If your business owns the building it operates out of — or leases from a landlord who does — there's a good chance your mortgage is about to become someone's problem this year. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, roughly $875 billion in commercial real estate loans come due in 2026. That's about 17% of every dollar of commercial mortgage debt outstanding in the country, and it's landing on top of a rate environment that looks nothing like the one those loans were written in.
Most of that debt was originated between 2015 and 2022, when a small business owner could lock a commercial mortgage in the 3-4% range. Some of those loans were already extended once or twice by lenders hoping rates would drop before the bill came due. They didn't drop enough. Now a wave of five- and ten-year notes is maturing straight into a market where commercial rates start around 5.7% and routinely run to 6.5% or higher — and the peak isn't even this year. S&P Global estimates the maturity wall grows to roughly $1.26 trillion in 2027. If you own commercial property, or your rent depends on a landlord who does, this is worth twenty minutes of your attention right now.
Why "Just Refinance It" Is Harder Than It Sounds
The headline problem isn't the higher rate by itself — plenty of businesses can absorb a percentage point or two on debt service if revenue has grown since the loan was written. The real problem is what appraisers call the financing gap.
Say your building was appraised at $2 million when you financed it in 2019, and the bank lent you 75% of that value — $1.5 million. Rents and property values in a lot of markets haven't kept pace with the runup in rates, and some commercial property types (offices especially) have lost value outright. If that same building now appraises at $1.7 million and a cautious lender will only go to 60% loan-to-value in this cycle, your new maximum loan is just over $1 million. You're not refinancing $1.5 million anymore — you're refinancing $1.5 million and finding roughly half a million dollars in cash, a co-investor, or a restructuring deal to close the gap.
This is exactly the dynamic playing out across the country. Borrowers refinancing this year are often looking at new rates 150 to 250 basis points above what they originally signed, on top of needing more equity in the deal than they had to put down the first time.
Which Properties Are Under the Most Pressure
Not every property type is equally exposed, and it's worth knowing where yours (or your landlord's) sits:
- Hotels and motels carry the highest share of 2026 maturities — around 30% of outstanding hotel loans come due this year, and hospitality income is volatile enough that lenders scrutinize these deals hard.
- Office is the sector under the most acute stress, independent of the maturity calendar. Elevated vacancy in a lot of metro markets means office loans that are maturing-and-unresolved are showing delinquency rates far above the market average.
- Industrial and warehouse space is, by contrast, the easiest category to refinance right now — national vacancy sits around 5.8%, approval rates are strong, and lenders will still go to 70-75% loan-to-value on good assets.
- Multifamily, senior housing, and retail with short lease terms round out the list of property types facing real friction.
If you're a small business owner leasing space in an office building or strip retail center whose landlord is staring down a 2026 maturity, it's not paranoid to ask your landlord directly how their refinancing is going — a forced sale or a lender-driven restructuring can mean a new owner, a lease renegotiation, or worse, a building that goes dark. It costs you nothing to ask.
If You Own Your Building: What to Do Before the Notice Arrives
For owner-occupiers — the dentist who owns her office building, the manufacturer who owns the warehouse, the restaurant group that owns its real estate — the advice from commercial lenders and workout specialists is consistent, and it boils down to starting early and showing up with your numbers already in order.
1. Start the conversation 9 to 12 months before maturity, not 90 days. Lenders are processing a historically large volume of refinance requests this year. Waiting until the last quarter before your note comes due puts you at the back of a long line, with less leverage to negotiate terms and less time to fix anything a new appraisal turns up.
2. Get a current, independent appraisal before you talk to your existing lender. Don't let the incumbent bank be the only one who tells you what your property is worth. A third-party appraisal gives you a real number to plan around and, if it's a good one, a stronger negotiating position when you shop the loan.
3. Know your debt service coverage ratio cold. Most commercial lenders want to see a DSCR — net operating income divided by annual debt payments — of at least 1.20x to 1.35x before they'll approve a refinance, and the exact bar depends on your lender, your property type, and your local market. If your current ratio is below that line, you have time to fix it before you apply: pay down other debt, hold off on discretionary draws, or push for a rent increase if you're leasing part of the building to a tenant.
