EBITDA multiples by industry in Australia: what private businesses actually sell for.

Why this table exists: and why it is dated

Search for EBITDA multiples and most of what you find is American: charts built from US transaction databases, quoting multiples for businesses many times the size of the typical Australian private company. Owners anchor on those numbers, arrive at a sale, a restructure or a family transfer expecting seven or eight times earnings, and discover the Australian evidence supports four. This page exists to close that gap. It is a maintained table of indicative EBITDA multiple ranges for Australian private companies, organised by industry and size band, dated, and refreshed each July. It is a calibration reference: the place to set expectations before methodology and evidence do the real work. It is not a valuation, and no individual business should be priced off it, for reasons the second half of this article explains.

Australian private-company EV/EBITDA multiples by industry and size band: July 2026 edition

The table gives indicative guide ranges for Australian private companies, expressed as enterprise value divided by normalised EBITDA on a debt-free, cash-free, going-concern basis, current as at July 2026. Three size bands are shown because size is the single strongest driver of where a business trades. Businesses above $5m normalised EBITDA increasingly attract private equity and strategic acquirers and trade on different evidence, so they sit outside the table. The Mid column is the midpoint of the range, not a transaction median: this is a judgment-weighted composite of three evidence classes (reported Australian private transaction data from brokers and M&A advisers, published Australian mid-market multiple analyses, and the multiples tested and supported across our own engagements, aggregated and anonymised), not a transaction database. Confidence is our rating of evidence depth for the row: Medium where the three classes broadly agree, Low where the evidence was thin or self-reported and the range was widened rather than false-precisioned.

This table is EBITDA only: SDE is a different denominator

Several of our industry pages quote multiples of seller's discretionary earnings (SDE) for owner-operated businesses, which is the convention brokers use for cafes, salons, gyms and small e-commerce stores. SDE adds the working owner's full remuneration back to profit, so it is a larger earnings figure than normalised EBITDA (which charges a market salary for the owner's role) and it attracts a lower multiple: an SDE multiple of 2.5x and an EBITDA multiple of 4x can describe the same business. The two must never be mixed in one calculation or one table. Every row above is EBITDA. Where an industry page quotes SDE, it says so, and the range is not comparable to this table without converting the earnings base first.

How to read the table properly

Three disciplines stop the table being misused. First, the denominator is normalised EBITDA: reported earnings adjusted for owner remuneration at market rates, related-party arrangements, one-off items and personal expenses, with each adjustment documented. Applying these multiples to unadjusted profit produces a number that means nothing. Second, the output is enterprise value: debt comes off and surplus assets are added back before you reach equity value, and a minority interest is worth less again than its pro-rata share. Third, these are ranges, not points: and where a specific business falls within its range is the substantive question. The factors that push a business toward the top or bottom of its band are consistent across industries:

• ·Recurring or contracted revenue versus project-by-project work
• ·Customer concentration: a top client above 20–30% of revenue drags the multiple down
• ·Owner dependence: whether the business runs without the person selling it
• ·Earnings trajectory and volatility across the last three to five years
• ·Quality of financial records: clean, reconciled accounts support the top of the range
• ·Transferability of key relationships, licences, accreditations and staff

Why sub-$5m-EBITDA businesses trade at steep discounts to listed peers

A listed industrial company commonly trades at a double-digit EV/EBITDA multiple while a private business in the same industry with $1m of EBITDA changes hands at four times. That gap is not mispricing: it is priced risk. Size: a small business has less diversification across customers, products and geographies, thinner management, and less resilience to the loss of a single contract or key hire. Liquidity: a parcel of listed shares can be sold in seconds at a quoted price; a private business takes six to twelve months of campaign, diligence and negotiation to sell, and may not sell at all, buyers pay less for what they cannot easily exit. Key-person risk: in most sub-$5m-EBITDA businesses a material share of the goodwill sits in the owner's relationships and knowledge, and a buyer discounts for the portion that may walk out the door at settlement. Funding: acquirers of small private businesses borrow less, on harder terms, than acquirers of listed assets, which mechanically caps what they can pay. Any valuation that lifts a multiple from listed comparables and applies it to a private company without documented adjustments for these factors is asserting a value the evidence does not support.

