Since March 2020, 3.8 million small businesses in the U.S. have received loans from the Small Business Administration (SBA) — COVID-19 EIDL loans to be specific. When Isabel Guzman took over as SBA Administrator in March, one of her first acts was to increase the COVID-19 EIDL loan limits — up to 24 months of working capital and a $500,000 loan amount cap. It's an incredible opportunity for millions of businesses, but the process hasn't been ideal. Here's the latest on the process, approvals, and what we predict will happen this week.

EIDL Loan Increases Face Internal SBA Challenges

Since the EIDL loan increase program got underway in April 2021, the EIDL loan increase progress has been slow. The SBA informed us on June 24th that only around 30,000 EIDL loan increases had been approved — that's over about 10 weeks of the program being lived.

In fact, the SBA has acknowledged the process has been less than ideal and they said they've been: working on hiring more loan officers to review increase requests and working on alternatives to verifying business revenue (due to IRS tax transcript backlogs).

Only 1% of EIDL Loan Recipients Have Received EIDL Increases

As mentioned, over 3.8M small business owners have received EIDL loans over the past year, originally ranging from low thousands to $150,000 — and now up to $500,000.

It's nearly certain not all of the 3.8M business owners have requested EIDL loan increases — some businesses may just not need any funding and rather are interested in paying off loans — even 30-year loans with low 3.75% interest rates supported by the federal government.

Based on our data and insights, a majority of EIDL loan recipients have been interested in increases. Assuming that a majority have requested the increases, here's how that looks on a chart.

Red is total EIDL loans. Blue is the total EIDL loan increases. That's right — you can barely see the EIDL loan increases number. Tap on the bar to see the total number.

Yes, the magnitude of difference between the two numbers shows very little change — but this makes the important point: Not much progress has been made. Last year, millions of original EIDL loans were approved in a matter of weeks.

EIDL Loan Increases is Growing Around 20% Per Week

Based on limited data points, we estimate that there are around 40K EIDL loan increase approvals so far, and we predict there will be another 10K this week — bringing the total to around 50K.

The growth shown in the chart below is around 20% week over week, however, that growth rate is on a small number in the first place.

A Faster EIDL Loan Increase May Be Coming

We've been hopeful for this for weeks but something has to give. Our SBA contact told us a few weeks ago they were working on, in particular, the IRS tax transcript issue, which has been the major issue hindering loan officer review. If this change is made, we expect a magnitude of difference in terms of EIDL loan increase approval speed. As always, we'll be reporting on all of the changes this week here and on our YouTube channel.