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

Data as of June 2026. This companion research post carries the full structural, market and capital-markets detail behind the Columbus feasibility study hub. Every figure traces to a primary source named in the Sources list. Statutes, ordinances, tax rates, population and the SBA record come from government publishers. The market layer comes from a research report the publisher has put on a public page, named in the sentence that carries it.

Columbus 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.

Municipal income tax is withheld where the work is done, and the home city's credit is not guaranteed. Ohio Revised Code 718.011 puts the withholding duty at the place the work is physically done. An employer need not withhold for a municipality where the employee worked twenty or fewer days in a calendar year, and even that exception holds only if the employer withholds and remits instead to the municipality containing the employee's principal place of work, which the statute defines as the fixed location the employee reports to on a regular and ordinary basis. A site in this metro therefore withholds at its own municipality's rate for its regular staff, and picks up a second and a third municipality for crews that cross a city line for more than twenty days. The City of Columbus Division of Income Tax publishes a list of Ohio municipalities with each one's rate, residence credit and credit limit, and it is that credit column, not the rate column, that decides what the worker keeps. Columbus itself charges 2.50% and gives residents a 100.00% credit up to 2.50%; Gahanna and Hilliard also charge 2.50% with a full credit; Bexley charges 2.50% and credits 65.00%; Sunbury and Pataskala charge 1.00% and credit 0.00%. Township ground is not exempt ground: the Etna-Reynoldsburg JEDD 2 charges 2.00% and the Marysville-Jerome Township JEDD charges 1.50%, each with a 0.00% credit. The same offered wage nets differently by home address, which is a recruitment and wage-setting input rather than an employer cost ratio.

A state tax on gross receipts rather than profit, which the statute forbids invoicing onward. Ohio does not tax an operating business on its profit at the state level in the way a national template assumes. Ohio Revised Code 5751.02 levies the commercial activity tax on each person with taxable gross receipts for the privilege of doing business in the state, and says plainly that the tax is not a transactional tax. Ohio Revised Code 5751.03 fixes the rate at two and six-tenths mills per dollar of taxable gross receipts after subtracting the exclusion amount for the calendar year, and Ohio Revised Code 5751.01 defines that exclusion amount as three million dollars beginning in 2024 and six million dollars beginning in 2025. Two consequences follow from the publisher's own words. First, the base is revenue, so a project that loses money in its ramp year still sits in the base once it clears the exclusion, unlike a profits tax. Second, the statute states that the tax is a tax on the taxpayer and shall not be billed or invoiced to another person, so it cannot be shown to a customer as a separate line the way sales tax is. For an SBA or USDA study in this metro, the exclusion means most single-site operators are below the threshold, and the modelling question is at what revenue the sponsor crosses it, not what the rate is.

The sales tax boundary inside this metro is a city line, not a county line. The Ohio Department of Taxation's Sales and Use Tax Rate Map, dated September 9, 2026 and stating rates in effect as of October 2026, puts Franklin County at 8.00%, made up of a 1.25% county permissive rate and a 1.00% transit rate on a state rate the same document gives as 5.75%. The nine other member counties of this metro are lower: Delaware, Union and Madison at 7.00%, Fairfield at 6.75%, and Licking, Morrow, Perry, Pickaway and Hocking at 7.25%. The part that a national template gets wrong is the transit overlay. The Department's note states that municipalities whose boundaries extend both within and beyond Franklin County assess a COTA rate of 1.00% in addition to the posted state and county sales tax rate, and it names them: the portions of Columbus and Westerville in Delaware County, the portions of Columbus and Reynoldsburg in Fairfield County, the portion of Reynoldsburg in Licking County and the portion of Dublin in Union County. The rate a project pays on its equipment and materials therefore changes at a municipal boundary inside four suburban counties, not at the county line. For an SBA 504 project whose use of proceeds is dominated by equipment, the difference between the 6.75% Fairfield posting and the 8.00% Franklin posting is a real line, and it is decided by the site address.

Voted property tax levies are frozen in dollars against existing property, and a new building is not. Ohio's tax reduction factor is the rule most often mis-modelled by an out-of-state underwriter. Ohio Revised Code 319.301 directs the tax commissioner to determine, each year and for each voted levy, by what percentage the sums levied against carryover property would have to be reduced for the tax to levy the same number of dollars in the current year as in the preceding year. The statute defines carryover property as all real property on the current year's tax list except land and improvements that were not taxed by the district in both the preceding year and the current year. A reappraisal that lifts values therefore does not lift the yield of a voted levy against property that was already on the list, but it does not protect a new building, which is outside the carryover definition and enters at the rate as levied. Three carve-outs stay outside the reduction: levies set to produce a specified amount of money, levies within the one per cent limitation imposed by Section 2 of Article XII of the Ohio Constitution, and taxes provided for by a municipal charter. Ohio Revised Code 5715.01 caps taxable value at thirty-five per cent of true value, and Ohio Revised Code 5713.01 requires each county auditor to appraise at least once in each six-year period, so the ten county auditors in this metro reset values on ten separate clocks.

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 Columbus metro cut below is computed in-house from the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA release by county membership across the Columbus, OH Metropolitan Statistical Area, never read from an SBA district total.

In fiscal year 2025 the Columbus metro recorded 754 7(a) approvals for $291,342,800 and 27 504 approvals for $15,230,000, filed largely through the COLUMBUS DISTRICT OFFICE. The most active 7(a) lenders in the metro that year, by approval count, were The Huntington National Bank (358 loans); U.S. Bank, National Association (43 loans); Northeast Bank (36 loans); Telhio Credit Union Inc (32 loans); KeyBank National Association (24 loans); Newtek Bank, National Association (22 loans); First Commonwealth Bank (20 loans); United Midwest Savings Bank National Association (14 loans). The most active 504 Certified Development Companies were Alloy Development Co., Inc. (10 loans, $6,176,000); Community Capital Development Corporation (10 loans, $4,094,000); Ohio Statewide Development Corporation (6 loans, $3,666,000); Citywide Small Business Development Corporation (1 loan, $1,294,000).

The figure below is cited to the publisher's public page, with the publisher named in the sentence and the report's own source line printed below it. Cushman and Wakefield, MarketBeat Columbus Industrial Q2 2026, reports a vacancy rate of 4.7%, an asking rent of $6.33 per square foot. The report is Cushman and Wakefield, MarketBeat Columbus Industrial Q2 2026, covering Q2 2026.

Two qualifications travel with that figure and belong on the page rather than in a footnote. The asset class is industrial, which is NOT one of the ten asset classes counted in this table. Most of this metro's SBA and USDA borrowers are building restaurants, hotels, day care, self-storage, car washes and the like, not industrial space, so this figure describes a different stock and is carried as metro context only. Cushman and Wakefield publishes no retail MarketBeat for this market, which is why the industrial report is the one used. And a metro-level vacancy or rent figure describes the stock a broker tracks, which is not the asset class a single SBA or USDA borrower is building; it sets context for the file and nothing in the file rests on it.

USDA Business and Industry and Community Facilities credit runs on a statutory geography, not on 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. The Columbus urbanized core is therefore out. What can remain in a ten-county metro of this shape is the outer ground of the member counties, beyond the urbanized area that runs with Columbus and its contiguous suburbs. Because the test turns on the subject address and on the urbanized-area boundary around it rather than on the name of the town or the county it sits in, 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. The 50,000 inhabitant test is the statute's general rule, and the statute sets its own different threshold for community facility DIRECT loans and grants, so a borrower pursuing that programme rather than a guaranteed one is tested against the lower figure. MMCG's work here is for guaranteed lenders, and the address is checked against the programme actually being used.

The market figures above are one publisher's reading of one asset class in one quarter, and they are carried because that publisher put them on a public page, not because they settle anything. They are not a substitute for the rent and expense evidence a study builds at the subject address, and this post does not extend them to the asset classes the report does not cover. What carries the weight here is the statute, the federal program frame and the SBA record computed from the primary file, which is the part of a Columbus study a lender can check line by line.