SBA Loan Volume Is Up 65%. Here Are 3 Predictions I'm Willing to Timestamp.

I'm going to do something most fintech CEOs won't do: publish predictions with real data and commit to revisiting them publicly. We started 2026 with AI Is Already Doing Your Taxes (Kinda) and Bloomberg just put out an intriguing piece on why that might be problematic.

The consensus mood in SBA right now is whiplash. Policy uncertainty, fraud hangover, and everyone waiting for clarity. But the bull case isn’t “things go back to normal.” The bull case is that incentives and enforcement are finally starting to align — and that rewards lenders who operate clean, fast, and evidence-based lending programs.

Here are three predictions I’m confident enough to timestamp, plus the signals that will prove me right or wrong.

The new administration has been vocal about investing more capital in small businesses. The policy signals aren't subtle — they're structural.

In a recent interview with Joe Lonsdale’s American Optimist, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler described the push to double the SBA manufacturing loan limit from $5 million to $10 million as “rocket fuel” — designed to help industries like defense, transportation, and pharmaceuticals return to America and purchase expensive equipment like CNC machines. Senate passage of this increase in the limit would be a clear inflection point for average loan size across 7(a) and 504 programs alike.

Signals to watch:

• Senate passage of the SBA manufacturing loan limit increase ($5M → $10M)

• Average approved loan size trending upward in SBA weekly reports

This one is about the denominator. Better tooling to identify and mitigate fraud, combined with the continued proliferation of new small businesses, means more clean applications entering the pipeline — and more of them getting through. It also more businesses need capital, and potentially a higher quality of business owner is emerging post the pandemic.

On the fraud side, the SBA is getting more precise. Think foreign IP addresses flagged on PPP loans, ineligible multi-millionaires filtered out of small business programs, and real audits of programs like 8(a) to ensure they actually serve the socially and economically disadvantaged rather than being exploited.

When you remove bad actors from the system, legitimate borrowers move faster. That’s how fraud prevention becomes an origination accelerator.

Signals to watch:

• Fraud identification improvements: flagging of foreign IP addresses on PPP loans, filtering ineligible applicants (more on this soon).

• Program integrity actions: 8(a) restructuring and audits that restore credibility and throughput

• New business formation rates are holding above pre-pandemic levels

This prediction is already showing up in the data.

Through mid-March 2026, the SBA has approved 23,690 loans totaling approximately $12.8 billion. For comparison, all of 2025 produced 78,078 approvals and roughly $37.3 billion in approved volume.

If you annualize the 2026 pace, that projects to approximately 113,700 approvals — a 46% increase over 2025 — and roughly $61.6 billion in volume, which would represent a 65% increase.

The growth isn’t concentrated in one segment. Smaller loans ($50K and under, $50K–$150K) are tracking at a pace that would roughly triple 2025 counts, while the $500K–$2M and $2M+ segments are also trending up in both count and dollar share.

The run rate of 2.5 months in is meaningfully above 2025’s full-year totals on both a count and dollar basis.

Source: SBA.gov approval data, 2025 full year vs. 2026 YTD annualized

We’re 2.5 months into 2026. Annualizing Q1 data is aggressive — seasonality, rate environment shifts, and policy delays could all flatten the curve. If the manufacturing loan limit stalls in the Senate, if fraud cleanup creates processing bottlenecks instead of clearing them, or if macro conditions deteriorate, these projections don’t hold.

But here’s why I’m still publishing this: while our government is complicated in many other areas, the SBA appears to be one of the agencies genuinely improving under the new administration. This is a critical moment for small business capital markets. The consensus is that things are getting more expensive — but things that small business owners never had access to before are now table stakes: websites, discovery tools, custom software. That makes the hard assets and infrastructure that SBA loans finance even more important.

These are my three predictions, 2.5 months into 2026. I’ll revisit them publicly at the end of Q2.

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One ask: Forward this to one person on your team and ask them, “Which prediction would we benefit from most if true?”

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