How much is a coffee shop worth?

Short answer: coffee shops sell at 2.27× SDE in realized sales — cheap for the cash flow, because location, lease and the morning routine are the business, and all three can break. A drive-thru with years of lease left is a different asset from a pretty café on a month-to-month. Run your numbers in the valuation calculator and see the coffee shops page.

The number

BizBuySell's trailing-five-year closed sales (through Q2 2026) put Coffee Shops and Cafes at 2.27× SDE and 0.47× revenue, median sale price $150,000. The size context still applies — IBBA Market Pulse, Q2 2026: 2.0× SDE under a $500K price; 2.8× at $500K–$1M; 3.1× at $1M–$2M; 4.8× EBITDA at $2–5M; 5.8× EBITDA at $5–50M — though most single shops price in the bottom two bands.

Public comparison: Damodaran Online's Restaurant/Dining bucket (a proxy for a single café, January 2026) trades at 17.49× EV/EBITDA. That is chains and franchisors. Your buyer is pricing a lease, a location and a labor model, not a brand royalty stream, and the discount from 17.49 to ~2.3 is what that difference costs.

Worked example — shown math, assumptions labeled:

• Revenue (assumption, a busy neighborhood shop): $450,000
• SDE margin (assumption): 18% → SDE = $450,000 × 0.18 = $81,000
• Multiple (BizBuySell realized, coffee shops): 2.27×
• $81,000 × 2.27 = $183,870

Espresso machines and build-out are normally inside that number, not stacked on top of it.

How buyers actually value a coffee shop

Location is not a cliché here, it is the asset: morning drive traffic counts, the side of the street that catches commuters before the freeway, parking for the 7am rush, and whether a drive-thru exists or can be permitted — a drive-thru shop can do double the tickets of the same menu without one. Buyers pull your transactions by daypart from the POS; a shop that is all 7–9am is a bet on one routine surviving road construction and remote work.

Then the lease (years left, assignability, rent step-ups), the equipment list — espresso machine age and service history matter, because a flagship machine is a five-figure replacement — and the labor model: can trained baristas who are not the owner open at 5:30am and hold drink quality and speed? Loyalty data counts too: an active loyalty program with hundreds of regulars, and beans/merch subscriptions, are transferable revenue. A chalkboard and good vibes are not.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it: drive-thru or a permitted path to one; long assignable lease with capped bumps; documented daypart sales and a loyalty base that comes 3+ times a week; bean, merch or office-coffee subscriptions; a second revenue leg (beans retail, event cart) that is in the books; staff who can run a Saturday without the owner.

Kills it: a new chain drive-thru opening on your commute route — buyers read the same permit filings you do; rent resets at renewal that erase the SDE; the owner as head barista, trainer and opener six days a week; equipment at failure age with no service records; sales propped up by one office nearby whose lease is also ending.

Move your number

Payments: coffee is a card business — small tickets, high frequency, so per-transaction fees and tip handling are real margin, and a slow tap at 7:40am costs the rush itself. Clean, fast, correctly priced processing is the Finix payments team's lever. Recurring revenue: subscriptions, prepaid loyalty and office accounts turn a routine into a contract; automated prompts that convert regulars into subscribers are ClaroPro-style AI and ops work, done quietly in the background. Systems: ordering ahead, loyalty and POS data in one place — so daypart and regulars are reports, not folklore — is what a Nova engineering team can connect for a growing shop or small chain.

Run your location's real numbers: the calculator for coffee shops.

This is an educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal; a real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day, after they sit in your parking lot at 7am and count cars. The caveats on this page are owner protection — they keep you from overpaying for a location whose routine is about to change, and from underselling a drive-thru and a lease that took years to secure. Never invent. Show the math. We're on the side of the business owner.