Business finance in the United States
The useful US question is not whether a rule exists. It is whether the rule in your state produces a number you can hold against a bank quote, or only a pile of dollar amounts you have to convert yourself.
Everything on this site that applies in the United States is collected here. Nothing on this page is a new claim: each figure is quoted and dated on the guide it links to, and how the figures are produced sets out the rule they were gathered under.
There is no federal disclosure rule to fall back on
Consumer credit has one. Business credit does not. What exists is state law, passed at different times, aimed at different products, and requiring different things. Two of the states we have read in the original make a provider hand you an annualized rate. The others require an itemized set of dollar amounts and leave the conversion to you.
That difference decides whether you can put an offer beside a bank quote without doing arithmetic first.
Check your state
Pick the state, the product and the size of the transaction. The checker says which statute reaches it, what the provider must hand you, and whether that includes a rate. Every statute was read in the original, with the date.
Open the state disclosure checkerCoverage turns on all three inputs, not on the state alone: several of these laws carry transaction-size ceilings — New York's regulation reaches commercial financing up to $2,500,000 — and several are written for one product type, such as sales-based or revenue-based financing, rather than for lending generally. A deal can sit in a disclosure state and still fall outside its disclosure law.
Where the SBA actually sets the price
It does not. A 7(a) loan is made by a bank, and what the agency controls is the ceiling on the spread the lender may add over a base rate. That ceiling steps down as the loan gets bigger — from base plus 6.5% at the small end to base plus 3.0% at the large end — so crossing one of those size lines is worth more than negotiating within a band.
Why a smaller SBA loan costs more has the table and the arithmetic.
Advances quote a number that is not a price
A revenue-based advance is quoted as a multiple: take this much, repay that much. The figure leaves out time, and time is the whole comparison. Repay an advance faster and its annualized cost goes up, which is the reverse of how a loan behaves — the same dollar cost can work out anywhere across a very wide range depending on the speed of the sweep.
That gap is exactly what the state disclosure laws exist to close, and it is why the right-hand column of the checker matters more than the left.
Factor rate vs interest rate
Why the two cannot be compared by eye, and the arithmetic that converts one into the other.
Who the government guarantee protects
A guarantee under a state-backed or federal scheme covers the lender's loss. It does not reduce what you owe.
What is not a US question
Three things on this site are the same whichever country you borrow in, because they are arithmetic and negotiation rather than regulation:
- Where the money goes — the five places a facility takes money, only one of which is the rate.
- The cost tool — turns a term loan, a fixed-cost advance or a revenue-share facility into one comparable number, in your browser.
- Six questions to put to a lender in writing — if the answer is not in the facility letter, it is not an answer.
Borrowing in the United Kingdom instead? The test there is a regulatory perimeter rather than a state disclosure rule: start on the UK page.
What changed on this page
7 September 2026 New — The guides now have a UK page and a US page, and the navigation carries them instead of the two checkers, which are one click from either. Neither page states anything that is not already stated, quoted and dated on the page it links to.