What UK Businesses Actually Sold For: The 2026 Multiples Data

Most articles about UK business sale multiples quote a range and leave you to guess where you sit. This one starts with a published number from real completed transactions.

The UK200Group and MarktoMarket SME Valuation Index tracks actual purchases and sales of UK businesses, contributed by member accountancy firms and analysed by MarktoMarket, a data provider covering UK private companies. In the November 2025 edition, the median EBITDA multiple was 4.5x, down from 5.5x a year earlier.

That is an 18% fall in a single year, and it followed what the report describes as an exceptionally strong 2024 for M&A activity. The index attributes the moderation to more cautious buyers: geopolitical conflict, tariff turbulence and AI-driven workforce change have made both sides more selective, even though interest rates were low and stock markets at record highs.

Two things make this dataset worth more than most of what circulates online. It comes from completed transactions, not asking prices or opinion surveys. And it is free to read, which most UK private-company multiple data is not: the ICAEW's private company multiples and BDO's annual newsletter both sit behind member or client access.

The rest of this piece covers what else the index shows, why the median and the mean tell different stories, and how to translate a headline multiple into something useful for your own business. If you want the mechanics of valuation rather than the market data, our guide to valuing a UK business covers the methods.

The same index reports a mean EBITDA multiple of 7.0x for November 2025 against that median of 4.5x. Both numbers are correct. They describe different things, and the gap between them is where most misleading advice comes from.

A median is the middle transaction: half sold for more, half for less. A mean is the arithmetic average, so a handful of large, highly-priced deals drag it upward. In 2024 the gap was 5.5x median against 7.3x mean. In 2025 it widened, 4.5x against 7.0x.

Which applies to you? If you own an ordinary owner-managed business, the median. The mean is being lifted by deals you are not in.

Here is the practical consequence. A seller who reads "UK businesses sell for 7x EBITDA" and applies it to a company generating £200,000 of EBITDA arrives at £1.4m. The median says £900,000. That difference is not a negotiating position, it is a misunderstanding of a statistic, and it is the single most common reason businesses sit unsold for a year before the price comes down.

The index also tracks P/E multiples, which fell more gently: median P/E eased from 6.0x to 5.8x, and mean P/E from 6.9x to 6.3x. And it reports average deal size falling from £7.5m to £5.5m, which tells you the mix shifted toward smaller transactions as well as lower multiples.

Worth saying plainly: a multiple is an output, not an input. It is what you get when you divide a price someone agreed by an earnings figure someone calculated. Change the earnings definition and the multiple moves without the price changing at all. Our normalised EBITDA guide covers why that matters more than the multiple itself.

Look again at the series: 6.0x in 2021, 4.3x in 2022, 5.0x in 2023, 5.5x in 2024, 4.5x in 2025.

That is not a decline. It is a market moving within a band, and the band has held between roughly 4.3x and 6.0x for five years.

For a seller, this is genuinely useful. It means:

Timing matters less than you would think. The spread between the best and worst year in five is about 1.7 turns of EBITDA. Meaningful, but smaller than the swing you can create in your own business by improving earnings quality or removing owner dependence. Waiting for a better market is usually worse than spending the same twelve months making the business more sellable.

A quoted multiple without a year attached is close to useless. Anyone citing "UK businesses sell at 5x" is quoting one point on a moving series. Ask which year and which dataset.

Deal volumes normalised rather than collapsed. The 2025 index describes volumes stabilising at more normal levels after an unusually active third quarter of 2024. Buyers are being selective, not absent. Our sector guides on selling a pub, a care home or a restaurant go into what selectivity looks like in practice.

One caveat on reading any single year too closely. The sample behind these numbers is deals contributed by member firms of one accountancy association. It is real transaction data, which is rare and valuable, but it is not a census of every UK business sale, and a single year's median can move on mix as well as on price.

The index reports a market-wide figure. Individual sectors sit a long way either side of it, for structural reasons that persist across cycles.

The table below pulls together the ranges we see quoted in each sector, drawn from broker practice and live listings rather than from a published dataset. Treat these as a sense-check against the 4.5x market median, not as valuations.

