Commercial Landscaping
Valuation Multiples (2026)

Landscaping EBITDA and SDE multiples by company size (2026)

Two things set the range: how big your earnings are, and which measure of earnings the buyer uses. An owner-run company with a few hundred thousand dollars of owner earnings sells on a multiple of SDE, usually to an individual. A company with $1 million or more of EBITDA and managers who run the crews sells on a multiple of EBITDA, usually to a private equity-backed platform.

Table sources: BizBuySell, an online marketplace for small business sales (2021 to 2025, archived copy); IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse, Q2 2026, a survey by the business brokers’ trade association and its M&A counterpart (all industries); GF Data, which collects deal terms from private equity firms, via ACG and Mercer Capital, a valuation firm (all industries); FISART, an M&A advisory firm (its own guide values); Livingstone Partners, an investment bank (an illustrative 2024 ladder). The IBBA sizes by price, GF Data by deal value and Livingstone by EBITDA, so the bands overlap.

Four terms come up throughout:

• Enterprise value is the price for the whole company before debt is paid off.
• A turn is one times EBITDA. At $2 million of EBITDA, a turn is $2 million of price.
• A platform is the first company a private equity sponsor buys in a sector and then builds on.
• An add-on is a company a platform buys and folds into its branches. A tuck-in is the smaller version, merged into a nearby branch.

For the buyers and the full diligence list, see our guide to selling a commercial landscaping company. This guide stays on the price.

SDE, EBITDA or revenue: which multiple applies to your company

Seller’s discretionary earnings (SDE) is pre-tax profit plus interest, depreciation, amortization, personal and one-time expenses, and the full pay of one working owner. It assumes the buyer will step into your boots. Adjusted EBITDA makes the same adjustments but keeps a market salary for whoever runs the company after you, because a private equity platform will hire a general manager. See EBITDA and Business Valuation Basics and EBITDA Add-Backs: A Seller’s Guide to What Holds Up.

For the same company, SDE is the bigger number, so an SDE multiple is always the smaller one for the same price. That is why “2.5x” from a broker and “4.5x” from an investment bank can describe nearly the same deal. The IBBA and M&A Source survey switches from SDE to EBITDA at a $2 million purchase price.

Why revenue multiples mislead

A revenue multiple is just an EBITDA multiple times a margin. A company with a 13% margin that sells at 5.0x EBITDA has sold at 0.65x revenue, close to BizBuySell’s 0.70x for landscaping and yard service. The same 0.65x on a 7% margin would be more than 9x EBITDA, which no buyer will pay for a thinner business. First Page Sage, a digital marketing firm, lists commercial landscapers with $3 million to $10 million of revenue at 3.3x revenue. At a 13% margin, that is about 25x EBITDA.

What the data shows at each size

Owner-operated companies

The only landscaping-specific data with a stated population is BizBuySell’s: in a web.archive.org copy of April 3, 2026, landscaping and yard service businesses sold from 2021 through 2025 went for 2.46x SDE, at a median price of $425,000. That is mostly residential mowing and small yard service, so for a commercial company it is the floor.

$300,000 to $3 million of EBITDA

Much of Salt Creek’s client range sits here, and landscaping-specific evidence is thinnest. FISART puts landscaping at 3.5x to 6.0x EBITDA, 4.5x median, for roughly $1 million to $50 million of enterprise value, reflecting its own advisory experience “read against GF Data, IBBA Market Pulse and the DealStats Value Index.” It is one firm’s guide values with no sample size. GF Data’s all-industry private equity deals of $1 million to $10 million averaged 5.5x to 5.6x in the first half of 2025, and $10 million to $25 million deals 6.2x to 6.7x, according to ACG.

Put together, a commercial landscaper with $1 million to $3 million of EBITDA, clean books, managers in place and a maintenance-heavy book usually sells between 4x and 6x. Below $1 million, with the owner still central, expect the low end or an SDE price. Where you land inside the range comes down to the drivers below, and to how many buyers are bidding.

Platform candidates

Above roughly $3 million of EBITDA, a well-run regional company can attract sponsors looking for a new platform as well as platforms looking for add-ons. An add-on is valued on what it adds to an existing branch network; a platform, on the management team and systems the sponsor will build on. Livingstone’s illustrative ladder shows the step: 3x to 5x for a tuck-in, then 5x to 8x for a platform or material add-on under $8 million of EBITDA.

Livingstone’s “most EBITDA multiples between 7x and 15x” for private equity exits over the last decade describe platforms already built. The measured premium is smaller: in GF Data’s first-quarter 2026 figures, reported by Mercer Capital, platforms averaged 7.6x against 6.5x for add-ons across all industries.

The public company

BrightView (NYSE: BV), the one listed U.S. commercial landscaper, trades at roughly 7x to 9x trailing EBITDA depending on the date and the EBITDA used. Capstone Partners, an investment bank, put it at 6.9x on July 27, 2026. On BrightView’s own adjusted EBITDA, from its 10-K and third-quarter release, it is about 8.0x by our arithmetic. That is the price of a small slice of a $2.7 billion company, not your price.

BrightView has not been buying either: its filings, including its June 2026 quarterly report, show no acquisitions in fiscal 2024, fiscal 2025 or the first nine months of fiscal 2026. SiteOne Landscape Supply is a distributor that buys other distributors, according to its annual report, and is no comparable for a service company.

How buyers price each line of revenue

A buyer splits the income statement into lines and asks how likely each is to repeat next year. No source publishes a separate multiple for any line, so the table shows how buyers reason.

Table sources: Salt Creek’s reading of buyer practice, consistent with value drivers published by FISART (“60%+ recurring” commercial contracts as a premium, a residential book as a discount), Capstone Partners (interest expanding into “tree care, irrigation, artificial turf”) and Hyde Park Capital, an investment bank (commercial-focused companies were “particularly sought after assets in 2024”).

Maintenance and enhancements

Maintenance is what a buyer is really paying for, and it pays on history: renewals, price increases that stuck, sites kept through a change of property manager. Enhancements are the first line a property manager cuts when budgets tighten, so a buyer credits them when they hold a steady ratio to maintenance through good years and bad. Work out yours: enhancement revenue as a percentage of maintenance revenue, for each of the last three or more years.

A quality of earnings review will also test whether crew hours charged to maintenance were really enhancement or installation work. If they were, maintenance margins look better than they are.

Construction and design-build

The discount on construction is about predictability. BrightView’s Development segment earned a 13.5% adjusted EBITDA margin in fiscal 2025, above its Maintenance segment at 13.0%, but construction has to be won again every year.

Hypothetical: two companies each have $3,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA. Company A earns $2,550,000 from maintenance and enhancements and $450,000 from installation. Company B earns $1,500,000 from each. At 6.0x for maintenance and 4.5x for construction:

Company A. ($2,550,000 × 6.0) + ($450,000 × 4.5) = $17,325,000, about 5.8x.
Company B. ($1,500,000 × 6.0) + ($1,500,000 × 4.5) = $15,750,000, or 5.25x.

Same EBITDA, $1,575,000 apart. If the sites you build become sites you maintain, show it with numbers; it is the best argument for pricing construction closer to maintenance. Construction diligence runs through the work-in-progress schedule: under-billings, fade on fixed-price jobs (margin that shrank between bid and completion) and retainage owed by general contractors.

Snow and ice

Buyers restate snow to an average winter before applying any multiple. BrightView shows the size of the swing: snow revenue for the nine months to June 30, 2026 was $293.4 million, about $83 million (39%) more than the $210.7 million a year earlier, on heavier snowfall, according to its third-quarter release. Nearly all snow revenue lands in the winter quarters, which is why that $210.7 million is almost the same as the $210.8 million booked for all of fiscal 2025.

Two cautions. That is revenue, before plowing and salt costs. And how much of a heavy winter a buyer treats as above average depends on snowfall against the long-run norm (BrightView uses ten- and thirty-year averages), rather than against last winter. The bigger snow’s share of your earnings, the more a heavy winter overstates them. Hypothetical: three companies, each with $2,000,000 of non-snow EBITDA, after a winter that produced 60% more snow profit than average:

Table note: average-winter snow EBITDA of $100,000, $300,000 and $600,000; heavy-winter $160,000, $480,000 and $960,000. Snow share is of normalized EBITDA.

Contract form decides how hard that restatement bites. Seasonal contracts, especially with a minimum or a cap on events, look close to recurring because the customer pays whether it snows or not. Per-event, per-push, per-inch and time-and-materials work looks like weather. Buyers will also ask who carries the salt cost when prices spike, how much plow capacity is subcontracted and what your slip-and-fall claims look like, and they will charge snow its share of the insurance program.

