How much is a restoration company worth?

Short answer: a mid-size mitigation and restoration company prices around 3.1× seller's discretionary earnings (SDE) on the standard size ladder — about $1.23 million on $396,000 of SDE in the example below. But restoration buyers barely start with the multiple. They start with where your jobs come from — carrier programs, plumbers, or Google — because each source carries a different margin and a different risk. Run your figures in the valuation calculator and see the restoration industry page.

The number

No trade-specific realized multiple for restoration is published in BizBuySell's trailing-five-year data (Q3 2021–Q2 2026), so this page runs on the IBBA Market Pulse ladder (Q2 2026) and says so: 2.0× SDE under $500K, 2.8× at $500K–$1M, 3.1× at $1M–$2M, then EBITDA multiples — 4.8× at $2–5M, 5.8× at $5–50M — where real management exists.

A worked example (margin is an assumption):

• Revenue: $1,800,000
• SDE margin, assumed: 22% → SDE = $1,800,000 × 0.22 = $396,000
• The price this implies lands in the $1M–$2M band, where the ladder pays 3.1× → $396,000 × 3.1 = $1,227,600

Two restoration-specific adjustments sit on top of that number: insurance receivables — 60-to-120-day-old carrier balances are discounted or excluded, they are not cash — and equipment, where drying fleets are usually inside the earnings price, not added to it. The proxy ceiling: public Business & Consumer Services companies at 14.26× EV/EBITDA (Damodaran Online, January 2026). National restoration platforms do chase that direction, which is exactly why they are buying companies like yours — at main-street multiples, not platform ones. Know which side of that trade you are on.

How buyers actually value a restoration company

Restoration is priced on job source and job type, in that order. Job source: work dispatched through carrier programs and TPAs (Contractor Connection, Alacrity and their peers) is steady but carries referral fees commonly in the 5–11% range, scorecards that can throttle your dispatch volume, and pricing held to Xactimate line items. Direct relationships — plumbers who call you at 2am, property managers, agents who hand your card out — carry no fee and better pricing, but they are relationships a buyer must believe will transfer. Job type: emergency mitigation (extraction, drying, board-up) is fast, high-margin, and invoiced in days; reconstruction is bigger tickets but slower, permit-bound, and margin-leaky. Buyers weight a mitigation-heavy book above a rebuild-heavy one of the same revenue. Then the operational audit: Xactimate estimating discipline and documentation — photos, moisture logs, signed work authorizations — because that file is what gets your invoices paid in full instead of negotiated down; receivables aging by carrier; and whether IICRC-certified techs and a real on-call rotation survive your exit. A company that is one estimator and one drying crew is a job with trucks, and it prices like one.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it:

• Direct referral sources — plumbers, property managers, agents — documented and diversified beyond any single TPA
• Mitigation at 60%+ of revenue with clean, fast collections
• Estimating and documentation discipline: files that survive adjuster review without haircuts
• Receivables under 60 days on average, aged honestly by carrier
• Certified techs, an on-call rotation, and a second estimator — a bench, not a hero

Kills it:

• 80% of volume from one TPA program whose scorecard you do not control
• Reconstruction revenue padded with change orders the carrier never approved
• Aged receivables presented as assets — the buyer will find the 180-day column
• Storm-chasing revenue in the trailing year treated as run-rate
• Mold work without the licensing, insurance, or protocols your state requires

Move your number

The levers in this trade are about margin proof and job flow you own. Shorten the cash cycle: deposits and progress billing on reconstruction, card and ACH options that do not wait on a carrier's 90-day drift, and processing costs that do not eat the mitigation margin — the Finix payments team is our route for that work. Own your referral follow-up: plumber and property-manager touchpoints, review requests after every job, and estimate follow-up that run without the owner are an operations build — ClaroPro's lane. Make documentation a system, not a scramble: moisture logs, photo files, and Xactimate packages assembled in software a buyer — or an adjuster — can audit line by line is the kind of build a Nova engineering team does when the job-management app stops fitting. Your baseline first: run the calculator.

This is an educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal, and restoration is a trade where the gap between the two is widest — receivables, program fees, and one storm season can swing a real price hard in either direction. The caveats sit on this page to protect you, the owner: so you never overpay for revenue that was really a carrier's dispatch decision, undersell referral relationships that took a decade of 2am calls to build, or sign a deal where old receivables were counted as cash. A real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day, after they have aged your receivables and read your scorecards.