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 EBITDA multiples by industry and size band — July 2026 edition
The ranges below are indicative guide ranges for Australian private companies, expressed as enterprise value divided by normalised EBITDA on a debt-free, cash-free, going-concern basis. They reflect our reading of reported Australian private transaction evidence, published broker and adviser data, and the multiples we see supported in engagement work, current as at July 2026. Three size bands are shown because size is the single strongest driver of where a business trades: under $500k normalised EBITDA, $500k–$1m, and $1m–$5m. Businesses above $5m EBITDA increasingly attract private equity and strategic acquirers and trade on different evidence — they sit outside this table. Format for each row: industry, then the indicative range for each band in ascending size order.
- ·Healthcare (medical, dental, allied health) — under $500k: 3.0–4.5x; $500k–$1m: 4.0–5.5x; $1m–$5m: 5.0–7.0x
- ·IT and managed services — under $500k: 3.0–4.0x; $500k–$1m: 3.5–5.0x; $1m–$5m: 4.5–6.5x
- ·Professional services (accounting, engineering, consulting) — under $500k: 2.5–3.5x; $500k–$1m: 3.0–4.5x; $1m–$5m: 4.0–6.0x
- ·Manufacturing and engineering — under $500k: 2.5–3.5x; $500k–$1m: 3.0–4.5x; $1m–$5m: 4.0–5.5x
- ·Wholesale and distribution — under $500k: 2.0–3.0x; $500k–$1m: 2.5–4.0x; $1m–$5m: 3.5–5.0x
- ·Transport and logistics — under $500k: 2.0–3.0x; $500k–$1m: 2.5–3.5x; $1m–$5m: 3.5–5.0x
- ·Construction and trade services — under $500k: 1.5–2.5x; $500k–$1m: 2.0–3.0x; $1m–$5m: 3.0–4.5x
- ·Retail — under $500k: 1.5–2.5x; $500k–$1m: 2.0–3.0x; $1m–$5m: 2.5–4.0x
- ·Hospitality (cafes, restaurants, catering) — under $500k: 1.5–2.5x; $500k–$1m: 2.0–3.0x; $1m–$5m: 2.5–4.0x
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 under IVS — rather than asserting one
Under IVS 104, 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. That process is what the ATO's market valuation for tax purposes guidance expects to see documented, and what APES 225 requires of professional-member valuers. 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: Prismi, 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. For most trading businesses that means a Comprehensive engagement (from $3,995 + GST), with multiple methodologies tested and the multiple selection reasoned in the report; where the matter is higher-value or likely to be reviewed, the Defensible Valuation File (from $8,995 + GST) is the right level. 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. Prismi 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.