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A RocketLevel piece for restoration owners, especially those 55 and over, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About an 8-minute read.
Private equity (PE) has been consolidating restoration for years. The clearest evidence is in the deals themselves rather than in any headline dollar total: in October 2021 Kohlberg & Company and Partners Group together acquired BluSky, which their own October 19, 2021 announcement described as a leading US provider of commercial restoration services, and consolidation platforms have kept buying since. We are not going to quote you an aggregate capital-deployed figure, because we could not find one published for this industry that holds up. What is not in dispute is the direction. If you own a restoration company, the buyers are real, they are active, and many of them will eventually knock on your door.
The question is what they'll pay when they do. Two shops doing the same revenue can trade at very different multiples, because buyers pay for how durable, diversified, and owner-independent that revenue is. You can build all three on purpose, starting years before you sell.
Valuation runs on a multiple of earnings. Smaller shops are valued on a multiple of seller's discretionary earnings (SDE); larger ones on a multiple of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). Before the numbers, one warning that saves a lot of confusion: SDE and EBITDA are not the same base. SDE adds your owner compensation and perks back in, so it is a bigger number than EBITDA for the same business. A 3x SDE multiple and a 6x EBITDA multiple can describe nearly the same price. Never line them up side by side as if they were one scale.
Published ranges, and note that they do not agree with each other:
Hold that CT Acquisitions ladder against the wider market before you use it, and use both of its numbers rather than one. In Capstone Partners' Middle Market M&A Valuations Index, April 2026 edition, the investment bankers surveyed expect typical middle-market deals to average 6.8x EBITDA in 2026 and premium deals 9.8x. Both halves matter. Against the 6.8x typical expectation, the top of a restoration-specific ladder looks rich. Against the 9.8x premium expectation it does not. A restoration independent reaches the premium half by running a competitive process with several qualified buyers at the table. Taking the first call that comes in rarely gets you there.
The gap has an explanation. Peak is describing the broad population including small owner-operated shops; the deal-side guides are describing the sponsored transactions they work on. Which band you belong in depends on your size and your mix, and it is the first thing to settle before you anchor on a number.
Weigh the sources for what they are. Every range above comes from a valuation firm or an M&A advisory publishing its own guide, which is marketing as much as it is data. None of them is audited, none discloses its sample, and no regulator, trade association, or public dataset reports restoration multiples the way public-company comparables get reported. We cite them because they are the best that exists in the open, not because they are authoritative. Read them as three practitioners' impressions that happen to disagree, and put more weight on what an advisor tells you after looking at your actual book than on any published band, including ours.
Within any of these bands, a diversified, owner-independent commercial book lands near the top while residential or program-dependent books sit at the bottom. The spread comes down to quality of earnings more than size.
The bands in that chart are RocketLevel's working view rather than a published finding: roughly 4.5 to 5.5 times EBITDA for a program-dependent book and roughly 6.5 to 7 for a diversified, owner-independent one, with a mixed book landing between the two. They sit toward the upper end of the published ranges above because they describe a specific profile, not the whole market.
Buyers and the brokers who advise them reward a specific, knowable set of attributes. The discount side is the same list read backwards, so there is no separate one below. Concentration, owner dependence and earnings a buyer cannot verify are what take the number down. Seven drivers do most of the work: