About PPP Recipients

PPP Recipients is a free, public-interest research site that makes the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program data searchable and explorable. The dataset covers all 11,468,210 approved loans from the program's inception in April 2020 through its closure in May 2021 — the complete record of one of the largest emergency economic interventions in U.S. history.

The PPP was authorized by the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) and provided forgivable loans to help small businesses, non-profits, sole proprietors, and independent contractors cover payroll and certain other operating costs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, the program disbursed approximately $793 billion across two rounds of funding.

This site was created to make the SBA's public data more accessible. The raw CSV files released by the SBA under the Freedom of Information Act contain millions of rows and are difficult to search, analyze, or link to without significant technical expertise. By loading the data into a fast, indexed database and building a web interface around it, this site enables anyone — journalists, researchers, policy analysts, business owners, or curious citizens — to look up any PPP recipient with a simple search.

Every loan record has a permanent, unique URL (e.g., /loan/12345678) that can be cited in news articles, research papers, or shared on social media. State pages, city pages, industry pages, and lender pages aggregate the data with narratives to make the numbers meaningful in context.

What this site is: A public records research tool. All data shown is drawn directly from the SBA's official FOIA release with no modifications other than formatting. The site is not affiliated with the SBA, the Treasury Department, or any government agency.

What this site is not: A fraud detection or enforcement tool. The presence of a business in the PPP data does not indicate wrongdoing. The SBA and Department of Justice have pursued fraud cases against some recipients, but this site makes no claims about the legitimacy of any individual loan. Users are encouraged to consult primary sources and exercise judgment when interpreting this data.

Privacy: The SBA withheld borrower names and addresses for all loans under $150,000 in its FOIA releases, citing FOIA Exemption 6 (personal privacy). This site respects that determination: approximately 86% of loan records in our database show "Name Withheld" for the borrower. Only loans at or above $150,000 — roughly 1.6 million records — have publicly disclosed names, as the SBA determined that the public interest in disclosure outweighed privacy concerns for those larger amounts.

The data source is the SBA's September 30, 2024 FOIA release, available at data.sba.gov/dataset/ppp-foia. This is the most current and complete version of the PPP loan data available.