Brief

PPP loans approved in August 2020 were charged off 20 times as often as the program's first loans

Kian O'Connor

Published October 11, 2026

Data retrieved September 25, 2026

Of the Paycheck Protection Program loans SBA approved in August 2020, 13.6% had been charged off by September 30, 2024. Of those approved in April 2020, the program's first month, 0.7% had.

Loans approved in August 2020 were charged off at 20 times the rate of those approved in April 2020

The share of each month's PPP loans that SBA's file records as charged off as of September 30, 2024, first and second draws together, for the months in which SBA approved at least 100,000 loans.

SBA's file has no loan approved from September to November 2020. December 2020, June 2021 and July 2021, with fewer than 100,000 loans each, are left out of the chart and kept in every total.

Source: The SBA

About this chart

The figures

Loans approved in August 2020 were charged off at 20 times the rate of those approved in April 2020. The share of each month's PPP loans that SBA's file records as charged off as of September 30, 2024, first and second draws together, for the months in which SBA approved at least 100,000 loans.
Month approved	Charged off	Loans approved	Charged off
April 2020	0.7%	2,896,276	19,573
May 2020	2.7%	1,507,814	41,094
June 2020	7.0%	408,369	28,447
July 2020	12.3%	211,452	26,028
August 2020	13.6%	112,346	15,237
January 2021	1.4%	864,684	12,116
February 2021	3.8%	1,233,465	47,268
March 2021	5.8%	1,492,503	87,130
April 2021	13.5%	1,735,601	234,718
May 2021	13.1%	1,003,262	131,218

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<figure style="margin:0;max-width:960px">
  <img src="https://americanfactbook.org/embed/chart/brief-ppp-when-the-loans-were-approved.svg" alt="Loans approved in August 2020 were charged off at 20 times the rate of those approved in April 2020" style="width:100%;height:auto" loading="lazy">
  <figcaption style="font:13px/1.4 system-ui,sans-serif">Chart: <a href="https://americanfactbook.org/ppp-loans">Loans approved in August 2020 were charged off at 20 times the rate of those approved in April 2020</a>, American Factbook, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a></figcaption>
</figure>

By September 30, 2024, the date of SBA's latest file, 643,039 of the 11,468,210 Paycheck Protection Program loans had been charged off: 5.6% of them. How often depended on when the loan was approved. Of the 2,896,276 loans SBA approved in April 2020, 19,573 had been charged off. Of the 112,346 approved in August 2020, 15,237 had: about 20 times the rate.

Counted by year, 2.5% of the 5,136,262 loans approved in 2020 had been charged off, against 8.1% of the 6,331,948 approved in 2021. Within 2021 the two kinds of loan differed. A first draw, a business's first PPP loan, was charged off in 11.5% of 3,476,202 cases; a second draw, a further loan to a business that had already had one, in 4.0% of 2,855,746.

Which months are compared

SBA approved loans in 13 months. The comparison above is among the 10 in which it approved at least 100,000. The other three fall at the edges of the program's two rounds: SBA approved 5 loans in December 2020, 2,432 in June 2021 and 1 in July 2021. A rate over so few loans is not one to set beside a rate over millions, so those months are left out of the comparison. Their loans are in every total.

What these rates are, and what they are not

A charge-off is a status SBA records on the loan, beside the amount the loan was approved for. It is not what SBA lost: the file does not record what was repaid before the charge-off or recovered after it. And it does not say why a loan was charged off.

The file records the month a loan was approved, and its status on one day. It does not say why the loans approved in one month differ from those approved in another, and this brief does not either: who applied, which lenders made the loans and what rules applied all changed over the program, and none of that is in these rows. A loan approved later has also been open for less time by September 30, 2024, so it has had less time to be charged off, which would hold a later month's rate down rather than up. A loan neither forgiven nor charged off by then could still become either.

What this cannot show

A charge-off is a status SBA records on a loan, with the amount the loan was approved for. The file does not record what was repaid before a charge-off or recovered after it, so no figure here is a loss, and it does not say why any loan was charged off.
Every status is as of the date of SBA's latest file. A loan approved later has been open for less time by that date, so it has had less time to be charged off, which would hold a later month's rate down rather than up. A loan neither forgiven nor charged off could still become either, so the rates are of where each month's loans stood on one day.
The month is the month SBA approved the loan. The file does not record why the loans approved in one month differ from those approved in another, and a difference in their rates is not evidence of a cause.

Sources

SBA Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) FOIA — loan-level data, U.S. Small Business Administration. Public domain. SBA's catalog record for the dataset (DKAN metastore, identifier SBA-OCA-2022-07-001) gives its license as "https://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/", the usa.gov public-domain label. The data is a federal agency's record of loans it guaranteed, a U.S. Government work under 17 U.S.C. 105. Retrieved September 25, 2026.

Every figure above is the recorded result of a query checked into the repository alongside this text. Continuous integration re-runs those queries and refuses the change if a number here and a number there disagree. Read the methodology, or the datasets behind it.

Published by American Factbook LLC. An independent publication.