Guide
How much is my business worth? A UK SME answer
Updated
There is a published answer to this question for UK SMEs, and it is narrower than most websites suggest. Here it is, with its source, its limits and its history.
The published starting point
The UK200Group, an association of chartered accountancy and law firms, publishes an annual SME Valuation Index with MarktoMarket. It is built from actual transactions, purchases and sales of real UK businesses as asset or share deals, submitted by the group's Corporate Finance Panel. For the year to November 2025 it reported a median EBITDA multiple of 4.5x and a median P/E of 5.8x (UK200Group SME Valuation Index, November 2025).
That is the closest thing the UK has to a published number for an ordinary SME sale. It is not a valuation of your business, and the index itself is a market average across sectors and sizes.
Five years of the same index
| Index | Median EBITDA | Mean EBITDA | Median P/E | Mean P/E |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2025 | 4.5x | 7.0x | 5.8x | 6.3x |
| Nov 2024 | 5.5x | 7.3x | 6.0x | 6.9x |
| Nov 2023 | 5.0x | 5.7x | 5.5x | 7.2x |
| Nov 2022 | 4.3x | 5.2x | 5.9x | 7.2x |
| Nov 2021 | 6.0x | 6.6x | 7.6x | 8.9x |
Read down the median EBITDA column and the useful conclusion is that the ordinary UK SME transaction has spent five years between roughly 4x and 6x. A page quoting you 10x for a business of this size is quoting something other than this market.
What moves you inside the range
- Owner dependence. If the business cannot trade for a month without you, the buyer is buying a job, and prices it as one.
- Customer concentration. One client at 40% of turnover is the first thing a buyer models losing.
- Recurring revenue. Contracted or genuinely repeating income is valued differently from won-again-every-year income.
- Quality of the numbers. Three years of clean, reconciled management accounts that agree to the statutory accounts remove a whole category of price chipping.
- Growth and margin trend. The direction of the last three years usually matters more to a buyer than the level.
- Who is buying. A trade buyer with synergies, a private equity platform and a management buy-out team will not pay the same number for the same business.
None of those six carries a published percentage uplift, and we will not invent one. What we can show is the range: run the calculator at the index median and again at the index mean and you have the width of the honest answer.