Private equity is buying landscaping companies again. On 21 May 2026, Trinity Hunt Partners announced Elevation Landscape Group, a commercial landscaping platform for the western United States, built around Colorado Springs firm Landscape Endeavors — the same playbook the firm ran in the east with Visterra Landscape Group. Every trade headline about it says the same thing: valuations are strong, buyers are moving downstream, this is a good time to own a landscaping business.
Which raises the obvious question. What is yours worth?
We went to page one of landscaping business valuation to find out. Twenty results: eleven M&A brokers and valuation firms, three software vendors, a business-for-sale marketplace, two forum threads, one trade magazine and one video. Between them they publish nine different rules for answering the question.
So we applied all nine to the same business. The answers ranged from $22,068 to $299,520.
The nine rules, quoted exactly
These are not paraphrases. Each is what that page prints, read on 10 September 2026, with its rank on the results page:
| Source (rank) | What it publishes |
|---|---|
| MidStreet (4) | "2 to 4 times SDE - or - 5 to 7 times EBITDA". Separately labels "1 to 1.5 times revenue" under a heading reading How NOT to Value a Landscaping Business. |
| Sofer Advisors (9) | "Most buyers apply a 3x-5x multiple to adjusted EBITDA". "Smaller companies under $1 million in revenue often trade at 3x-4x". "0.5x to 1.0x of annual revenue for smaller firms". |
| YourExitValue (19) | "Landscaping businesses sell for 2.0x to 4.0x SDE in 2026. The median transaction closes at 2.4x to 2.8x." Individual buyers "acquiring residential landscaping businesses for cash flow pay 2.0x to 2.8x SDE using SBA financing." |
| FirstPageSage (8) | A table of EBITDA multiples by subsector and size. Lawn Service, smallest band: 8.6x. A second table of revenue multiples: Lawn Service, smallest band, 3.0x revenue. |
Note that two of these directly contradict each other before we compute anything. MidStreet says a revenue multiple is the wrong method and prints 1 to 1.5x as the error to avoid. FirstPageSage prints 3.0x revenue as an answer. Sofer prints 0.5x to 1.0x. Three page-one sources, three incompatible positions on whether the method itself is valid.
The business we are valuing
The same book we use in every pricing piece on this site, so the figures stay comparable across all of them:
- 60 residential clients, mowed weekly across a 32-week season — 1,920 visits a year
- $52 a visit — season revenue $99,840
- A two-person crew at $52.80 an hour fully loaded ($26.40 a head: wages, payroll tax, workers' comp, paid time off), 40 minutes per property
- One of those two people is a paid employee: 40 hours a week for 32 weeks at $26.40 = $33,792
- The other is the owner
- Overhead $24,900 a season: fuel and truck $4,800, equipment repair and replacement reserve $4,000, insurance $6,000, truck payment and depreciation $7,200, phone, software, licences and admin $1,400, marketing $1,500
$99,840 minus $33,792 minus $24,900 leaves $41,148 available to the owner. We worked that number out in detail in the owner-salary post, and it is the number this whole article turns on.
The fork nobody on page one navigates for you
Look at that $41,148 again. The owner rode the mower for 1,280 hours to produce it — 40 hours a week for 32 weeks — doing work they already pay someone else $26.40 an hour to do. At that rate, $33,792 of the $41,148 is a wage. Only $7,356 is a return on owning anything.
That gives two completely legitimate earnings numbers for one business:
| Basis | What it means | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| SDE (seller's discretionary earnings) | Everything a single owner-operator receives: profit plus their own labour | $41,148 |
| EBITDA | What is left after paying someone market wage to do the owner's 1,280 hours | $7,356 |
Those two numbers differ by 5.6 times. The owner's own labour is 82% of everything the business produces. Apply a multiple to the wrong one and the multiple barely matters — you are already off by more than five-fold before you start.
Every source on page one names both SDE and EBITDA. Not one of them tells a 60-client owner-operator which one a buyer will actually use on them, or how far apart those two numbers sit on a book that small. That gap is the entire article.
Nine rules, one business
Here is every published rule from page one applied to the same $99,840 of revenue, $41,148 of SDE and $7,356 of EBITDA:
| Rule | Source | Applied to | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3x-4x EBITDA, under $1M revenue | Sofer | $7,356 | $22,068 – $29,424 |
| 3x-5x adjusted EBITDA | Sofer | $7,356 | $22,068 – $36,780 |
| 5x-7x EBITDA | MidStreet | $7,356 | $36,780 – $51,492 |
| 40-60% of sales | MidStreet (as an error) | $99,840 | $39,936 – $59,904 |
| 0.5x-1.0x revenue, smaller firms | Sofer | $99,840 | $49,920 – $99,840 |
| 8.6x EBITDA, Lawn Service | FirstPageSage | $7,356 | $63,262 |
| 2.0x-2.8x SDE, individual buyer w/ SBA | YourExitValue | $41,148 | $82,296 – $115,214 |
| 2x-4x SDE | MidStreet | $41,148 | $82,296 – $164,592 |
| 1x-1.5x revenue | MidStreet (as an error) | $99,840 | $99,840 – $149,760 |
| 3.0x revenue, Lawn Service | FirstPageSage | $99,840 | $299,520 |
Low to high: $22,068 to $299,520, a spread of 13.6 times. Throw out every revenue multiple — which MidStreet argues you should — and the earnings multiples alone still run $22,068 to $164,592, a spread of 7.5 times.
