More than $4 billion in loans have now made its way to Mississippi after Congress approved another round of federal support for businesses earlier this year.

As was the case after the first round of the Paycheck Protection Program last summer, the state’s top recipients so far include restaurants, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, legal practices, construction companies, car dealers, hotels and religious organizations.

In total, over 79,000 businesses in Mississippi have been approved for PPP loans. Borrowers are eligible for full forgiveness as long as they maintain the same level of employment and compensation for a certain period and spend most of the loan on their payroll.

Mississippi Today published info on many of the businesses receiving money last summer, but the Small Business Administration has since made public more information on PPP recipients following a lawsuit from the Washington Post and other outlets. The published data now include specific amounts businesses have received, as well as the names of places that got smaller loans.

Disbursements to Mississippi businesses ranged from $100 to a $10 million loan, which went to Staff Pro LLC, an employment agency in Gulfport.

The SBA states that the PPP program is designed to help small businesses keep workers on payroll. In Mississippi, nearly all — 96% — of loans were directed towards payrolls. On average, businesses in the state received about $7,000 per employee.

Yet that rate varies greatly; J&W Transport LLC, a trucking company in Jackson, received a loan of over $260,000 to pay one employee. Several other companies, shown below, received enough in loans to pay each employee over six figures. The program caps forgiveness for salaries at $100,000 per employee, more than twice the state’s median household income.

For the most part, Mississippi’s recipients were small individual businesses — over 80% reported 10 or fewer employees, and only 1% were part of a franchise. Yet franchisees in Mississippi from dozens of large national chains came away with millions in loans; 28 of McDonald’s locations in Mississippi, for instance, received a combined $14.8 million, despite the chain being a multinational corporation that made $4.7 billion in profit last year.

In fact, the franchise locations combined for each of McDonald’s, Sonic, Applebee’s and General Motors received more in loans than any of the state’s non-franchise businesses.

The loan data also include demographics of the borrowers, although most businesses left those fields blank. Most of those that answered were white and male-owned, shown below:

Use the tables below for full lists of Mississippi’s PPP recipients, by business and industry.

By industry:

By business:

Disclosure: In 2020, Mississippi Today sought a Paycheck Protection Program loan, which was approved and disbursed.

Clarification: The story has been edited to clarify that franchisees of national chains applied and received PPP loans rather than the chains’ corporate bodies.

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