Chicago Business Acquisition Statistics 2026: What 650 Cook County Deals Cost and Who Financed Them

Justin Abdilla Named Attorney, Abdilla and Associates · ARDC #6308444

Deal range $400K to $9M. I review letters of intent, purchase agreements and seller notes for business buyers and sellers. Last updated: September 2026.

Counting businesses rather than deals? See Chicago business sale statistics.

Nobody publishes what a business sells for in Cook County. Brokers publish national averages, industry surveys split by deal size and never by geography, and no agency counts transactions at all.

One local measurement does exist, and almost nobody uses it. The SBA publishes every 7(a) loan it guarantees, one row per loan, including the county, the industry, the lender, the amount and whether the loan was eventually charged off. Filter that to Cook County acquisitions and you get 650 real deals.

This page is that dataset, computed and published in full. Everything below the local sections is national, and says so.

Key Takeaways

• 650 SBA-financed business acquisitions in Cook County between fiscal 2018 and June 30, 2026, worth $716,332,900 in guaranteed loans. (SBA 7(a) FOIA data, computed by this firm)
• Fiscal 2025 was the record year: 116 deals and $159,340,900, against 70 deals the year before.
• Median loan $648,750. A quarter were under $300,000 and a quarter above $1,500,000. Nine deals hit the $5,000,000 program cap.
• Restaurants trade most often, hotels move the most money. 49 full-service restaurant deals drew $32,326,300. 25 hotel deals drew $77,910,100.
• Two banks wrote 28 percent of the market. Byline Bank 94 deals, Huntington 90. The top five lenders account for 44 percent, out of 115 institutions that appear at all.
• 12.7 percent charged off on the seasoned fiscal 2018 and 2019 cohorts, 10 of 79 resolved loans.
• 1,297 acquisitions across the six-county region, of which Cook is 50 percent. Median deal size is flat everywhere, $645,000 to $707,000. Franchises are 15.1 percent of Cook deals and 24.4 percent in the collar counties.
• Ten years is the standard term, on 61 percent of deals. The median initial rate was 7.50 percent.

650 Deals, and 2025 Was the Record

Fiscal 2025 was the busiest year in the series by a wide margin. It carried 116 acquisitions against 70 the year before, a 66 percent jump, and $159,340,900 in loans against $77,175,600.

Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA loan data through 2026-06-30, filtered to Cook County, Illinois and a business age of "Change of Ownership." Computed by Abdilla and Associates. Fiscal 2026 covers three quarters only.

What They Cost

The median Cook County acquisition loan was $648,750. The distribution is unusually flat: no band dominates, and deals are spread almost evenly from under $250,000 to $5,000,000.

Which Businesses Actually Trade

182 distinct industries appear across the 650 deals, so the tail is long. The head is not: restaurants alone account for 80 of them.

Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA data, Cook County change-of-ownership loans, computed by Abdilla and Associates. Industries are merged across the 2017 and 2022 NAICS revisions where a code was renumbered or renamed.

Ranking the same deals by money rather than by count reverses the order almost completely.

Who Actually Lends

This is the figure with no substitute anywhere. 115 institutions financed at least one Cook County acquisition, and the market is far more concentrated than that number suggests.

Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA data, Cook County change-of-ownership loans, computed by Abdilla and Associates.

What Failed

SBA reports the final status of every loan, so the failure rate can be computed rather than estimated. It has to be read by cohort. A loan approved in 2024 has had no time to fail, so recent years look artificially clean.

Resolved means the loan reached paid-in-full or charge-off. Loans still outstanding, cancelled or not yet disbursed are excluded. SBA withholds status on many recent loans, which is why resolved counts fall away in later years.

Inside Cook: The City and the Suburbs

Cook County is two markets. 240 of the 650 acquisitions were businesses with a Chicago address and 410 were suburban, and they do not look alike.

Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA data through 2026-06-30, computed by Abdilla and Associates. City and suburb are split on the borrower address, because SBA records no separate business location.

The city and the suburbs buy different businesses

The Rest of Chicagoland

Cook is half the region and not all of it. The same filter across the six-county metropolitan area returns 1,297 acquisitions worth $1,465,679,300. DuPage is the second market at 225 deals.

Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA data through 2026-06-30, computed by Abdilla and Associates. Same filter as the Cook County figures above.

DuPage in particular

225 acquisitions worth $271,289,300, at a median of $677,500, which is slightly above Cook. Fiscal 2025 doubled the county's volume to 60 deals from 30. Naperville alone accounts for 34 of them, then Bensenville, Lombard and Addison.

The industry mix is not a smaller version of Cook's. Cook trades restaurants, liquor stores and hotels. DuPage's most-acquired list runs to machine shops at a median of $1,970,000, plumbing and HVAC contractors, and freight transportation arrangement. It is a contractor and light-industrial economy wearing the same statistics.