Snow has a real upside too. In Snowbelt markets, contracted snow keeps your best crew leaders on payroll all year, and those are the people who keep the maintenance accounts. Make that case with snow revenue by contract type for several winters, set next to local snowfall. When snow is a large share of a company, some buyers price it like a stand-alone snow business, which Salt Creek’s tool starts at 3.5x to 5.5x, below its 4.0x to 6.5x for commercial maintenance.

What a buyer will ask a commercial landscaper for in the first month

Once a letter of intent is signed, the requests come fast. These are the ones that move price, and each is easier to answer if you pull it together before going to market:

• Renewal history by contract, split into auto-renewed, renegotiated and rebid, with the result of each rebid.
• Sites lost when a property sold or the management firm changed.
• HOA board turnover. New boards often rebid.
• Route density by branch: sites per route and drive time. More stops per crew-hour in a tight area is where a platform’s savings come from.
• Crew leader and account manager tenure, and whether accounts followed an account manager who left.
• H-2B petition history and the share of workers who return each season.
• Snow contract mix, seasonal against per-event and time-and-materials.
• Yard rent, if you own the property, restated to market.
• Loss runs for auto and workers’ compensation.
• Profit by branch and job costing by crew and service line.

None of these is unusual. What separates sellers is whether the answers arrive in a week from clean records or in a month from someone rebuilding them. A slow answer tells a buyer to look harder.

What moves the multiple up or down

Capstone sums up what acquirers want: “Acquirers have favored operators with recurring maintenance exposure, recurring service programs, and strong access to labor.” Our sale guide has the full list of drivers; these have the most arithmetic behind them.

Retention, and who signs the contract

BrightView’s maintenance contracts run one to three years and are “generally cancellable by the customer with 30-90 days’ notice,” according to its 10-K. So buyers price what customers actually did.

Hypothetical: two companies each have $10,000,000 of maintenance revenue. Company A keeps 95% a year; Company B keeps 85%. With no new sales, after three years A has about $8,570,000 left and B about $6,140,000. To stand still, B must sell $1,500,000 of new work a year, three times what A needs. That shows up as a lower multiple, a larger escrow or an earnout.

Concentration hides one level up from the customer list. A company can have 300 sites, none over a few percent of revenue, and still have a third of its book signed by two property management firms. When one rebids its vendors, many sites move at once. Do that analysis before a buyer does.

Fleet age and EBITDA less maintenance capex

EBITDA is earned before a single truck is replaced. Livingstone notes that buyers may value a landscaper on “EBITDA less maintenance capex.” Maintenance capex is the money spent replacing trucks and equipment just to stay even. It is lumpy: BrightView’s equipment purchases went from $78.4 million in fiscal 2024 to $254.2 million in fiscal 2025, according to its fiscal 2025 cash flow statement.

How you pay for equipment changes what EBITDA shows. An owner who rents or uses operating leases carries that cost inside EBITDA; an owner who buys carries it in capex, below EBITDA. That is one reason buyers compare EBITDA less maintenance capex.

Hypothetical: two companies each have $2,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA. Company A replaces equipment on schedule at about $600,000 a year. Company B has spent $250,000 a year, and its equipment list shows $700,000 of overdue replacements. At 5.5x, A is worth $11,000,000. B’s cash flow looks better, but the buyer restates its capex to the $600,000 the fleet needs and deducts the $700,000 backlog: $10,300,000. The money saved by stretching the fleet comes back out of the price, and equipment loans are paid off at closing on top of that.

Owned real estate

Many owners own the yard and rent it to the company. If the rent is below market, the buyer restates it to market and prices the lower EBITDA. Most buyers would rather lease than buy the property, so get a market-rent opinion before you go to market.

Margin

The only primary-source margin benchmark we could verify is BrightView’s: 13.2% adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2025, and 11.2% for the first nine months of fiscal 2026 (nine months, which exclude the summer quarter), including a $16 million self-insurance adjustment. A margin well below 10% makes a buyer ask about pricing, crew productivity or overhead. A margin well above BrightView’s makes a quality of earnings review ask whether the owner’s pay or deferred spending is flattering it.

Owner dependence and add-backs

The fastest way to lose a turn is an owner who sells every major account, prices every bid and is the only person property managers call. See How to Reduce Owner Dependence Before Selling. Add-backs work in reverse: every dollar that fails a buyer’s accountants costs a full multiple of itself. A $100,000 add-back that fails at 5.0x is $500,000 off the price.