Why US multiple charts mislead Australian owners

The US charts that dominate search results mislead in both directions at once. They overstate because US transaction databases skew heavily toward larger deals: and multiples rise with size, so a chart built from $20m-EBITDA transactions says nothing about a $700k-EBITDA business in Parramatta. They overstate again because the US mid-market has a deeper buyer pool, more private equity capital and more aggressive debt funding than Australia's, all of which bid multiples up. Then they understate, confusingly, where the chart is built on seller's discretionary earnings (SDE): the convention for small US business sales, which adds the owner's full salary back to profit. An SDE multiple of 2.5x and an EBITDA multiple of 2.5x are very different prices, and most owners reading the charts have no way to tell which they are looking at. Finally, none of it is evidence an Australian valuer can put in a working file: sector composition, growth profiles, tax settings and the interest-rate environment all differ, and a valuation prepared for an Australian tax purpose has to rest on evidence relevant to the Australian market at the valuation date.

How a valuer evidences a multiple: rather than asserting one

Under market value is the estimated amount an asset should exchange for between a willing buyer and a willing seller acting knowledgeably and without compulsion: the same substance as the willing-but-not-anxious principle Australian law has applied since Spencer v Commonwealth (1907). A multiple asserted ("the industry standard is 4x") is a guess wearing a suit. A multiple evidenced looks different: the valuer identifies comparable transactions or companies and documents why they are comparable; adjusts for the differences that matter: size, growth, profitability, customer concentration, owner dependence; corroborates the result against a second methodology, typically capitalisation of future maintainable earnings with a net-asset-value floor; tests sensitivity, so the report shows what the conclusion looks like at the selected multiple plus and minus half a turn; and records the reasoning in a working file that can be produced if the value is ever queried. The output is a supportable range and a concluded position within it: not a single number pulled from a table, including this one.

Methodology, sources and the annual refresh commitment

This is the July 2026 edition, the first, compiled at the start of FY2026–27. The ranges are judgment-weighted composites of three evidence classes: completed Australian private transaction data as reported by business brokers and M&A advisers; published Australian mid-market transaction and multiple analyses; and the multiples we see tested and supported across our own engagements, in aggregate and anonymised. The limitations are real and worth stating: Australian private transaction data is incomplete, self-reported, and lags the market by months, and thin industries produce wide ranges. Where the evidence for a band was thin we widened the range rather than false-precision it. The table will be refreshed each July, with the prior edition archived and material movements noted, so the page remains a current, dated Australian reference. If citing it, cite the edition: Oliver Group, EBITDA multiples by industry in Australia, July 2026 edition.

Where the table ends and a valuation begins

The table calibrates expectations; it does not evidence a value. For a sale negotiation, that distinction is commercial. For a tax purpose, a CGT event, a restructure rollover, a related-party transfer, or a small business CGT concession claim where eligibility rides on the value and the $6m maximum net asset value test is not indexed, the distinction is the whole game, because what survives review is the documented file, not the number. Fees are fixed at engagement and never contingent on the outcome, and if a client asks us to land on a multiple the evidence does not support, we will say so and decline the engagement on those terms. Oliver Group prepares independent valuations only: we are not tax agents, and your accountant or lawyer applies the value to the tax and legal questions it exists to answer. Oliver Group's fees are set by the annual turnover of the business: a Small Business Valuation is $1,495 + GST for turnover under $2 million, a Medium Business Valuation is $2,495 + GST for turnover between $2 million and $10 million, and a Large Business / Start-Up Valuation is $3,495 + GST for turnover over $10 million or for a start-up. Small-business reports are delivered in 2 business days and medium-business reports in 3 business days; the delivery date for a Large Business / Start-Up Valuation is agreed before commencement. Delivery time starts once payment and all required information have been received. Retrospective valuation dates are +$495 each and additional entities are +$795 each. The fee is fixed in writing before work begins and never depends on the concluded value.