Every physical location with paid employees in San Francisco ZIP codes.
Covered market #17
Businesses for sale in San Francisco, CA
33,575 business establishments operate in San Francisco, and 13,930 of them employ between 5 and 99 people — the range most often bought and sold by individual owners. Professional and technical services leads the local mix with 7,229 firms.
Local market
What the San Francisco business base looks like
Large enough to run without the owner on site, small enough for an individual buyer. This is where most transactions happen.
The rest are mostly owner-only businesses, which rarely change hands as going concerns.
Largest industries in San Francisco
- Professional & technical services7,229
- Restaurants & accommodation4,272
- Healthcare & social assistance3,624
- Retail2,923
- Personal & repair services2,670
These five account for 62% of establishments in San Francisco. A buyer's odds are best where the local base is deepest, and a seller competes with everyone else in the same column.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, ZIP Business Patterns 2023. Figures cover the ZIP codes the Postal Service assigns to San Francisco, which approximates but does not exactly match the city limits. Establishment counts are locations with paid employees; sole proprietors without employees are not included. Latest available year: 2023.
Buying, selling, combining
San Francisco is a professional and technical services market first.
7,229 of the 20,718 businesses in the five largest categories are professional and technical services — 35% of them. That shapes who buys here and what they pay for.
Buy in San Francisco
13,930 businesses here employ 5 to 99 people, so the constraint is filtering, not finding. Set a buy box on industry, price and cash flow and let it do the narrowing.
Search this marketSell in San Francisco
Buyers compare inside a category. With 7,229 professional and technical services businesses in San Francisco, that comparison is crowded — clean records and a documented handover are what separate one from the next.
Start an owner listingCombine several into one
Acquirers looking for scale in San Francisco often cannot buy it in one piece. 7,229 professional and technical services firms is the kind of depth that lets several be combined into one company big enough for a buyer that would not look at any of them alone.
How combinations workNothing here is a listing or an offer. Confidential details stay behind NDA acceptance and the seller's own consent.