How these numbers are produced — and what they are not

Each industry page shows a range of EV/EBITDA and EV/Revenue multiples rather than a single figure. Ranges are shown because a single number implies a precision that private-company data does not support: two businesses in the same sector with the same earnings routinely trade several turns apart on customer concentration, owner dependence and revenue quality alone.

Every range carries a sample size and an as-of date. Where the sample size is 1, the figure is a single indicative estimate and should be treated as a starting point for discussion, not evidence.

These ranges are reconciled internal estimates. They are not derived from a verified, audited sample of closed transactions. Where the underlying records disagreed, we took the spread of the surviving values and excluded outliers that sat more than 50% away from the median — an exclusion rule applied mechanically rather than by judgement, so it cannot be used to flatter a sector.

The calculator applies an industry multiple to the earnings figure you provide. If you enter EBITDA, it uses an EBITDA multiple, which is the more reliable basis. If you only enter revenue, it falls back to a revenue multiple, which is materially cruder — revenue multiples ignore how much of that revenue reaches the bottom line.

The output is a range, not a price. It does not account for the things that most often move a real transaction: quality of earnings and add-backs, customer concentration, contracted versus repeat revenue, owner dependence, working-capital requirements, deal structure, or what a specific buyer is willing to pay for a specific strategic reason.

Treat the result as a sanity check on your expectations. A formal valuation requires someone reading your actual accounts.

The archive holds 10,212 recorded transactions dated from 2 September 2014 to 1 July 2025, across 61 sectors and 5,617 named acquirers. It is a record of deals that were reported, not a complete census of the market — private transactions that were never disclosed cannot appear in it, and disclosure skews towards larger and institutionally-owned businesses.

Every record carries a deal value. 2,108 carry a disclosed multiple: 2,042 a revenue multiple and 826 an EBITDA multiple. That means the set is strong evidence of what changed hands and for how much, and much thinner evidence of what multiple was paid. Every median on the site is shown with the number of deals that disclosed, so you can see which of the two you are looking at.

All of it is published. Until August 2026 the site showed 644 of these records — those dated 2020 or later that carried a disclosed multiple — on the reasoning that the remainder was a stale 2014-2015 import in which multiples were largely absent. Checked against the archive, neither part held: the set is continuous, with between 234 and 1,472 transactions in every year from 2014 to 2025, and multiple coverage does not fall away with age (2016 is the best-covered year at 29%, 2024 one of the worst at 16%). The cut-off was withholding 1,464 transactions that did carry a disclosed multiple, so it was removed. What guards against an old deal being read as a current comparable is not omission but disclosure: the date leads every row, the default sort is newest first, and a period filter sits on the page.

The count above is exact, not a floor. It is read from the archive endpoint the site itself renders from, /functions/archive, which returns every record in one response. An earlier version of this page quoted “10,000+” and explained that pagination limits made an exact total impossible to read; that was a limit of how the data was being queried, not of the data.

The businesses shown as available are live sell-side mandates represented by FIH.com. They are listed anonymously — sector, scale and asking price only — because the identity of a business for sale is confidential until a buyer is under NDA.

Asking prices are what the seller is asking. They are not appraisals, and they are not evidence of what the business will ultimately transact at.

FairlyValued.com is a research property of FIH.com, which advises technology companies on mergers and acquisitions. If you ask to speak to an adviser through this site, you will be speaking to FIH.

That relationship is why the methodology is published in this much detail: a valuation tool operated by an advisory firm has an obvious incentive to flatter, and the check on that is showing the workings.

Ranges are reviewed periodically and every figure carries the date it was last reviewed. If you believe a range is wrong — particularly if you have transacted in that sector recently — tell us and we will look at it.

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