4. Look at SBA 504 and 7(a) if you occupy the property yourself. Owner-occupied commercial real estate is exactly what SBA 504 loans are built for, and as of mid-2026 they're pricing meaningfully below conventional CMBS and bank options. Critically, SBA underwriting for an owner-occupied deal weighs the cash flow and creditworthiness of your business, not just the property's standalone economics the way a pure investment property loan would. That's an advantage if your business is healthy even though the real estate market is choppy.
5. Model the worst case now, while you still have options. If the math doesn't work — if even a best-case refinance leaves you unable to cover debt service — better to know that nine months out, when you can explore a sale, a joint venture, a partial refinance with seller financing, or a negotiated loan modification, than to discover it during a 30-day notice from your lender.
A Nine-Month Timeline You Can Actually Follow
Here's roughly how the process breaks down if your loan matures in, say, twelve months from today:
- Months 12-10 before maturity: Order an independent appraisal. Pull three years of P&L and balance sheet history. Calculate your current DSCR and compare it to your lender's likely minimum.
- Months 10-8: Have the "how's your building doing" conversation with your landlord if you're a tenant, or start soft conversations with two or three lenders (including your current one) if you're an owner. Ask each what LTV and DSCR they'd realistically underwrite to today, not what they underwrote to when the loan originated.
- Months 8-5: If there's a financing gap, start pricing your options — a partner buying in, a seller-financed second, a partial paydown from operating cash, or a decision to sell before you're forced to. Apply for SBA 504/7(a) prequalification if you occupy the property, since that process has its own lead time.
- Months 5-2: Formally apply, submit the financial package, and negotiate rate lock and terms. This is where clean, reconciled books turn a multi-week back-and-forth into a same-week approval.
- Final 60 days: Close. If the numbers never worked, this is also the point by which a voluntary sale or negotiated workout should already be signed, not still "in conversation."
Compressing this into 90 days is exactly the scenario every lender and workout advisor warns against — it's when businesses end up accepting worse terms simply because the clock ran out.
Why Your Books Matter More Than Usual Right Now
Every one of the steps above runs through the same bottleneck: a lender, an appraiser, or an SBA underwriter asking to see your numbers. In a tight refinancing market, "trust me, business is good" doesn't move an underwriter. Clean, reconciled financial statements — trailing three years of P&L, a current balance sheet, and a clear picture of the property's operating income if you lease out any part of it — are what actually get a deal approved on time.
This is where a lot of small business owners get caught flat-footed. If your books live in a black-box tool that only your bookkeeper can query, or if property income and business operating income are tangled together in one undifferentiated account, producing a lender-ready package under a nine-month deadline is a scramble. Separating the real estate's income and expenses from your operating business — and being able to hand a lender an auditable, versioned history of exactly how those numbers were produced — is the difference between a routine refinance and a stressful one.
That's a real advantage of plain-text accounting. Beancount.io keeps your entire ledger in version-controlled, human-readable text, so you can track property income separately from operating income, pull a clean trailing-twelve-month P&L on demand, and show a lender exactly how every number traces back to a source transaction — no black box, no reconstructing spreadsheets under deadline pressure. If your 2026 or 2027 maturity date is already on the calendar, get started for free and have your financial story ready well before the lender asks for it.
The Bottom Line
$875 billion in commercial mortgages maturing in 2026 sounds like a headline for Wall Street, but it plays out at the level of individual small businesses — the ones who own the building they operate from, and the ones who lease from someone who does. If your loan is coming due this year or next, the single highest-leverage move you can make is starting early: get an independent appraisal, know your debt service coverage ratio, explore SBA options if you're owner-occupied, and make sure your financial records are clean enough to hand to a lender the moment they ask. The businesses that treat this as a nine-month project tend to come out with a manageable rate. The ones that wait for the notice tend to come out with a lot less choice in the matter.