Brief
Half of the PPP loans charged off were sole proprietorships'
American Factbook Research
Published
Data retrieved
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. Half of those, 322,999 or 50.2%, were loans to businesses that gave their type as a sole proprietorship.
9.4% of sole proprietorships' loans were charged off, against 1.5% of corporations'
The share of each business type's PPP loans that SBA's file records as charged off, for every type holding at least one percent of all loans, with every PPP loan together for comparison. The type is the one the borrower gave.
Source: The SBA
About this chart
The figures
| Business type | Share of its loans charged off | Loans | Charged off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Employed Individuals | 12.9% | 876,198 | 112,938 |
| Independent Contractors | 11.0% | 816,784 | 89,606 |
| Sole Proprietorship | 9.4% | 3,449,226 | 322,999 |
| Every PPP loan | 5.6% | 11,468,210 | 643,039 |
| Limited Liability Company (LLC) | 2.5% | 2,385,321 | 60,157 |
| Corporation | 1.5% | 2,324,029 | 35,214 |
| Subchapter S Corporation | 1.2% | 1,040,233 | 12,151 |
| Partnership | 1.2% | 118,213 | 1,362 |
| Non-Profit Organization | 0.5% | 250,238 | 1,175 |
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Sole proprietorships held 3,449,226 loans, 30.1% of every PPP loan, and 7.5% of the dollars. Their average loan was $17,123, against $128,048 for a corporation. By the same date 9.4% of their loans had been charged off, against 1.5% of corporations'. Counted in approved dollars rather than in loans, the share is smaller: sole proprietorships held 32.7% of the dollars charged off: their loans were small.
Two types were charged off at higher rates still. Among the types holding at least one percent of all loans, the highest were self-employed individuals, at 12.9%, and independent contractors, at 11.0%. Next came sole proprietorships. Forgiveness ran the other way: 87.5% of sole proprietorships' loans carried a forgiveness amount, against 97.3% of corporations'.
What a charge-off is in this file
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, so a charged-off loan's approved amount is its size, not a loss. And the file does not say why a loan was charged off. A business that closed, a borrower who could not be found and a loan SBA judged improper are the same status in these rows, and this brief cannot tell them apart.
What a business type is
The business type is the borrower's own answer on the application, as SBA prints it. The file carries 25 of them, and 2,255 loans with none. A sole proprietorship, a self-employed individual and an independent contractor are three separate answers, and the file does not say what led one borrower to give one rather than another. So the comparison here is between answers on a form, not between kinds of business that the file defines.
What the figures do not say
These are statuses on one date. A loan that was neither forgiven nor charged off by then could still become either. And the figures say nothing about why sole proprietorships' loans were charged off more often than corporations': the file records the type, the amount and the status, and none of the circumstances behind them.
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.
- The business type is the borrower's own answer on the application, as SBA prints it. The file does not define the types or say what distinguishes a borrower who gave one from a borrower who gave another.
- Every status is as of the date of SBA's latest file. A loan neither forgiven nor charged off by then could still become either.
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.