A Federal Reserve survey shows 52% of employer firms got approved for new financing while 94% faced a financial challenge — here's what that gap means for your business credit file.
A note on terminology used on this page: BCC Supplies does not lend money. A BCC Supplies membership is a commercial installment contract, reported to the business credit bureaus as a business installment tradeline — some pages also describe this as an "installment loan" in a descriptive sense, not a cash loan from a lender. See how this is structured →
94% of employer firms reported experiencing at least one financial challenge in the year leading up to the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey.2 That's not a typo — nearly every employer firm surveyed hit some kind of financial friction, whether that was a cash flow gap, rising costs, or trouble getting paid on time.
At the same time, 52% of employer firms that applied for new financing were approved.1 Put those two numbers side by side and you get the real story of small business lending in 2025 and into 2026: almost everyone struggles financially at some point, but barely half of applicants who go looking for financing actually get it.
That gap between struggle and approval is exactly where your business credit file does its work. Lenders don't approve or deny based on how hard a year was — they approve based on what your file shows them.
A 52% approval rate1 means roughly half of employer firms that applied for new financing walked away with a no, or with an offer they didn't take. That's a coin flip, and coin flips are exactly what a thin or inconsistent business credit file produces.
Lenders underwriting a new financing application aren't just looking at revenue or time in business. They're pulling a business credit report — from Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Business, Equifax Business, or an SBFE-fed source — and checking whether that file shows a track record of on-time payment across multiple tradelines.
The 52% figure1 is an average across every type of applicant, from firms with strong established files to firms applying cold. If your file is thin, you're statistically more likely to land in the declined half.
Financial challenges themselves — a slow month, a client who paid late, a cost spike — don't automatically get reported to a business credit bureau. What gets reported is how the business responded: did it still pay its vendors and tradelines on time, or did payments slip.
With 94% of firms reporting at least one financial challenge in the past year,2 the businesses that come out with strong files are the ones that kept payments current through the stress, not the ones that avoided stress entirely. That's an important distinction, because it means a rough year doesn't have to become a rough credit file.
This is also why having multiple tradelines reporting matters more when times are tight. A single missed payment on one account is far less damaging to your overall file if you have several other accounts reporting a clean, on-time history alongside it.
The most direct way to move away from a coin-flip approval outcome is to build a business credit file that reports payment history independent of your personal credit and independent of any single lender's internal scorecard. That means tradelines that report to the actual bureaus lenders check — D&B, Experian Business, and Equifax Business.
A BCC Supplies membership is a commercial installment contract, reported to the business credit bureaus as a business installment tradeline — it is not a cash loan, and BCC Supplies is not a lender. It's one way to add a consistently reporting tradeline to a file that might otherwise be thin, which is exactly the kind of gap that shows up in a 52% approval environment.1
Both figures come from the Federal Reserve's Small Business Credit Survey data as tracked by the St. Louis Fed, dated to January 1, 2025.12 These are annual survey figures, so the next real read on whether the approval rate has moved from 52% will come with the next survey cycle.
In the meantime, the practical takeaway doesn't change: your business's odds of landing on the approved side of that 52% line depend heavily on what your credit file shows a lender before they ever look at your bank statements. Firms that treat tradeline reporting as routine maintenance — not a one-time project — tend to show up with the kind of file that survives a financially rough year intact.
Sources: 1. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Small Business Credit Survey: Approved for New Financing (Employer Firms)
2. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Small Business Credit Survey: Experienced at Least One Financial Challenge (Employer Firms)
A BCC Supplies membership is a commercial installment contract that reports to the business credit bureaus as a business installment tradeline — a straightforward way to add consistent, on-time payment history to your file.
See Your Options →BCC Supplies is not affiliated with the Federal Reserve or the Small Business Credit Survey; this article simply explains what the survey's published approval and financial-challenge figures mean for how lenders read your business credit file. BCC Supplies does not lend money — a membership is a commercial installment contract reported to the bureaus as a business installment tradeline, one practical way to strengthen the file lenders check before they say yes or no.
Sources: 1. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Small Business Credit Survey: Approved for New Financing (Employer Firms) 2. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Small Business Credit Survey: Experienced at Least One Financial Challenge (Employer Firms)
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