How much is a kitchen and bath remodeling business worth?

Short answer: about 2.8× seller's discretionary earnings (SDE) — roughly $672,000 on $240,000 of SDE in the example below. Kitchen and bath is remodeling with a retail layer on top: a showroom, cabinet lines, and designers. Buyers price the transferable cash flow and the signed backlog — and they are careful not to pay earnings prices for display kitchens. Run your numbers in the valuation calculator and see the kitchen and bath industry page.

The number

Kitchen and bath has no realized multiple of its own in BizBuySell's trailing-five-year data (Q3 2021–Q2 2026), so the frame is the IBBA Market Pulse ladder (Q2 2026): 2.0× SDE under $500K, 2.8× at $500K–$1M, 3.1× at $1M–$2M, 4.8× EBITDA at $2–5M. Broker guidance for this trade sits right on it: owner-operated shops around 2×–3.5× SDE after a real designer or lead wage; managed design-build firms on adjusted EBITDA.

A worked example (margin is an assumption):

• Revenue: $1,200,000
• SDE margin, assumed: 20% → SDE = $1,200,000 × 0.20 = $240,000
• At 2.8×: $240,000 × 2.8 = $672,000 — inside the $500K–$1M band, so the rung is consistent

Counted separately, not inside the multiple: saleable cabinet and fixture inventory at cost, and the showroom real estate if you own it (usually a separate price or a lease decision). Client deposits on unbuilt jobs are a liability and come off. The proxy ceiling — public Engineering/Construction at 17.18× EV/EBITDA (Damodaran Online, January 2026) — prices companies that do not negotiate with Mrs. Garcia over grout color. Your number prices the ones that do, beautifully, one kitchen at a time.

How buyers actually value a kitchen and bath business

Buyers start by separating the two businesses wearing one logo. The retail layer: showroom traffic, cabinet dealer lines (and whether those lines and their terms transfer to a new owner — dealer agreements are not automatically yours to sell), designer close rates, and average ticket. The contracting layer: signed backlog reconciled to deposits, install capacity — in-house crews or subs — and job margins after the callbacks. The hinge between them is the designer. If one designer (often the owner) produces most of the sold work, the buyer is purchasing a person, and the price gets an earnout or a discount to match. They also test the backlog's honesty: deposits booked as liabilities, cabinet orders placed against real jobs, no displays counted as inventory gold. Product mix gets read closely — full design-build gut jobs, cabinet-and-counter refreshes, and one-day bath conversions are three different margin animals sharing a cage — and so does lead source: showroom walk-ins and referrals compound; purchased leads evaporate at closing.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it:

• Two or more designers who sell — design revenue that survives the owner's vacation
• Cabinet dealer lines that transfer, with terms and pricing intact
• Signed backlog with deposits reconciled job-by-job and cabinets ordered against contracts
• Install crews (in-house or loyal subs) with documented quality — low callback rates
• Showroom in a strong retail location on a lease the buyer can assume

Kills it:

• The owner is the designer, the salesperson, and the lead installer — a three-job person
• Display-heavy balance sheet: $200,000 of showroom kitchens presented as an asset story
• Deposits from the next job paying for the last job's granite
• A cabinet line that terminates on change of ownership, discovered late
• Bath-conversion work dependent on high-pressure in-home sales the buyer will not run

Move your number

The levers: make design sell without you and make deposits behave. Money mechanics: staged deposits (design fee, cabinet order, start of install) collected by card or ACH without punishing fees on five-figure tickets — the Finix payments team is our route for that. The nurture engine: kitchen decisions take months; systematic follow-up on open designs, past-client check-ins, and review requests that run themselves are an operations build — ClaroPro's specialty. Job truth in one system: design status, deposits, orders, and install margins tracked per job in software a buyer can audit, built by a Nova engineering team when the showroom's spreadsheets and the field's group texts stop agreeing. Get your baseline: run the calculator.

This is an educational framework with the math shown, not an appraisal — a showroom business carries too many moving parts (dealer lines, deposits, displays) for a formula to price blind. Every caveat here works for you, the owner: they keep you from overpaying for displays dressed as assets, underselling a designer bench and cabinet lines that took years to win, or signing before anyone reconciled the deposits. A real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day, after the job files match the bank.