Labor

Capstone calls “a seasonal dependence on the statutorily capped 66,000-visa H-2B program” a labor bottleneck, and the government added up to 64,716 supplemental visas for fiscal 2026. Several seasons of reliable returning workers turn that risk into a reason to pay more. FISART lists crew turnover above 50% as a discount driver.

Who is paying these multiples

Private equity is most of the market. KPMG Corporate Finance, KPMG’s investment banking arm, says private equity firms accounted for 76% of landscaping transaction volume in 2025 through August 31, counting residential work. Hyde Park Capital counted 108 landscaping transactions in the U.S. and Canada through September 2025, with private equity involved in 78. Platform detail is in who buys commercial landscaping companies, and advisors are compared in M&A Advisors and Business Brokers for Commercial Landscaping Companies.

Which buyer you sell to changes the multiple as much as anything in your books. A platform with a branch ten minutes from your yard can run your routes more cheaply than you can, and can afford to share some of that saving. One two states away cannot. That is why the same company can draw offers a full turn apart.

From headline multiple to cash at closing

The multiple sets enterprise value; what you receive is smaller. Equipment loans and finance leases come off as debt, and platforms commonly ask for rollover equity and an escrow. Our sale guide walks a hypothetical $20 million revenue company from a $14.4 million headline to $9.25 million of cash at closing. See also Rollover Equity Explained and What You Keep After Selling Your Business.

Working capital is where landscaping sellers most often give money back without noticing. If you bill maintenance in equal monthly installments while the work is heavier in summer, the buyer will restate receivables and deferred revenue to match. Prepaid snow contracts, other customer prepayments and open insurance claims can be treated as debt-like items and deducted from the price. See The Working Capital Peg.

Three hypothetical worked examples

A $6 million owner-run company, stated two ways

Hypothetical: $6,000,000 of revenue, of which $4,200,000 is contract maintenance, $900,000 enhancements, $500,000 snow and $400,000 installation. The owner sells and prices every major account and pays himself $250,000. Reported EBITDA is $600,000, and the books carry $30,000 of personal expenses.

SDE. $600,000 + $250,000 + $30,000 = $880,000.
Adjusted EBITDA. A replacement general manager costs about $115,000: $880,000 − $115,000 = $765,000, a 12.8% margin.

Sold to an individual buyer. At 3.0x SDE, the price is $880,000 × 3.0 = $2,640,000, a little below the IBBA’s all-industry 3.1x for $1 million to $2 million sales; at this price the survey switches to EBITDA, and individual buyers for a company this size are fewer. It is within reach of an SBA 7(a) loan, which tops out at $5 million.

Sold to a platform as a tuck-in. At 4.5x adjusted EBITDA, $765,000 × 4.5 = $3,442,500, about 3.9x the same company’s SDE.

Same crews, $802,500 apart. The platform price assumes the accounts stay after the owner steps back, so expect a transition period and possibly an earnout tied to retention.

A $12 million company with a snow line and an owned yard

Hypothetical: a Midwest company with $12,000,000 of revenue: $7,800,000 maintenance, $2,400,000 enhancements and $1,800,000 snow. It has account managers and reports $1,600,000 of adjusted EBITDA. Enhancements have run at about 31% of maintenance for four years, which a buyer will credit.

Snow. Last winter produced $380,000 of snow EBITDA against a $280,000 average on the company’s records: minus $100,000.
Yard rent. The owner charges the company $60,000 a year for the yard he owns; a market-rent opinion says $120,000: minus $60,000.

Normalized EBITDA. $1,600,000 − $100,000 − $60,000 = $1,440,000. At 5.0x, enterprise value is $7,200,000, against $8,000,000 on the reported figure. The owner gets some of that back as the higher rent, but an owner who walks in expecting $8,000,000 will feel the buyer took it. Make the restatement yourself first.

A $40 million company at platform scale

Hypothetical: $40,000,000 of revenue, of which $26,000,000 is maintenance, $6,000,000 enhancements, $3,000,000 snow and $5,000,000 construction. It has a general manager, three branch managers and job costing by service line, and shows $5,200,000 of adjusted EBITDA.

Snow. Last winter’s snow produced $700,000 of EBITDA against a $400,000 average: $5,200,000 − $300,000 = $4,900,000 normalized.
Maintenance capex. The fleet needs about $1,600,000 a year, leaving $3,300,000 of EBITDA less maintenance capex.