Your lender depends on your county

The busiest acquisition lender is not the same institution across the region, and this is the kind of thing a buyer discovers only after being declined once.

Franchises cluster outside the city

This is the sharpest geographic difference in the data, and it is a clean gradient. Fewer than one in ten Chicago acquisitions is a franchise. In Lake County it is nearly one in three, and every step in between runs the same direction.

Chicago 9.6 percent against suburban Cook 18.3 percent, Fisher exact p equals 0.003. Cook overall 15.1 percent against 24.4 percent across the five collar counties pooled, p below 0.0001. On 1,297 deals.

If You Want a Multiple

None of the above gives you a multiple, because SBA records the loan and not the earnings. For that the only figures are national.

Source: IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse survey, Q4 2024. National. No Chicago or Cook County cut of this data exists.

What the Paperwork Does

Three things decide a deal after the price is agreed, and all three are covered in full elsewhere on this site rather than summarised here.

• The letter of intent. 60 days is the exclusivity anchor across 196 SEC-filed letters this firm read, exclusivity appeared in 34 of the 50 operating-business letters, and most no-shops were granted for nothing. Before you sign that letter of intent.
• The SBA rulebook. From October 1, 2026, SOP 50 10 8.1 prohibits seller earnouts in change of ownership deals and requires a Quality of Earnings report at a purchase price of $3 million or more. The rules that govern are those in force when SBA issues the loan number, not when the parties sign. The SBA's new acquisition rules.
• The earnout, where one survives. Outside SBA financing it is still on the table, and it is where sellers lose money after closing. Earnouts: how sellers get burned.

What Nobody Publishes

This page fills part of the gap. The rest is still empty, and it is listed here so you can stop looking, and so anyone quoting a figure for it can be asked where it came from.

• No transaction count. The 650 deals here are SBA-financed only. Cash purchases, conventional loans, seller-financed deals and private equity acquisitions are invisible. No agency counts the total.
• No local sale price or multiple. SBA records the loan, not the earnings and not the price. Every multiple published anywhere is national.
• No local days on market. National figures exist for some industries, near 178 days for restaurants. No local cut exists for any of them.
• No time from letter of intent to closing, at any geography. Figures presented as time to close are usually listing to sale, which measures something else.
• No financing mix. This page gives the SBA numerator. Nobody publishes the denominator, so the share of Chicago sales financed by a bank, a seller note or cash remains unknown.

Methodology and Source Notes

The local figures are computed from the SBA's own 7(a) FOIA release, which publishes one row per guaranteed loan. Rows were filtered to a project state of Illinois, a project county of Cook, and a business age of "Change of Ownership," which is SBA's own flag for a loan made to buy an existing business. That yields 650 loans across fiscal 2018 to June 30, 2026. Nothing was sampled or estimated.

Five limits travel with every local number here.

• SBA only. These are not all Chicago business sales. They are the ones that used a 7(a) loan.
• Loan, not price. Buyer equity and seller notes sit above the loan, so every figure is a floor.
• Fiscal 2018 start. SBA did not record the purpose flag before then.
• Fiscal 2026 is a part year, three quarters to June 30, 2026.
• Failure rates need seasoning. Recent cohorts have not had time to default and their rates are not comparable to older ones.

The national multiples come from the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse survey. The letter of intent figures are this firm's own reading of SEC filings, with the method set out on the letter of intent page. The SBA rule changes come from SOP 50 10 8.1 and its announcing notice.

Update policy

SBA refreshes the 7(a) FOIA file quarterly. This page is recomputed on each release, and the counts move when it does. The national multiples are checked on each Market Pulse release. The SBA rules are checked on any SOP revision.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many businesses are bought and sold in Chicago each year?

No agency publishes a transaction count for Chicago or Cook County. The closest measured figure is SBA lending. Between fiscal 2018 and June 2026, SBA guaranteed 650 7(a) loans for a change of business ownership in Cook County, worth $716.3 million. That is a floor and not a total, because it counts only deals that used SBA financing. Cash purchases, seller-financed deals, conventional bank loans and private equity acquisitions are all absent from it.

What does a business actually sell for in Chicago?

No source publishes a Cook County sale price. The nearest local measurement is the size of the SBA loan used to buy the business. Across 650 Cook County acquisitions the median loan was $648,750, with a quarter under $300,000 and a quarter above $1.5 million. The loan is not the price. A 7(a) loan funds part of a purchase, and buyer equity and a seller note usually make up the rest, so the true price sits above the loan.

Which Chicago businesses change hands most often?

Restaurants, by a wide margin. Full-service restaurants accounted for 49 of the 650 Cook County acquisitions and limited-service restaurants another 31. Liquor retailers followed at 29 and hotels at 25. By dollars the order reverses: 25 hotel deals drew $77.9 million, more than double the $32.3 million that went to 49 full-service restaurant deals.

Who finances business acquisitions in Chicago?