Sector	Typical basis	Range	Why it sits there
Day nurseries	EBITDA	7x – 9x	Corporate and PE buyers compete; Ofsted grade underwrites quality
Care homes	EBITDA	4x – 8x	Property-backed, but regulation adds risk
MOT garages	SDE	2x – 3.5x	DVSA approval is a genuine barrier to entry
Cleaning companies	SDE / EBITDA	1.5x – 5x	Contract quality decides where in the range
Ecommerce	SDE	2.5x – 5x	Traffic and supplier concentration pull it down
Coffee shops, restaurants	SDE	1.5x – 3x	Owner labour is most of the profit
Hair salons	SDE	1x – 2.5x	Revenue follows the stylist, not the premises
Car washes	SDE	1x – 2x	Earnings hard to verify, compliance risk

What the pattern actually shows

Read down that column and the logic is consistent. Sectors where a buyer can employ a manager and keep the earnings trade on EBITDA at higher multiples. Sectors where the owner is the business trade on seller's discretionary earnings at low ones.

Nothing about the market cycle changes that ordering. A nursery in a weak year still beats a salon in a strong one, because the difference is structural rather than cyclical.

Which is the useful conclusion for a seller: your sector sets the band, and your preparation decides where in the band you land. Neither is the market's doing.

Each of those sectors has its own guide covering the specifics, including selling a nursery, a garage and a cleaning business.

The index gives you a starting point. Getting from there to a defensible figure for your own business is mostly about honest adjustment.

Start below the median if you are small. Multiples scale with size. A business generating £80,000 of owner's earnings is not going to attract the multiple a £2m EBITDA company does, because the buyer pool is different and the risk is concentrated in one person. Owner-managed businesses in that bracket typically trade on seller's discretionary earnings at 1.5x to 3x rather than on EBITDA at all.

Adjust for owner dependence. This is the biggest single factor and it is not in any index. If the business needs you, a buyer is pricing a job. If it runs without you, they are pricing an asset. That difference regularly moves the number by more than the whole five-year market range.

Adjust for revenue quality. Contracted, recurring, diversified revenue earns a premium. Concentrated revenue on rolling monthly terms earns a discount. A buyer is really asking one question: how much of this survives the handover?

Adjust for the sector. Some sectors carry structural premiums for reasons that have nothing to do with the current market. Nurseries trade high because there are corporate buyers competing. Car washes trade low because the earnings are hard to verify. Our sector guides cover the specifics for each.

Then check the tax. The multiple determines the headline price; Business Asset Disposal Relief at 18% from 6 April 2026 determines what you keep. A structure decision can be worth more than a turn of EBITDA.

If you want to work through your own figure properly, our guide to what your business is worth walks through the calculation step by step.

The UK does not have a single official series for private company transaction multiples. Neither ONS nor Companies House publishes one, which surprises people. What exists is a handful of private datasets of varying accessibility.

Source	What it gives you	Access
UK200Group / MarktoMarket SME Valuation Index	Median and mean EBITDA and P/E multiples, average deal size, five-year series	Free
ICAEW private company multiples	11 sectors and 40-plus sub-sectors of UK private company transactions	Member access
BDO private company sale multiples	Annual UK EV/EBITDA benchmarks	Client-only from 2025
Business Sale Report Deal Value Index	Meta-analysis of around 500 trade deals and 100 PE transactions, drawing on Experian MarketIQ	Landing page free, detail gated
Christie & Co sector outlooks	Traded-market multiples for pubs, care homes, childcare, retail	Varies by edition

A note on method, since it decides whether a number is worth anything. Ask three questions of any multiple you are quoted: is it from completed deals or asking prices, is it median or mean, and what year does it cover. Most of the multiples circulating in blog posts and broker marketing fail at least one of those.

And be careful with US data, which dominates search results. American SME multiples run higher for structural reasons including deeper buyer pools and different financing norms. Applying them to a UK business will give you an expectation you cannot achieve.

If you are thinking about selling in the next two years, the honest read of this data is reassuring rather than alarming.

The market moved within a 4.3x to 6.0x band for five years. You cannot control which point in that band you sell into, and the range is narrower than the difference a well-prepared business makes against a poorly-prepared one. So the time is better spent on the things you can control.

In rough order of return:

1. Remove yourself from operations. It changes which valuation basis applies, not just the number.
2. Make the earnings verifiable. Clean accounts, normalised properly, that a lender can underwrite.
3. Contract the revenue. Signed terms beat goodwill in every sector.
4. Reduce concentration. In customers, suppliers and traffic sources, depending on the business.
5. Time the tax, not the market. The BADR rate change is a bigger, more certain number than a turn of multiple.

None of that requires predicting where multiples go next, which is fortunate, because nobody can.

One last framing. The EBITDA multiple UK sellers get quoted is a summary of other people's deals, not a promise about yours. Use it to sanity-check an asking price and nothing more.

When you are ready to see what comparable businesses are being listed at, you can browse businesses for sale on NewOwner, or list your own and deal with buyers directly. If you would like to talk through where your business sits against this data before committing to a number, get in touch.