Owner intake · Mechanical
For Mechanical owners in the US·Free, no email to see the range
What is my mechanical contracting business worth
Mechanical contracting is the trade where buyers care most about contracts and least about goodwill. Recurring service on plant that cannot be allowed to fail is what gets paid for.
- 2.5x–4.0x
- 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 mechanical contracting
Service contracts on critical plant
Chillers, boilers and controls that cannot go down give you contracted, renewable revenue. That is the highest-value thing in the business.
Design and build capability
In-house engineering widens what a buyer can sell to your customers after the deal, and they price that option in.
Certifications and clearances
Certifications, safety record and any clearance that lets your crews on a site are barriers to entry a buyer is buying.
Customer tenure
Ten years with the same hospital or plant is worth more than the same revenue from ten new customers.
Questions owners ask us first
- How are mechanical contractors valued
- On profit before the owner's pay, at 2.5x to 4.0x in our range, moved by the size of the earnings and the years behind them. Contracted service revenue is what pushes you to the top of it.
- Is my business too small to sell
- Below roughly $500K of revenue it is hard to find a buyer who is not buying a job. Above it there is a real market, and above about $2M of revenue there are funded buyers actively looking.
What these businesses actually sold for
Closed sales pooled from 2021 to 2025, reported by BizBuySell under Electrical and mechanical contracting. Not our figures, and worth reading against ours.
- 2.66x
- Multiple achieved
- $845K
- Median sale price
- $1.7M
- Median revenue
- $386K
- Median earnings
That is one average across every business in the category, including the small owner-dependent ones. Half of them land inside a band roughly twice as wide, and size sorts them. 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