# PPP small loans: who got them, when, and what the fee rules paid for making them

How the smallest PPP loans got out, month by month: 151 cells of approval month, loan-size band and draw, each with the loans approved, the dollars behind them, the median loan, and the lender fee the published schedule would pay for making them.

Published at https://pandemicdarlings.com/data/ppp-small-loan-access/ . Compiled table; not part of release pandemic-darlings-data-v1-2026-07-10. Built 2026-09-21.

## Files

| file | rows | bytes | sha256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| `ppp-small-loan-access.csv` | 151 | 24611 | `f165f1ae1bd4f2e57a5f66fb53e519c5947bb2275e8d87dc878e15a5808694cb` |
| `small-loan-lenders.csv` | 100 | 17228 | `112ae3b98706034247e0b94af5c78459cee6df0d321fec5d8bdb9cead090f183` |
| `fee-incentive.csv` | 19 | 4286 | `58b3dd7f2543fc26d6f27e6b2505478574ff2b485cb19199d15ba3fad8809aec` |
| `geography.csv` | 60 | 16273 | `477a687e89d067fc4c4837ecaba9edc5548a61fe2625dec798c99f1c573846cb` |

`dictionary.csv` beside this file describes every column of the served table: measured type, blanks, distinct values, range, example and meaning. `SHA256SUMS` carries the SHA-256 of every file on the page, including the page itself.

## What this is

One row is one approval month, one loan-size band and one draw. The eight bands are cut at $5,000, $10,000, $20,833.33, $50,000, $150,000, $350,000 and $2,000,000; every cut but the $10,000 one is a boundary in an SBA rule, in a fee schedule, or in SBA's own file layout, and the $10,000 cut is analytical and labeled as such in the companion file.

Three companion files are cut from the same universe and reconcile to it: small-loan-lenders.csv ranks the 50 largest originators of small loans under each of two definitions of small, fee-incentive.csv prices every band under both fee schedules, and geography.csv gives counts and shares by borrower state.

The unit is a loan, not a business, a borrower or a job. One business holding a first-draw and a second-draw loan is two loans here.

## How it was built

The universe is every loan in SBA's release of 30 September 2024 — 11,468,210 rows across 13 files — less the four whose undisbursed amount is at or above their approval amount. That leaves 11,468,206 loans and $792,601,069,043.55 approved, dated 3 April 2020 to 19 July 2021. Within it, 8,984,989 loans were $50,000 or less and 7,306,941 were $20,833.33 or less, the Schedule C maximum.

Nothing is hand-entered. The 13 raw files are read with Python's CSV reader into one compact row per loan, then aggregated. Money is carried as integer cents and fees as integer ten-thousandths of a dollar, which is exact for the 50, 5, 3 and 1 percent rates and the flat $2,500, so the totals are not floating-point estimates.

Every figure on this page was recomputed from the loan file when the page was built: the universe, both small-loan thresholds, all 151 cells, the eight fee-incentive bands and all 60 state rows were re-derived and compared to the table, with 0 mismatches.

## Read this before you use it

Fees are modeled, not paid. Every fee column applies a published schedule to a loan amount. SBA has never published per-loan or per-lender fee payments. Clawbacks, netting and fees on loans later cancelled or charged off are outside the model, which does not know whether a lender was paid at all.

Loan size is not borrower size. A $15,000 loan means a small payroll base in the month used to compute it. It establishes nothing about the borrower's revenue, employment, sector or survival.

Nothing here is a cause. The 2021 schedule paid far more per small loan than the 2020 schedule, and far more small loans were made in 2021. Both are measurements. The eligibility formula, the Schedule C gross-income change, second draws, set-asides and lender entry all changed at the same time.

A platform network row is the partner lender's whole book. Where platform_network is filled in the lenders file, it names a lender that a held document identifies as that platform's partner. The loans and fees are the lender's, for its whole book of that size.

17 mis-coded loans. SBA's file marks 17 loans as second-draw but dates them in 2020. Following the archive's standing treatment they are counted by approval date with the 2020 round and priced under the 2020 schedule.

## What it does not measure

Geography has no denominator. The state file gives counts and shares, not loans per 1,000 establishments: no 2019 establishment file is held, and a raw state count tracks state size before anything else.

Lender types are blank. SBA's file has no lender-type field and the archive holds no SBA lender list. Calling a lender a fintech because of its name is not a measurement.

Demographics are absent by choice. SBA's race, ethnicity, gender and veteran fields are largely unanswered in this release, so no subgroup comparison is published here.

The same fee model, cut three other ways. PPP fee schedules by vintage gives it at three rows, the lender ranking ranks whole books, and the fee counterfactual prices one loan at a time.

## Citation

PPP small loans: who got them, when, and what the fee rules paid for making them, compiled from SBA's loan-level release of 30 September 2024.

## Rights

Compiled from U.S. government public records; attribution to Pandemic Darlings requested for the compiled table.