As an add-on at 6.0x: $4,900,000 × 6.0 = $29,400,000.
As a new platform at 7.0x: $4,900,000 × 7.0 = $34,300,000, about 10.4x EBITDA less maintenance capex.

The $4,900,000 gap is what a sponsor pays for a management team, systems and a market position that can absorb add-ons. It usually comes with conditions: a large share of the price rolled into the new platform’s equity, management staying on and a board the seller no longer controls.

The gap is not guaranteed. A platform whose routes overlap heavily with yours can price the route savings into its bid, and it knows each dollar of EBITDA it adds will eventually be valued at its own higher exit multiple. In a competitive process, that buyer can match or beat a new-platform bid.

Why published landscaping multiples run from 2x to 15x

Search for what a landscaping company is worth and you will find numbers from about 2x to 15x, most of them describing something different. Almost no landscaping sale discloses its terms: every landscaping transaction in KPMG’s fall 2025 facilities report shows “NA” for its EBITDA multiple.

Table sources: BizBuySell (2021 to 2025); FISART (October 2026); GF Data via ACG (first half of 2025); Livingstone Partners (2024); First Page Sage (Q1 2025).

First Page Sage says its averages come from “a combination of industry reports, private equity networks, and interviews with M&A professionals.” It shows no deals. Its 9.9x for commercial companies with $500,000 to $1 million of EBITDA is above the public company on any reading, which is not where a company of that size prices. Treat 10x-plus figures as platform-exit numbers.

How landscaping compares with other services sectors

Landscaping sits at the low end of route-based services. On FISART’s table, its 4.5x median compares with 5.5x for HVAC and 6.5x for pest control, where contracts are monthly or quarterly and 80%+ recurring. A landscaping contract gets rebid, and the companies that close the gap are the ones that can prove their customers stay anyway. See business services valuation multiples, our business services M&A advisory page and HVAC and plumbing valuation multiples.

Getting a preliminary read on what your company is worth

Salt Creek Advisory is a family-owned investment bank run by brothers Jack Pitts and Connor Pitts, who work directly with owners of companies with about $2 million to $75 million in revenue. In a landscaping sale, our job is to put add-on buyers and platform sponsors in front of your company at the same time, with the snow normalization, fleet history and retention data ready before a buyer frames them. For standard M&A engagements there is no upfront retainer.

The Value My Business tool lets you pick commercial landscape maintenance, design and build, or snow removal. It starts from Salt Creek’s working ranges, 4.0x to 6.5x EBITDA for maintenance and 3.5x to 5.5x for design and build and for snow, and adjusts for size and your answers. The result is directional, not a valuation. If a platform has already made you an offer, we can tell you which of the issues above it is pricing in.

Sources

• BrightView Holdings, “Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025”, filed November 2025.
• BrightView Holdings, “Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026”, filed August 2026.
• BrightView Holdings, “Third quarter fiscal 2026 results (Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1)”, August 4, 2026.
• SiteOne Landscape Supply, “Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 28, 2025”, filed 2026.
• Capstone Partners, “Residential Services M&A Coverage Report”, October 2026.
• KPMG Corporate Finance, “Facilities Services Industry Update”, Fall 2025.
• Hyde Park Capital, “Landscaping Market Insights, Winter 2024”, January 2025.
• Hyde Park Capital, “Landscaping Services Market Insights, Fall 2025”, 2025.
• ACG Insights, “Small Deals Still a Big Factor in Middle-Market Private Equity Through H1 2025”, November 11, 2025.
• Mercer Capital, “Middle Market Transaction Update, Summer 2026”, 2026.
• IBBA and M&A Source, “Market Pulse Q2 2026 highlights”, August 2026.
• BizBuySell, “Business Valuation Multiples by Industry” (web.archive.org copy of April 3, 2026), data from Q1 2021 through Q4 2025.
• FISART, “EBITDA Multiples by Industry 2026: Data Table”, October 2026.
• Livingstone Partners, “Commercial Landscaping: An Owner’s Guide to Private Equity Activity and Valuation Considerations”, November 1, 2024.
• First Page Sage, “EBITDA Multiples for Landscaping Companies: 2025 Report”, February 6, 2025.
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Temporary Increase in H-2B Nonimmigrant Visas for FY 2026”, 2026.
• U.S. Small Business Administration, “7(a) loans”, accessed October 2026.