Equipment Lease Demand & MCA Demand The Same After Eight Years

For firms with less than 500 employees that sought out financing in the last year, 10% applied for a lease while just 7% applied for a merchant cash advance, according to the latest data published annually by the Federal Reserve. Though each figure has varied slightly by year, the 10% seeking leases and 7% seeking MCAs match the survey results that compared the two back in 2017. So virtually nothing has changed since then.

Notably, 87% of financing applicants applied for a loan or a line of credit in 2017 while the 2025 report found that only 25% applied for a loan and only 22% applied for a line of credit in the last year. Meanwhile, interest in factoring has gone down. Roughly 4% of financing applicants used to seek out factoring specifically but that number has since dropped to 2%.