What Multiple Does a Security Business Sell For

What the ranges actually are

Published practitioner guidance gives three bands of multiples of EBITDA. A multiple is the number a buyer multiplies yearly profit by to reach a price, and EBITDA is profit before interest, tax, and the write-down of equipment, vehicles and other assets. Small, owner-managed alarm monitoring firms sit at 3x to 5x, integrated electronic security businesses, carrying installation, maintenance and monitoring together, at 6x to 10x, and scaled platforms with substantial recurring revenue at 10x to 15x or more. It gives none for manned guarding.

Monitoring books are frequently cross-checked on a different basis entirely, as a multiple of monthly recurring revenue rather than of annual profit. That is not a richer valuation dressed up differently; it is the same arithmetic approached from the side where attrition and average account value are visible.

Size matters within all of this, and not only because larger businesses are more profitable. Larger systems firms tend to sit at higher multiples than smaller ones, and scarcity of available targets at each size does a good deal of that work.

What moves a business within its range

The recurring share comes first, every time. A business where sixty per cent of revenue arrives under contract each month is being valued on a different footing from one at fifteen per cent, whatever the profit line says, because the buyer is pricing the probability that the income is still there in three years.

Contract structure sits directly behind it: term, notice period, whether the agreement is signed, whether price has been reviewed, whether a clause lets the client walk away if the owner changes (a change of control clause). Identical revenue on twelve-month contracts with ninety days notice is worth more than the same revenue on rolling monthly arrangements, and the difference is not marginal.

Accreditation and licensing decide who can bid rather than what they bid. Current NSI or SSAIB approval at the right scope, Approved Contractor Scheme status where guarding is involved, and complete BS 7858 records are what allow a buyer to keep the contracts on transfer day. Workforce stability then decides whether the business can still deliver them a year later.

The cost side belongs in this list as well, particularly on the guarding half of the sector, where margins are thin enough that fixed costs matter. An SIA licence application has cost £204 since April 2026, and officer pay in guarding is usually at the National Living Wage, the SIA's 2022 sector profile found, so any guarding business being valued on margin is being valued on how well it manages a cost base it does not control.

What a range can and cannot tell you

A range is a description of a market, not a forecast for a business. Two firms in the same county, with the same turnover and the same certifications, routinely sit at opposite ends of the same band because one has a documented recurring base and a management layer and the other has an owner who knows everything and has written none of it down.

The other thing a range cannot carry is the shape of the consideration. An offer at a lower multiple paid entirely at completion can be worth more than a higher one with half deferred over three years against performance targets, and setting the two side by side on multiple alone is how sellers talk themselves into the weaker deal.

Which is the argument for treating a published band as the beginning of the conversation. It tells you the market is active and roughly where it prices this trade, and the buyer pool behind it has broadened as backed platforms have kept acquiring. What it cannot do is tell you what your business is worth, because that depends on evidence only you currently hold.

So the sensible use of a published band is as a sanity check. If somebody quotes you a figure well outside it, ask what they know that the market does not. If the figure sits inside it, the useful question is no longer whether the range is right, but which end of it your own evidence supports.

A range describes a market. It cannot tell you what your business is worth, because that depends on evidence only you currently hold.

Nick Hunt leads the work on raising what a business is worth before a sale, from margin to owner dependence, meaning how much of the business still runs through you.