How much is a landscaping business worth?

Short answer: closed landscaping and yard-service businesses on BizBuySell averaged 2.49x SDE and 0.72x revenue over the trailing five years — a real, realized number. What moves you above or below it is the maintenance book: contracted, dense, renewable work. Everything else is weather and hope. Background on the Landscapers page; your figures in the valuation calculator.

The number

From BizBuySell's industry valuation multiples (closed sales, trailing five years through Q2 2026): Landscaping and Yard Service Businesses — 2.49x SDE, 0.72x revenue, median sale price $449,950. Treat 2.49x as the center of the market, not your entitlement — the spread around it is decided by contract quality, below. The size ladder explains the rest of the spread: 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 pure-play landscaper exists at your scale; the large public grounds companies sit in this bucket, and the gap between 14.26x and your 2.49x is the price of size, liquidity, and management depth. 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: $1,000,000
• SDE margin: 25% — an assumption; maintenance-heavy books run richer than install-heavy books
• SDE: $1,000,000 x 25% = $250,000
• Multiple: 2.49x SDE — BizBuySell realized, landscaping and yard service, trailing five years
• Indicated value: $250,000 x 2.49 = $622,500, before debt; mowers, trucks, and trailers are typically inside a main-street deal, but read the asset list

How buyers actually value a landscaping business

Buyers split your revenue into two piles and price them differently. Maintenance — mowing, cleanups, fertilization, irrigation checks under contract — is the pile they pay for, especially commercial and HOA accounts with written, assignable agreements and a renewal record. Install and design-build is the second pile: good money, but it restarts every spring and usually lives in the owner's head and relationships, so it earns a lower, grudgier price. Within maintenance, buyers measure route density — stops per crew-hour, drive time between properties — because a dense route converts the same labor into more margin every single week. They check retention by revenue, not by account count: losing one $50,000 commercial contract is not ten $5,000 residentials. They ask how crews are staffed and whether that labor model — including seasonal labor — is documented and legal enough for a lender to underwrite. And they look hard at winter: a snow or holiday-lighting counter-season that keeps crews and trucks earning is worth real money in northern markets; four idle months is a discount. Customer concentration gets the standard treatment: one HOA above roughly a fifth of maintenance revenue is a re-bid risk with a date on it.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it:

• Maintenance at 60%+ of revenue under written, assignable contracts with renewal history
• Tight routes: crews finishing full days in a few neighborhoods, not crossing the county
• Enhancement sales into the existing base — mulch, plantings, lighting — logged as a repeatable motion, not the owner's hustle
• A working foreman or ops lead who runs the board when you are gone for two weeks
• A counter-season (snow, lighting, leaf work) that keeps the same crews billable

Kills it:

• Design-build spikes treated as run-rate revenue
• You on a mower, you estimating, you answering the HOA's emails
• One HOA or one developer about to re-bid, at a fifth or more of revenue
• Equipment at end-of-life with the replacement cycle unfunded
• Seasonal labor arrangements that exist only as a handshake

Move your number

Convert project customers into maintenance contracts. Every install you finished is a maintenance prospect you already won once; automated proposals and renewal follow-up are exactly what the ClaroPro team builds for green-industry owners. Get the book on card-on-file and ACH. Monthly maintenance billed automatically, enhancements collected on completion — fee cost and days-to-paid are the Finix payments team's problem to solve with you. Tighten routes with real systems. Route, crew, and contract data in one platform — not in your memory — is what lets a buyer verify density and retention; a Nova engineering team builds that layer when the off-the-shelf apps stop fitting. Then run the improved book through the calculator, prefilled for landscapers.

Educational framework, shown math, not an appraisal. A real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day. The caveats on this page protect the owner — you — from overpaying for a competitor whose HOA contract is up for re-bid, from underselling a dense maintenance book that deserves the top of the range, and from walking into a deal priced on one good spring. We're on the side of the business owner: never invent, show the math, be honest where it is soft.