The Salt Lake City 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 Salt Lake City 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.

Salt Lake City 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.

An air quality nonattainment area that neither contains the metro nor sits inside it. The Environmental Protection Agency designates the Northern Wasatch Front, UT area Nonattainment for the 2015 eight-hour ozone standard, classified Moderate with a date of February 5, 2026, and the regulation states that the area is made up of Davis County, Salt Lake County, part of Tooele County and part of Weber County. Set that against the metro. This metro is two counties, Salt Lake and Tooele. Salt Lake County is inside the nonattainment area entirely. Tooele County is inside it only for the townships the regulation names, so a site in the county's west or south may be outside. Davis and Weber counties are inside the nonattainment area and outside this metro. The two geographies overlap and neither contains the other, which is the whole point for a study. Nonattainment status is what triggers the stricter permitting path for a new or modified source of the relevant pollutants, so it is a schedule and cost question before it is an environmental one, and it cannot be answered by naming the metro or even by naming the county. It is answered by locating the parcel against the township list the regulation prints.

Water impact fees proposed at roughly three times the current schedule, not yet adopted. Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities put an updated impact fee schedule out in July 2026. On the water side the proposal is a step change rather than an adjustment: the existing fee of $1,871 on a three quarter inch meter is proposed at $5,577, and the existing $3,830 on a one inch meter is proposed at $11,154. A sewer impact fee and a stormwater impact fee are proposed alongside it. Two things about this belong in a study rather than in a footnote. The first is that it is proposed and not adopted. The department states that the proposal goes before the city council, that the council will hold two hearings, and that if the council approves it the fees take effect 90 days from the approval date, so a project's connection cost depends on which side of that date its permit falls and a study must say which schedule it has used. The second is the water context. The department has the entire Public Utilities service area under a Stage 2, or mild, Water Shortage Advisory, calling for a reduction of 10 million gallons of water per day. For a car wash, a hotel laundry or a restaurant, a meter sized for peak demand is what sets the impact fee, so the sizing decision and the fee schedule decision are the same decision.

Commercial property is assessed at full market value while a home is assessed at 55 percent of it. The Salt Lake County Assessor states that figuring ad valorem taxes requires the taxable market value, the assessment ratio at 55% of market value for Residential property and 100% for all others, any exemptions, and the tax rate for the area of the county. The consequence for an underwriting file is direct and easy to get wrong. A commercial asset carries its whole market value into the tax base while a house down the street carries a little over half of its own, so the effective tax burden per dollar of value on the subject exceeds what any residential benchmark would suggest, and the nominal tax rate alone does not show it. This is a Utah rule rather than a Salt Lake rule, and the state page carries it in full; it is named here only because it decides the tax line on every commercial pro forma in this metro.

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

In fiscal year 2025 the Salt Lake City metro recorded 510 7(a) approvals for $273,530,300 and 83 504 approvals for $102,231,000, filed largely through the UTAH DISTRICT OFFICE. The most active 7(a) lenders in the metro that year, by approval count, were Mountain America FCU (76 loans); Zions Bank (74 loans); U.S. Bank, National Association (35 loans); The Huntington National Bank (26 loans); Northeast Bank (25 loans); Canyon View Federal Credit Union (21 loans); Celtic Bank Corporation (18 loans); Newtek Bank, National Association (18 loans). The most active 504 Certified Development Companies were Mountain West Small Business Finance (66 loans, $83,994,000); Intermountain Business Lending, Inc. (9 loans, $7,096,000); B:Side Capital (5 loans, $4,307,000); Capital Matrix, Inc. (2 loans, $6,075,000); CDC Small Business Finance Corp. (1 loan, $759,000).

Where a research publisher has put a market figure on a public page, this brief may carry it, cited to the page that carries the figure, with the publisher named in the sentence and the report's own source line printed below it. Cushman and Wakefield, MarketBeat Salt Lake City Industrial Q1 2026, states that overall vacancy, including sublease space, held at 7.9% in Q1 2026, that direct vacancy stood at 6.9%, that overall vacancy increased by 130 basis points year over year from 6.6%, and that average asking rents across all industrial property types remained flat in Q1 at $0.80 per square foot (psf) per month on a triple-net (NNN) basis. The report is Cushman and Wakefield, MarketBeat Salt Lake City Industrial Q1 2026, covering Q1 2026.

Source: CoStar via Cushman and Wakefield; the report's own line reads "Sources: CoStar, Real Capital Analytics, Cushman & Wakefield Research".

Two qualifications travel with that figure and belong on the page rather than in a footnote. The Salt Lake City MarketBeat cited here is Q1 2026; no retail MarketBeat is published for this market. 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 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 Salt Lake City urbanized core is therefore out. What remains in this metro is the outer parts of the member counties, beyond the urbanized area that runs with Salt Lake City and Murray. 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.

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 Salt Lake City study a lender can check line by line.