The Charlotte Feasibility Market: SBA, USDA and Its Structural Variables

Data as of June 2026. This companion research post carries the full structural and capital-markets detail behind the Charlotte feasibility study hub. Every figure traces to a primary source named in the Sources list. MMCG's city briefs use primary and FOIA sources and do not carry commercial rent, vacancy or occupancy figures.

Charlotte carries its own set of statute and government rooted variables that redefine the underwriting envelope for a commercial real estate, SBA or USDA feasibility study. Each is stated here at the level a primary source supports.

A corporate income tax on its way to repeal. The North Carolina Department of Revenue publishes a corporate income tax rate of 2.00 percent for tax year 2026, down from 2.25 percent in 2025 and 2.50 percent for 2019 through 2024. A study that holds the current rate flat across a projection period overstates the tax burden in the out years, and a study that assumes repeal has already happened understates it today. The defensible treatment in a credit file is the published schedule, applied year by year, with the rate stated as of the tax year it belongs to.

A franchise tax on the capital base, owed in a loss year. The Department of Revenue states that for C corporations, for taxable years beginning on or after January 1, 2025, the franchise tax rate is $1.50 per $1,000 of the corporation's tax base, with a maximum of $500 for the first $1,000,000 of its tax base, and that the minimum franchise tax is $200. The rate quoted is the C corporation schedule; the publisher sets out a separate schedule for S corporations, and an entity that is not taxed as a corporation is outside it altogether, so the entity type has to be established before the line is carried at all. The amounts are small beside debt service, but the structure is what matters to an underwriter: for the entities it reaches this is a charge on capital rather than on earnings, and it lands in the ramp-up years when an SBA 7(a) or 504 project has no taxable income.

Two revenue departments, both cutting, inside one labour market. The corporate rate schedule and the capital-base franchise tax described above are instruments of North Carolina law and reach only the North Carolina side of this metro. Across the line the South Carolina Department of Revenue publishes an individual income tax whose top rate has fallen every year on its own schedule, 7 percent for 2021 and prior, 6.5 percent for 2022, 6.4 percent for 2023, 6.2 percent for 2024 and 6 percent for 2025, and which becomes a two-bracket structure for tax year 2026 at 1.99 percent below $30,000 and 5.21 percent at $30,000 and above, less $966. Most SBA borrowers are pass-through entities, so for them the South Carolina individual schedule is the operative one and the North Carolina corporate schedule is not. Both states are cutting, on different instruments and different timetables, and neither trajectory can be read off the other. A study that names the metro and then applies one state's regime to all of it has not answered the first question the file asks.

Nationally, the U.S. Small Business Administration closed fiscal year 2025 having guaranteed 84,400 7(a) and 504 loans for $44.8 billion, comprising 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion and 6,750 504 loans for $7.8 billion, per SBA News Release 25-83 dated September 30, 2025. The Charlotte metro cut below is computed in-house from the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA release by county membership across the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC Metropolitan Statistical Area, never read from an SBA district total.

In fiscal year 2025 the Charlotte metro recorded 711 7(a) approvals for $411,631,300 and 37 504 approvals for $62,910,000, filed largely through the NORTH CAROLINA DISTRICT OFFICE. The most active 7(a) lenders in the metro that year, by approval count, were The Huntington National Bank (79 loans); Northeast Bank (75 loans); Newtek Bank, National Association (40 loans); TD Bank, National Association (38 loans); Readycap Lending, LLC (36 loans); Pinnacle Bank (34 loans); Live Oak Banking Company (33 loans); U.S. Bank, National Association (27 loans). The most active 504 Certified Development Companies were Business Expansion Funding Corporation (25 loans, $41,413,000); Carolina Business Capital, Inc. (8 loans, $14,322,000); Independent Development Services Corporation (1 loan, $4,987,000); Catawba Regional Development Corporation (1 loan, $934,000); Certified Development Corporation of South Carolina (1 loan, $847,000); 504 Capital Corporation (1 loan, $407,000).

USDA Business and Industry credit runs on a statutory geography, not a county line. Under 7 U.S.C. 1991(a)(13)(A) the terms rural and rural area mean any area other than a city or town of more than 50,000 inhabitants and any urbanized area contiguous and adjacent to such a city or town. For Community Facilities direct loans and grants, 7 U.S.C. 1991(a)(13)(C) sets the line at 20,000 inhabitants. The Charlotte urbanized core is therefore out. What remains in this metro is the outer parts of the member counties on both sides of the state line, where towns sit below the statutory population line and outside the urbanized area that runs with Charlotte, Concord and Gastonia. Because the test turns on the subject address and the urbanized-area boundary around it rather than on the name of the town, MMCG verifies eligibility at the address on the USDA Rural Development eligibility map at intake, before any work on the study begins, and no town is named on this page as eligible on a model's say-so.

A Charlotte market piece would ordinarily carry submarket rents, vacancy and absorption. Those come from commercial market reports, which MMCG's city briefs do not carry, so they are omitted rather than shown on a weaker source. What remains is the statute, the federal program frame and the SBA record computed from the primary file, which is the part of a Charlotte study a lender can check.