North Carolina Feasibility Studies

SBA Ledger, which tabulates the agency's loan-level files as they stood on June 30, 2026, counts 1,906 7(a) approvals in North Carolina in fiscal 2025, at a median loan of $271K ⁷. With the 504 program added the count is 1,990 approvals for $1.33 billion, of which 504 approvals came to $130M, and lenders reported 21,928 jobs on those loans ⁷. The fiscal year that began in October 2025 had reached 1,085 approvals by the end of June 2026 ⁷. GoSBA Loans, a second tabulator, puts the count at 1,712 7(a) loans from 129 active lenders for 2025, a year it does not tie to the federal fiscal year ⁸.

Over the longer run, the federal files show 11,443 loans approved in fiscal years 2016 to 2025, net of cancellations, for $7,653.5 million of 7(a) credit approved in fiscal years 2016 to 2025, net of cancellations ⁹. On the 504 side, debentures in the same files came to $768.0 million approved in fiscal years 2016 to 2025, net of cancellations ⁹.

The lender and CDC rankings

GoSBA ranks Live Oak Banking Co. first by 2025 dollar volume at $127.5 million, ahead of Pinnacle Bank at $62.9 million and GBank at $57.7 million; Newtek Bank, in fifth place, made 101 loans for $48.3 million ⁸. Counted by approvals over the five fiscal years to 2025, SBA Ledger's order is different: Live Oak with 500, Huntington with 496 and Wells Fargo with 458 ⁷.

Two of the three leading 504 lenders are Charlotte CDCs. On SBA Ledger's five-year table, Business Expansion Funding Corp. (BEFCOR) of Charlotte leads at $355M on 312 loans, 504 Capital Corporation of Chesapeake, Virginia follows at $82.4 million, and Carolina Business Capital of Charlotte is third at $73.9 million ⁷.

Most of the federal credit allocation went to loan participations

Of the up to $201.9M Treasury approved for North Carolina in 2022, in the second round of the State Small Business Credit Initiative ¹⁰, the state's plan of that year put $160M into a Loan Participation Program, $10M into a Capital Access Program and $31.9M into venture capital, with the NC Rural Center chosen to manage the money ¹¹.

The research read USDA's Community Facilities direct loan and grant terms on the agency's North Carolina program page ¹². Those terms, Business and Industry guarantees and the other USDA programs are covered on our USDA Rural Development practice page, agency and bank capital on the conventional and institutional page, and EB-5 on the EB-5 page.

The Insurance Commissioner settled the Rate Bureau's homeowners request on January 17, 2025. The Bureau had asked for increases of up to 99.4% in its largest row; the settlement raised average statewide base rates 7.5% on June 1, 2025 and another 7.5% on June 1, 2026, and froze filings so that no new one can take effect before June 1, 2027 ²⁹. No commercial rate settlement was found.

Wages start at $7.25 an hour in 2026: the statute sets the floor at whichever is greater, the federal rate or a state figure of $6.15, and the federal rate is the larger ²⁷. Construction cost appears here only as Rider Levett Bucknall's national index, which read 288.58 in April 2026 and 292.28 in July 2026 for the United States as a whole ²⁸. The research's only North Carolina city index is Charlotte's, on the Charlotte page.

The latest of the four is the winter storm emergency. On January 24, 2026, FEMA announced the President's approval of emergency declaration EM-3637-NC for a severe winter storm whose incident period began on January 21; it named all 100 counties along with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Lumbee Tribe ⁶¹.

Hurricane Helene's major disaster declaration for the state dates from September 28, 2024, and the Federal Register was still carrying amendments to it in May 2026: Amendment No. 9, published that month, recorded a change of federal coordinating officer effective October 31, 2025 ³⁶. Its effects on demand, from recovery-worker hotel stays to a population loss in Buncombe County, are set out in the Asheville section.

Tropical Depression Chantal left two federal records with different reach. SBA issued an administrative disaster declaration on July 25, 2025, naming Durham and Orange as the primary counties; physical damage loan applications closed on September 23, 2025 and economic injury applications on April 27, 2026 ⁶⁰. FEMA's major disaster declaration, DR-4889-NC, followed on September 11, 2025, limited to Public Assistance, and FEMA had obligated $4,908,838.58 under it by May 16, 2026 ³⁵. Both counties are in the market of our Raleigh-Durham page, which carries the SBA declaration.

