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Method

How the PPP loan figures are made

How the pages of the PPP loans hub read what their publishers put out, and what that record can and cannot say. The method every topic shares — where a figure comes from, snapshots, freshness and corrections — is on the site’s methodology page.

What a row is

One row is one loan the Small Business Administration guaranteed under the Paycheck Protection Program: a borrower as named on the loan, a lender, the amount approved and the amount as it now stands, the approval date, and the loan’s status and forgiveness as of the date of SBA’s file. SBA publishes the loans in thirteen files, one for loans of $150,000 and over and twelve for smaller loans.

Loans are counted, borrowers are not

SBA publishes no identifier for a borrower: no EIN, no UEI, no DUNS number. A business could take a first draw and a second, and the two can sit in different files. So every total on the hub and state pages counts loans and sums dollars, which add across the files, and none counts businesses, which would count a borrower with two draws twice.

A status is as of a date

The loans were approved in 2020 and 2021 and will not change. Their status and forgiveness do, and SBA republishes them, so every page states the date of the file it read. A loan carries a forgiveness amount or it does not; a charge-off means SBA paid the lender under its guarantee. Where SBA writes Exemption 4, the loan was disbursed and neither paid in full nor charged off, and its status is withheld. None of these is a finding about the borrower, and the file carries no fraud flag.

Where a loan is

A state or county is where SBA records the business as operating, not its mailing address. The fifty states and the District of Columbia have pages; loans SBA filed under a territory, an armed-forces address or no location at all are in every national figure and are listed on the hub page rather than dropped.

Which borrowers have a page

A borrower page needs a name SBA printed as a name. Two kinds of loan have none, and neither has a page. 28 loans are ones where SBA withheld the borrower under FOIA Exemption 6 and printed “Exemption 6” in place of a name; read as a name, it would put that many people on one borrower’s page. And 676 loans have a borrower name that is not a name: a single character, or one of the names below, read without their punctuation (“N/A” and “N.A.” are one entry). Two letters or more that could be initials, such as “AJ”, have a page. Every one of these loans is in every total, state and lender figure; only the page is withheld. Every spelling, with its loans:

A name that says there is none
“NA” 33, “N/A” 17, “SAME” 14, “NOT AVAILABLE” 12, “NONE” 5, “--NONE--” 4, “NO NAME” 3, “BLANK” 2, “SAME AS ABOVE” 2, “- NONE -” 1, “BUSINESS NAME” 1, “N.A.” 1, “NAME” 1, “NO” 1, “NONE-” 1, “TBD” 1
A description in place of a name
“INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR” 134, “SELF EMPLOYED” 89, “SELF EMPLOYMENT” 49, “SELF” 45, “SOLE PROPRIETOR” 35, “CONTRACTOR” 17, “OWNER” 13, “SOLE PROPRIETORSHIP” 8, “LLC” 7, “SELF-EMPLOYED” 6, “DBA” 4, “INDIVIDUAL” 3, “. INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR” 1, “BUSINESS” 1, “INC” 1, “SELF- EMPLOYED” 1, “SOLE OWNER” 1, “SOLE PROP” 1
A single character, or none
“-” 53, “|” 40, “N” 30, “E” 5, “J” 4, “M” 4, “B” 3, “C” 3, “R” 3, “1” 2, “I” 2, “S” 2, “X” 2, “0” 1, “A.” 1, “B>” 1, “C.” 1, “D” 1, “H” 1, “L.” 1, “P” 1

42,426 loans have a borrower name that SBA’s export wrote with an HTML entity: “WAX & SPA” for the name SBA printed as “WAX & SPA”. Pages show the name decoded, and the name as the file holds it stays on the page’s markup as data-verbatim. The entity is the export’s encoding, not the name; the only change a page makes to a name is its casing.

What this data cannot show

  • A borrower has no identifier in the file. There is no EIN, UEI or DUNS number, so two loans belong to one borrower here only where the name and address match exactly as published; a business that moved, or spelled its name two ways, is two borrowers.
  • Borrowers include people: sole proprietors, independent contractors and the self-employed borrowed under their own names, and a borrower page prints the name, city, state and ZIP, not the street address.
  • A loan is not a grant, and forgiveness is not a finding about the borrower. A charge-off means SBA paid the lender under its guarantee. The file carries no fraud flag, and nothing here implies one.
  • Jobs reported is the number of employees the borrower put on the application. It is not jobs saved, and SBA does not verify it in this file.
  • Race, ethnicity, gender and veteran status are self-reported, and SBA prints “Unanswered” (for ethnicity, “Unknown/NotStated”) where a borrower gave none, so a distribution of the answers is not a distribution of borrowers.
  • A loan's status is as of SBA's snapshot, September 30, 2024. Where SBA writes Exemption 4, the loan was disbursed and neither paid in full nor charged off, and its status is withheld.
  • Twenty-eight loans carry no location and no lender. They are in every national total and appear in the state, county and lender tables as a row with no location.

Sources

Data retrieved