Small Business Administration Announces Closing of Restaurant Revitalization Funds on Monday

Thursday, May 20th, 2021 -- 12:00 PM

The Small Business Administration announced that it will be closing the application portal for Restaurant Revitalization Funds on Monday, May 24th at 7pm.

The legislation that created the RRF established a total of $28.6 billion to be used for RRF grants. From there the SBA allocated the money into different “set aside buckets of funds” related to different criteria.

To date, the RRF program has received more than 303,000 applications representing over $69 billion in requested funds. Therefore, the total amount of money requested for the RRF funds exceeds the total amount allocated by over $40 billion ($69 million requested - $29 million total funding).

Of the various “set aside buckets” of money, only one set aside bucket has less application requests than the amount set aside in the bucket. This is the set aside bucket with the criteria for restaurants that have an annual revenue of not more than $50,000.

This set aside bucket has $220 million remaining that has not been requested. Therefore, while all qualified restaurants may continue to submit applications, eligible establishments that meet the criteria of standard annual revenue of not more than $50,000 are especially encouraged to apply for our RRF through the SBA-recognized point-of-sale vendors or directly via the SBA online application portal by May 24th.

As of today, about 38,000 of the 303,000 applicants have been approved by the SBA for the RRF. At this point a little more than 12% of the applications have been approved by the SBA.

It appears many of the applicants may not hear back for several weeks as the SBA works through the applications and the process.  In addition, unless additional funding is appropriated, not all of the application requests will be funded.

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.