How much is an irrigation business worth?

Short answer: buyers pay for the service book — spring startups, winterizations, backflow tests, and repair customers who call you every year — and pay very little for installation revenue, however big it looks. The business sells on SDE at small-deal multiples; no verified trade-specific realized multiple exists in the data below, so this page uses category data and says so. See the Irrigation page, then run your book in the valuation calculator.

The number

BizBuySell's trailing-five-year realized tables do not isolate irrigation companies — the trade is usually buried inside landscaping categories, which is why this page will not dress a landscaping number up as an irrigation number. Category data, honestly labeled: Size moves the multiple more than almost anything. The IBBA Market Pulse survey (Q2 2026) puts realized pricing at 2.0x SDE for deals under $500K, 2.8x SDE at $500K-$1M, 3.1x SDE at $1M-$2M, 4.8x EBITDA at $2-5M, and 5.8x EBITDA at $5-50M. Same trade, same margins — a bigger, less owner-dependent business simply gets a different multiple.

For an anchor, public companies in Business & Consumer Services trade at 14.26x EBITDA — Damodaran Online, January 2026. No public company is a pure irrigation servicer; water and landscape service platforms in this bucket are the anchor, and they own recurring books at a scale you are still building toward. That is not your price. It is the opportunity-cost anchor a buyer measures your shop against: money parked in large, liquid companies earns that multiple, so a small, illiquid one has to be cheaper per dollar of earnings.

Worked example — shown math, assumptions labeled:

• Revenue: $650,000
• SDE margin: 25% — an assumption; service and repair carry this margin, install work usually drags it down
• SDE: $650,000 x 25% = $162,500
• Multiple: 2.0x SDE — IBBA tier for deals under $500K (Q2 2026)
• Indicated value: $162,500 x 2.0 = $325,000, before debt — a blended figure; Section 2 explains why a buyer mentally reprices the two halves differently

How buyers actually value an irrigation business

Every irrigation buyer performs the same split. Installation — new systems for builders and landscapers — is priced near zero goodwill: it depends on construction starts, on relationships the owner holds, and on winning the next bid. Long-time green-industry consultants have made the point for decades: a service division carries real transferable value, installation carries almost none. Service is the business they are buying: the spring startup list, the fall winterization route, mid-season repair customers, and — the jewel — backflow testing, which many jurisdictions require annually, making it the closest thing this trade has to a mandated subscription. Buyers price the service book on count, retention, and revenue per tech: a technician running a tight route of known systems, billing startups and repairs all season, is an asset with a number attached. They check whether service customers are under any agreement or simply habitual — habitual is worth something, agreement is worth more — and whether the customer records live in a system: zones, controller type, backflow device serial numbers, test dates.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it:

• A counted service book: startups, winterizations, and backflow tests per year, with retention shown
• Certified backflow testers on staff — plural — with devices and test records in a system
• Smart-controller upgrade work layered onto service visits: higher ticket, same stop
• Revenue per service tech documented by month and route
• Service customers across several water districts and customer types, not one builder's subdivisions

Kills it:

• Install revenue from two builders presented as the business
• You are the only certified tester, the only tech, and the customer list is in your phone
• No agreements, no records — customers "just call us" (they will call the buyer only if the buyer is lucky)
• Seasonality with no winterization route to close the year
• Unpermitted or untested backflow work waiting to become someone else's compliance problem

Move your number

Put the service book under agreement. A startup-plus-winterization plan, sold at install and renewed automatically, converts habit into contract — the proposals, renewals, and reminders are systems the ClaroPro team builds for seasonal trades. Charge for the season like a subscription. Card-on-file for service plans and ACH for commercial accounts smooth the brutal spring/fall cash spikes and cut per-ticket fees; that setup is the Finix payments team's work. Build the system database. Every property's zones, controller, and backflow serial in one platform is your retention engine and your buyer's diligence file in the same object — a Nova engineering team builds it when the spreadsheet of addresses stops being enough. Re-run your split in the calculator, prefilled for irrigation.

An educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal. A real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day. These caveats are owner protection in plain clothes: they stop you overpaying for install revenue that evaporates with the next housing dip, underselling a service book with mandated annual tests in it, or signing a deal where the customer records turned out to be one man's memory. We show the category label because we're on the side of the business owner.