be satisfied, or the borrower simply changes their mind. Approval is a lender's commitment subject to conditions, not a completed transaction.

FY2025: both measures deteriorated

FY2023 was the cleanest year in the period on both measures. Two years later the cancellation rate is 70% higher and the median file takes nearly twice as long to fund.

Some of the FY2025 figure is a timing artefact — recent approvals have had less opportunity to disburse, so a portion of what currently reads as cancelled or undisbursed may yet fund. But the median-days figure is computed only on loans that did disburse, and it has risen independently. Both measures moving together, in the same direction, across two consecutive years, is not a snapshot effect.

What predicts a slow file

By loan size

Loan size matters far less than most borrowers expect. A $3 million file funds a median of five days slower than a $100,000 file. Larger loans are less likely to be cancelled, not more.

By processing method

7(a) General — the method requiring full SBA review rather than delegated lender authority — takes six days longer at the median but has the lowest cancellation rate at 8.45%. Delegated authority produces faster approvals and more of them fall through.

By business maturity

Counter-intuitively, established businesses cancel most often, and acquisition files cancel least. An acquisition has a purchase agreement, a closing date and a counterparty — real pressure to complete. An established business refinancing has the option to walk away, and exercises it.

Lender is the biggest variable

Among the 23 institutions with 2,000 or more approvals in the period, the cancellation rate ranges from 3.95% to 51.29%. Median time to funding ranges from 4 days to 25 days.

Northeast Bank cancels more than half of what it approves. Newtek's two entities cancel a third or more. Chase cancels one in twenty-five.

Read this carefully, because it is easy to misread. A high cancellation rate is not necessarily a service failure. A lender that approves early and liberally, then works out conditions afterwards, will show a high cancellation rate and may still be a perfectly good counterparty — the borrower simply learns later that the file will not close. A lender that approves only files it is confident in will show a low rate.

What it does tell a borrower is what an approval from that institution is worth. An approval from Chase is close to a completed transaction. An approval from a lender cancelling half its book is a step in a process.

BayFirst is the standout on speed: a median of 4 days, at 8.84% cancellation, on nearly 9,000 approvals. That is a genuinely different operating model.

What this means if you are a borrower

Plan for 30 days, not 90. Three-quarters of SBA loans fund within a month of approval. The horror stories are real but they are the tail, not the norm.

Ask the lender for its cancellation rate. They will not have it to hand, but the question itself is informative, and the data is public. An approval from a high-cancellation lender is a weaker signal than one from a low-cancellation lender.

Loan size is not the constraint. A larger file does not take meaningfully longer. If the transaction justifies more capital, size is not what will slow you down.

If you are acquiring a business, your file is statistically the most likely to close — 8.07% cancellation, the lowest of any borrower category. The purchase agreement is doing that work.

Conditions are where files die. Cancellations cluster after approval, which means the risk is not getting approved but satisfying what the approval was conditioned on. Ask for the conditions in writing at approval, not at closing.

Limitations

No denial data exists. This analysis cannot say anything about approval odds. The FOIA release records approvals only.

Recent approvals are censored. FY2025 loans have had less time to disburse, so the FY2025 cancellation figure will fall as remaining files fund. The direction of the FY2024–FY2025 deterioration is supported by the median-days series, which is not subject to this effect, but the level should be treated as provisional.

Disbursement date is first disbursement. Construction and multi-draw facilities disburse in stages; this measures the first, not completion.

Cancellation reason is not recorded. Borrower withdrawal, lender withdrawal, failed conditions and collapsed transactions are indistinguishable in the data.

Lender attribution is at snapshot. Loans transferred between institutions are attributed to the current holder.

Download the data

The timing panel — cancellation rate and median days to funding by loan size, processing method, business age, approval year and lender — is available as a CSV.

Licence. This dataset may be reproduced, analysed and republished, in whole or in part, for any purpose including commercial use, provided that sba-feasibility-study.com is credited as the source with a link to this page.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. US Small Business Administration, 7(a) FOIA loan-level data, as of 31 March 2026.
2. US Small Business Administration, SOP 50 10 8, processing method definitions.
3. Analysis by the research team at sba-feasibility-study.com. Figures computed from public SBA data. Last updated: 28 July 2026.