How the numbers are built
Two separate assessments, published in full. Neither is a forecast of what a lender will do, and neither is hidden.
myloankit is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Every SBA threshold below is quoted from a published instrument and cited to it; the selection of which six to measure is myloankit's own.
Two numbers, kept apart
Your document carries two assessments and never blends them into one figure.
The SBA Benchmark Score measures your loan file against six selected published SBA requirements — a subset of what SBA looks at, not the whole of it. They are the measuring criteria rather than the destination: a bank, a credit union, a CDFI and an online lender each keep their own credit box and none of them publish it, so a published threshold is the only one a file can be read against by all of them. It is arithmetic: a fixed rubric, the same inputs returning the same result on any day, with every threshold cited to the instrument it comes from.
The market analysis measures the venture — its projected economics against industry benchmarks, and the number of comparable operators trading near your site. It is also arithmetic, but the benchmarks are industry figures rather than SBA requirements.
They answer different questions and are reported separately, because a strong file for a difficult venture and a weak file for an easy one are different situations, and one number would hide which you are in.
The Market Outlook Score
Starts at 55, bounded to 0–100. This is the venture number, not the loan-file one — the SBA Benchmark Score is built from the dimensions below it and never starts anywhere.
- Profit scenarios. Both projections positive adds 20; only the optimistic one adds 8; neither subtracts 18.
- Profit magnitude. Scaled from the projected figures, bounded to plus or minus 15 on the conservative case and plus or minus 10 on the optimistic one.
- Gross margin against the industry benchmark. Measured against the midpoint of the published range for your category, bounded to minus 12 and plus 10. Where no benchmark matches, a generic curve applies instead.
- Competitor density. Derived from the count of comparable operators within your radius, bounded to plus or minus 12.
- Rent above a tenth of revenue. A penalty only, up to 18 points. Rent at or below 10% of baseline revenue costs nothing.
- Mode. Physical subtracts 6, hybrid 4, online 2.
The SBA Benchmark Score's six selected dimensions and their thresholds are published separately, with the source and effective date of each, and with what the six leave out.
Why the base is 55 and not 50
This engine is adapted from one that scored ventures worldwide. That engine started at 50 and added points for a country's GDP per capita — five points where it exceeded $50,000.
myloankit serves United States applicants only, and US GDP per capita sits far above that threshold. The term was five points for every applicant this service will ever score: a constant, not a measurement. It distinguished nobody.
Removing it outright would have moved every score down five points for no reason, so it was folded into the starting figure instead. Every score is exactly what it would have been. Nothing was reweighted, and no threshold moved.
Where the market data comes from
- Comparable operators — counted from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass API, with a commercial places API as a fallback. Three endpoints are tried in sequence.
- Your site's coordinates — resolved from the city and state you enter. There is no field for coordinates, a street address or a ZIP, so none can be supplied.
- Industry margin benchmarks — a published table of typical gross-margin ranges by category, printed beside your own figure rather than in place of it.
- SBA thresholds — SOP 50 10 8, Procedural Notice 5000-876777, and 13 CFR 120.110. Each is named in your document with its effective date.
If the competitor count cannot be gathered — the source is a volunteer-run service and does time out — your document says the count was not established rather than reporting zero. A signal that could not be measured is not a finding about your venture.
What the numbers do not do
- No credit is pulled, and no consumer report about you is taken in. Both scores are built from figures you supply and public benchmarks.
- Where you are is never scored. Your city and state reach the trade-area lookup and the narrative only. No geographic value of any kind reaches the SBA Benchmark Score, and a test proves two identical businesses in different places score identically.
- Industry is never weighted. The SBA programme screen is a yes or no against 13 CFR 120.110; whichever answer applies, your SBA Benchmark Score does not move by a point.
- Time trading is not scored as risk. Under two years adds projections with supporting assumptions to your document set. It does not lower either number.
- Blanks are not zeros. A figure you have not got is reported as not yet assessable and leaves the total, rather than counting against you.
The limits
Both numbers rest entirely on figures you supply, and nothing checks them. They are projections where you are not yet trading, and projections are assumptions with arithmetic applied.
The competitor count reflects what is mapped in OpenStreetMap, which is more complete in some places than others. A low count can mean a quiet trade area or an unmapped one, and your document does not know which.
The market analysis is not part of the SBA assessment and carries no weight in it. Neither number is a prediction of any lender's conduct.