SDE multiples: what sellers are actually asking

Every small business for sale is priced as a multiple of its earnings, and every buyer eventually asks the same question: what multiple is normal? Published answers are usually either a broker's rule of thumb or a range copied between blog posts without a source.

These figures come from our own corpus of live listings. The method, the exclusions and the command to regenerate them are at the bottom, so you can check them rather than trust them.

The overall picture

Across 3,768 listings with both an asking price and a stated SDE:

So half of everything on the market is asking between 1.5× and 3.5× SDE. A business asking 6× isn't necessarily overpriced, but it is unusual, and the burden of explanation sits with the seller.

The multiple rises with earnings — for physical businesses

This is the strongest pattern in the data, and it's the one worth internalising: larger businesses are asked out at higher multiples. Restricting to one marketplace of predominantly physical, owner-operated businesses:

A business earning over $1M is asked out at nearly double the multiple of one earning under $100K. The usual explanations are that larger businesses carry less owner-dependence, have real management, survive the loss of any one customer, and can be financed more easily — so more buyers can bid for them.

The practical consequence for a buyer: you cannot take a multiple you saw on a $2M-SDE business and apply it to a $150K-SDE business. They are different markets.

Online businesses don't follow the same rule

Run the same cut inside a marketplace of predominantly online businesses and the pattern disappears:

Flat, and falling at the top. The two largest bands hold fewer than 30 listings each, so treat the decline as directional rather than established — but the absence of the physical-business gradient is clear across the well-populated bands.

The likely reason is that size doesn't buy the same durability online. A larger content site or storefront can still depend on one traffic source or one platform's policy, so scale doesn't reduce risk the way an established local business with staff and contracts does.

By category

Asking multiples for the categories with enough listings to be worth quoting. Industry on a listing is free text, so most listings can't be classified confidently — these buckets are the ones that could, and each shows its sample size. A listing matching two categories is counted in both.

Read the middle-half column, not just the median. Auto services has the same median as landscaping but a far wider spread — meaning category tells you much less about that business than its own numbers do.

The multiple is only as good as the SDE

Both halves of the ratio come from the seller. The asking price is their number, and the SDE is their number too — calculated with add-backs they chose, from records they prepared.

A business asking 2.5× on an SDE that's overstated by 20% is really asking around 3.1× on its actual earnings. The multiple looked normal; the price wasn't. This is why verifying the earnings matters more than benchmarking the multiple, and why what SDE is and how it's calculated is the more useful page of the two.

Method

• Source: active listings in the Acquire Scout corpus, aggregated from public business-for-sale marketplaces. Snapshot taken 6 August 2026.
• Population: listings marked active with both an asking price and a stated cash flow (SDE) greater than zero — 4,066 listings.
• Exclusions: 298 listings (7.3%) with a computed multiple below 0.25× or above 20×, which are data errors rather than signal — typically a monthly cash-flow figure quoted against a full asking price. 3,768 listings remain.
• Multiple: asking price ÷ stated SDE. Medians and quartiles, not means — the distribution has a long right tail and a mean would sit above almost every listing in it.
• Categories: assigned by the same keyword classifier the product uses to filter searches. Free-text industry means 2,821 listings can't be classified; categories overlap.
• Reproducing it: the query and every calculation live in lib/listings/sde-multiple.measure.test.ts in our codebase, run with SDE_MEASURE=1. The figures above are its output.

These are asking prices at one point in time from one corpus. They are not a valuation, and they are not advice about what to pay for a specific business.

Next: which documents to request from a seller — the ones that let you check whether the SDE under a multiple is real.