The plant behind the sewer line

In 2026 wastewater capacity was decided plant by plant and town by town, as the Brunswick County pause in the Wilmington section shows. Green Level went further and stopped every development approval, not only new sewer connections, while it worked through water and sewer supply ³⁴. The study names the plant that will take the project's flow and carries the utility's dated allocation for it.

A state decision ahead of the town's

Several uses meet a state permit or licence before a local one. A new regulated bed, or a surgery center outside the 2023 exemption, needs a Certificate of Need ¹³¹⁵. An assisted living building is licensed by size class, and the larger memory care buildings change building class with it ¹⁹. A child care center's star rating decides whether it can take subsidized children ²¹. An RV park's wastewater is designed to the state's flow per site ²⁵. For each, the study names the licence or permit, the agency that grants it, and where the application stands on the study date.

The parcel's county is then read against the declarations under hazards, by name where the record lists counties.

Census Vintage 2025 figures, as transcribed in a reference encyclopedia, put the Asheville metro at 422,345 residents in 2025 against a 2020 base of 406,926, a five-year rise of 3.79% ⁴¹. That gain conceals a turn. The state budget office puts Buncombe County at 277,417 residents in 2025, down 1,810 in the year to July 2025 after a gain of about 2,381 the year before ³, and local reporting on the Census release named Asheville as the only North Carolina metro to lose population in that year; the metro was down 634 ⁴².

Lodging shows the distortion most clearly. Recovery workers and federally funded stays filled rooms in 2025; when that demand ended, February 2026 hotel occupancy fell 11 points from the February before ³⁹. By July 2026 Buncombe's hotel RevPAR was $122, a gain led by rate, and vacation rental occupancy was 66.8% ⁴³. Local reporting on the tourism authority's figures in March 2026 described $34.5 million of lodging-tax revenue as recently approved for marketing and tourism-related capital projects ³⁹, and the City of Asheville is getting an additional $225 million of federal funding for its revised Helene action plan ⁴⁰.

Two rules shape the lodging count for a hotel or glamping project here. Buncombe's occupancy tax does not apply to stays of 90 or more consecutive days ⁴⁴, and because state law bars local registration of short-term rentals ²⁶, no local registry counts the rental supply.

The Triad is two metros and a larger combined area. The Greensboro-High Point metro held 805,945 residents on July 1, 2025, the Winston-Salem metro held 712,206, and the wider combined statistical area held 1,776,615, all as transcribed from Census Vintage 2025 ⁵³. The combined area includes counties beyond the two metros, so the three figures do not add up. Greensboro-High Point issued permits for 3,860 housing units in 2025, the sum of the monthly Census permit series ⁵⁴.

Randolph County's plant came first. Toyota's battery plant at Liberty, on a site of about 1,850 acres ⁵¹, is a project of more than 5,100 jobs ⁵⁰; it held its grand opening in November 2025 and production has started ⁵². Davie County's came next: in August 2026 the Governor announced ProVia's $120 million window-manufacturing hub at Mocksville, approved for a state job development grant ⁴⁹.

The Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton metro held 376,890 residents on July 1, 2025, as transcribed from Census Vintage 2025 ⁵³. The four counties differ widely in size: Catawba County held 170,172, Burke 88,655, Caldwell 81,105 and Alexander 36,958 ⁵³. Regional reporting named Hickory among the North Carolina metros whose growth accelerated in 2024 to 2025, without giving the rate ⁴⁸.

No published case names a site in Asheville, Fayetteville, the Triad, Greenville, Hickory or Wilmington. The rural case is agricultural: the pork processing plant under USDA B&I tests a new federally inspected harvest and fabrication plant in a rural county of the eastern North Carolina coastal plain, hog country, where the questions are hog supply, independent processing capacity and whether the plant can hold its fabrication margin.

The multifamily case follows a new mid-rise in a high-growth suburban submarket of the Charlotte-Raleigh growth corridor toward an agency permanent loan, and rests its case on absorption and capture in a tightly drawn market area. The assisted living and memory care case places a new community in a suburban submarket on the edge of a major North Carolina Piedmont metro under a HUD Section 232 takeout, where the Certificate of Need position of adult care beds makes the supply read decisive. The medical office and surgery center case, set on a growing suburban health corridor in a major North Carolina metro the case does not name, finances an owner-occupied building with a physician-owned surgery center under SBA 504, and shows a Certificate of Need facility as both a limit on new competitors and a precondition the project must satisfy.