Two lenders do most of it. Byline Bank funded 94 of the 650 Cook County acquisitions and Huntington National Bank 90, so between them they wrote 28 percent of the market. Live Oak Banking Company was third at 51. The top five lenders account for 44 percent of all deals, and 115 different institutions appear in the data. Byline is Chicago based, which matters because the busiest acquisition lender in the county is a local bank rather than a national one.

How often do SBA business acquisition loans fail in Chicago?

On the two fully seasoned cohorts, fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2019, 10 of 79 resolved Cook County acquisition loans were charged off. That is 12.7 percent. Newer cohorts look better only because most of their loans have not resolved yet, so their rates are not comparable. The figure counts loans that reached a final status, so it is a resolved-loan rate and not a share of all originations.

Is the SBA restaurant default rate really 9.34 percent?

Treat that number carefully. It originates on the marketing site of a small loan brokerage rather than a research source, and that site publishes different restaurant default figures elsewhere on its own pages. An independent party processing the same SBA data reached 10.1 to 10.8 percent. The Cook County acquisition figure computed here, 12.7 percent across all industries on seasoned cohorts, is consistent with the higher range. Restaurants do fail above the blended average, but the decimals in that circulating figure are not reliable.

How long is an SBA acquisition loan, and at what rate?

Ten years is the standard. Of the 650 Cook County acquisitions, 61 percent carried a 120 month term. The 117 loans at 300 months are deals that included real estate, which is what stretches the term to 25 years. The median initial interest rate across the set was 7.50 percent.

What multiple do small businesses sell for?

Multiples rise with size, from about 2.0 times SDE under $500,000 of price to 6.0 times EBITDA in the $5 million to $50 million band. Those figures are national, from the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse survey, because no Chicago or Cook County multiple is published by anyone. The full ladder and what moves a multiple up are set out on the what is my business worth page.

Do you have data for DuPage County business sales?

Yes. SBA financed 225 business acquisitions in DuPage County between fiscal 2018 and June 2026, worth $271,289,300, at a median loan of $677,500. That is the second largest market in the region after Cook, and the median is slightly higher than Cook's. Naperville accounts for 34 of the deals. DuPage's most acquired industries are not Cook's: machine shops, plumbing and HVAC contractors and freight transportation arrangement, rather than restaurants and liquor stores.

Are businesses more expensive in the Chicago suburbs?

Not in the financed deal sizes. Across all six counties the median acquisition loan sits between $645,000 and $707,000. Cook is $648,750, DuPage $677,500, Will $707,000. On 1,297 transactions there is no suburban premium visible at all.

Are franchises a bigger part of the suburban market?

Substantially. Franchised businesses were 15.1 percent of Cook County acquisitions and 24.4 percent across the five collar counties pooled, which on 1,297 deals is significant at p below 0.0001. Lake County is the highest at 29.8 percent, close to one deal in three. The most acquired franchise in both Cook and DuPage is The UPS Store. Franchised deals also carry larger loans, a median of $749,500 in Cook against $635,400 for independent businesses.

Is it cheaper to buy a business in Chicago than in the suburbs?

At the median, yes, but most of the gap is what is being sold rather than where. 240 acquisitions with a Chicago address ran to a median loan of $542,500 against $750,000 for the 410 suburban Cook deals. Remove hotels, gas stations and supermarkets, which are overwhelmingly suburban, and the gap narrows to $524,000 against $647,500 and sits exactly on the conventional significance threshold. Two hotels changed hands inside the city against 23 outside it.

What kinds of businesses sell inside Chicago itself?

Dense urban service businesses. Across 240 Chicago acquisitions the most frequent were full-service restaurants (20), liquor retailers (12), limited-service restaurants (11) and coin-operated laundromats (11). Laundromats are strikingly a city business: all 11 coin-operated laundromat sales in Cook County were inside Chicago and none were suburban, at a median loan of $755,000, which is more than a full-service restaurant costs. Suburban Cook's list is different: hotels, gas stations with convenience stores, general automotive repair and CPA offices.

Where to go next

• What is my business actually worth? The multiple ladder, add-backs, and what actually moves the number up.
• Selling my business in Illinois. Asset sale against membership interest sale, tax clearance, and the stop order that catches sellers.
• Someone wants to buy my business. What to do with an unsolicited offer before you answer it.
• Before you sign that letter of intent. 196 real letters, measured.
• EBITDA vs. Quality of Earnings. What a buyer's accountant tests and what it costs you.
• Earnouts: how sellers get burned.
• Getting an Illinois LLC exit ready.
• The SBA's new acquisition rules.
• Chicago business sale statistics. How many of each business type exist in Cook County, and which are disappearing.

Full Source List

The Cook County figures on this page are original computation and are not published anywhere else. Reuse is welcome with attribution and a link. Cite as: Abdilla and Associates, "Chicago Business Acquisition Statistics 2026," thechicagolandlawyer.com, updated September 2026.