How much is a nanny agency worth?

Short answer: it depends entirely on which business you actually run — one-time placement fees, or recurring revenue where families pay through you every week. The second is worth multiples of the first. No realized trade multiple exists in our data, so this page is category data, labeled honestly. See Nanny Services and run your model in the valuation calculator.

The number

No trade-specific realized multiple for nanny agencies appears in BizBuySell's trailing-five-year table, so category data only. The size ladder from the IBBA Market Pulse, Q2 2026 is the frame for most small sales: 2.0× SDE under a $500,000 price, 2.8× at $500,000–$1M, 3.1× at $1M–$2M, then 4.8× EBITDA at $2–5M and 5.8× EBITDA at $5–50M. Size buys multiple because size usually means a team, systems, and less key-person risk.

For context only, large listed Business & Consumer Services companies trade at 14.26× EV/EBITDA (Damodaran Online, January 2026). That is a proxy ceiling, not your price: public buyers get liquidity, audited books, and no owner behind the counter. Your buyer prices risk and opportunity cost at Main Street scale.

Worked example (assumptions labeled) — a placement agency:

• Revenue: $300,000 in placement and search fees.
• SDE margin: 38% — an assumption; placement is people-light and owner-heavy.
• SDE: $300,000 × 38% = $114,000.
• Multiple: 2.0× SDE (IBBA Market Pulse, Q2 2026, under-$500,000 price band).
• Math: $114,000 × 2.0 = $228,000.

Now the contrast: an agency with the same revenue built on recurring payroll and backup-care memberships, with contracts a buyer can read, argues for a higher band — because next month's revenue is already spoken for. A fee book that must be re-sold family by family is not.

How buyers actually value a nanny agency

Buyers separate placement revenue — a percentage of a nanny's first-year salary, earned once — from recurring revenue: agencies that employ the nannies, run household payroll, or sell backup-care and membership plans bill every week or month. That separation decides the price. Then:

• The guarantee book — replacement guarantees (commonly 60–90 days, sometimes longer) are a live liability: placements still inside the window can come back as unpaid re-searches, and buyers count them.
• The candidate database — how many vetted, background-checked, recently active nannies, and whether the vetting files are complete and transferable.
• Family relationships and referrals — repeat families (second child, sibling referrals) vs. one-placement households, and whether those relationships live with the owner personally.
• Compliance posture — household-employment tax handling, worker classification, background-check process, and any state domestic-worker rules: in this trade, sloppy compliance is a liability a buyer inherits.
• Corporate accounts — employer backup-care contracts, where they exist, are the rarest and most valuable revenue here.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it: recurring payroll or membership revenue as a real share of the mix; a documented candidate pipeline with current background checks; replacement rates low and tracked; repeat and referral families as the main source of placements; a placement consultant besides the owner closing searches.

Kills it: the owner as sole interviewer, vetter, and relationship holder; guarantee claims handled off the books; families and nannies who can — and do — bypass the agency after the first placement; classification or tax practices a buyer's counsel flags in week one; revenue riding a handful of ultra-high-fee placements that will not repeat.

Move your number

Build a recurring layer and collect it cleanly: backup-care memberships and payroll-service fees billed monthly on card or ACH turn one-time fees into underwritable revenue — the Finix payments team can price that collection setup. Systematize the match pipeline: family intake, candidate follow-up, guarantee-window tracking, and second-child outreach run by the ClaroPro team's operations systems instead of the owner's inbox; every repeat placement is revenue with near-zero acquisition cost. Make the database the asset: vetted candidates, completed checks, placement history, and guarantee status in one system a buyer can audit — a Nova engineering team build or clean-up — because in this trade the database is the business. Run your model: valuation calculator for nanny services.

This is an educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal; a real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day. The caveats in this page exist to protect you, the owner: from overpaying for placement fees that must be re-earned from zero, underselling a genuinely recurring book, or signing a deal before anyone counts the open guarantees and compliance files you are about to own. Never invent. Show the math. Be honest where there are caveats. We're on the side of the business owner.