SBA 7(a) and 504 Loan Programs

The two longest-running SBA lending programs in the open data catalog: loan approvals for 7(a) and 504 are covered from fiscal year 1991 through the current quarter, delivered as five historical segment files plus the FY2020-present extracts.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - sba-open-data-portal — "loan-level FOIA files for the 7(a), 504, microloan, PPP and RRF programs".

Conventions decide whether two sources can be joined at all. Buy one side of an analysis that ignores this convention and every reconciliation step — calendar alignment, unit conversion, entity matching — lands on your team instead of the vendor's.

The failure mode is concrete: a source can carry the SBA 7(a) and 504 Loan Programs label while differing from what you need on exactly the dimension that matters — 7(a) and 504 loans approved since fiscal year 1991 through the current quarter. Comparing two sources on that line usually settles the choice faster than any feature matrix.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and sba-open-data-portal lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open sba-open-data-portal and confirm its record — "loan-level FOIA files for the 7(a), 504, microloan, PPP and RRF programs" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
3. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
4. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: specialized-finance data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - Government-Guaranteed Lending - Loan-Level Data - PPP Loan Data