Owner intake · Landscaping and grounds
For Landscaping and grounds owners in the US·Free, no email to see the range
What is my landscaping business worth
Landscaping is valued almost entirely on recurring maintenance. Design and install revenue is nice to have; the contracted mowing, grounds and snow work is what a buyer is really buying.
- 2.0x–3.2x
- Multiple we apply
- 6
- Questions
- $0
- Cost to you
Applied to profit before your own pay, then moved inside that range for the size of the earnings and the years you have traded. It is a range, not an appraisal.
Your range, in six questions
What moves the number in landscaping
Recurring maintenance contracts
Annual or seasonal contracts that renew are the core of the value. Install-only revenue is discounted because it has to be won again each spring.
Commercial against residential
Commercial and HOA contracts are larger, longer and transfer more cleanly. A residential route can still be strong if the retention is there.
Route density
Twenty properties in one zip code are worth more than twenty spread across a county, because the buyer's cost to serve them is lower.
Equipment condition
Owned, maintained equipment with life left in it reduces the buyer's first-year capital spend and shows up in the price.
Questions owners ask us first
- What is a landscaping business worth
- We use 2.0x to 3.2x profit before the owner's pay, moved for size and years trading. The share of your revenue that is contracted maintenance is the single biggest lever inside that range.
- Does snow or seasonal work count
- Yes, if it is contracted. Committed seasonal work with a signed agreement counts toward recurring revenue. Casual per-event work does not, in a buyer's eyes.
What these businesses actually sold for
There is no landscaping multiple we can source to closed transactions, so we are not going to print one. A benchmark page for the trade exists, but we could not verify its multiple figures directly, and every other figure we found elsewhere came from a firm selling advisory services and citing nothing. What we can show you is the rest of the trades and the market-wide numbers, which are on the page below.
What trades businesses actually sold for has every trade, the quartile spread, the sources, and why the 8x figures you have read elsewhere do not apply to a business this size.
Before you trust the number
We publish the arithmetic in full: the earnings a buyer prices, the multiple for each trade, the two adjustments, and the things we deliberately leave out. How buyers value a trades business.
Other trades