This is not one bad source among nine good ones. Every number in that table is honestly published by a firm that does this for a living.
Why they all disagree: you are not in their tables
The dispersion is not carelessness. It is a scope problem, and it is visible the moment you read the column headers instead of the numbers.
FirstPageSage's EBITDA table starts at a $500,000-to-$1M band. Our book has $7,356 of EBITDA. The smallest company that table describes is 68 times larger on the metric the table is indexed by. Its revenue table starts at $1M to $3M; our book turns over $99,840, one tenth of the floor. The 8.6x and the 3.0x are almost certainly accurate for the companies they were measured on. Those companies are not this one.
Now find the rule whose stated scope actually contains our business. There is exactly one: Sofer's "smaller companies under $1 million in revenue often trade at 3x-4x". We are under $1 million — by a factor of ten. And it produces the lowest number in the table: $22,068 to $29,424.
That is the uncomfortable finding. The only rule on page one that explicitly includes a business this size gives an answer roughly one thirteenth of the largest. Everything above it in the range was measured on companies with a management layer, multiple crews, and an owner who is not on a mower.
So which number is right? It depends on the buyer's plans, not on your business
Two rules on that page are legitimately scoped to a small residential book, and they still disagree by 3.9 times:
- An individual buyer — someone buying themselves a job with an annuity attached, usually with SBA financing. They will run the crew, so they get the owner's $33,792 of labour as part of the deal. They buy on SDE. YourExitValue puts that buyer at 2.0x to 2.8x: $82,296 to $115,214.
- A company buyer — a regional consolidator, a strategic, a PE platform. They will not put a principal on your mower. They must hire your replacement, so what they are buying is EBITDA. At Sofer's 3x to 4x: $22,068 to $29,424.
Same business. Same season. Same client list. The price changes by $60,000 to $90,000 based on nothing but what the buyer intends to do with their own mornings.
This is the thing to internalise before you talk to anybody: on an owner-operated book you are not primarily selling a business, you are selling a job with a small annuity attached. The annuity is $7,356. The job is worth $33,792. Buyers who want the job pay for both. Buyers who do not, pay for one.
And this is why the roll-up headlines are not about you
Read the Elevation announcement again with that in mind. It is a commercial landscaping platform. So was Visterra. The trade coverage of 2026 roll-ups is almost uniformly about commercial maintenance contracts — HOA, property management, municipal — because those are the books that carry contracted revenue, crew depth, and enough EBITDA to clear an institutional buyer's minimum.
A platform buyer paying 5x to 7x EBITDA would offer this book $36,780 to $51,492, and in practice would not look at it at all, because $7,356 of EBITDA is below the threshold at which the diligence cost is worth paying. Strong valuations in the trade press are real. They are being paid for a different asset than the one most readers own.
If commercial work is where you want to end up, that is a route worth planning deliberately — we wrote up how commercial contracts actually get won separately. But it is a five-year repositioning, not a valuation tactic.
What actually moves your number
Three levers get discussed. Only one of them is available to a 60-client operator this season, and it is not the one anybody writes about.
1. Add clients to routes you already drive
A client added to an existing route contributes $537.60 a season — 32 visits at $16.80 of contribution each — and, if the stop genuinely fits the route without adding drive time or overhead, all of it drops to SDE.
At a 2.4x SDE median, every client on a route you already drive is worth $1,290 the day you sell. Add 32 of them and SDE rises to $58,351, which at the same 2.4x is $140,043 — up $41,288 from today's $98,755.
Now price a full multiple turn. Going from 2.4x to 3.4x on today's SDE is worth $41,148.
Thirty-two clients on your existing routes is worth the same as talking a buyer up an entire multiple turn — and it is the only one of the two you control. Nobody on page one runs this comparison, because nobody on page one gets paid when you densify a route.
2. Prove every dollar you made
MidStreet puts it well: "you reduce your sale price exponentially with every dollar you can't prove you made." The sentiment is right and the word is wrong — the relationship is linear, at whatever your multiple is, which is bad enough.
At 2.4x SDE, every $1,000 of revenue you cannot document costs $2,400 at closing. An owner taking $8,000 a season in undocumented cash is holding a $19,200 reduction in sale price.
Against that, the cash saves tax. At a combined income and self-employment rate around 30%, $8,000 saves roughly $2,400 a year. Divide: the break-even is eight years. Sell inside eight years and the cash was a losing trade; hold longer than that and it was not. That is the actual calculation, and it is more honest than either "always take cash" or "never take cash".
Two caveats worth more than the arithmetic. An SBA lender underwrites the tax returns, not your recollection, so undocumented revenue frequently costs you the buyer rather than the price. And nothing here is tax advice; the 30% is illustrative and yours is a question for your accountant.
3. Get off the mower — which you cannot afford yet
YourExitValue is specific: businesses where the owner runs the primary crew face "30% to 40% multiple discounts", and two or more foreman-led crews running documented routes support the higher bands. True, and almost universally presented as an action item.
Price it. Replacing the owner's 1,280 hours costs $33,792 against $7,356 of return — a $26,436 hole the business has no way to fund. To cover that hire out of contribution alone you need $33,792 / $16.80 = 2,011 more visits, which is 63 more clients.
A 60-client book has to reach roughly 123 clients before stepping off the crew pays for itself. You cannot buy your way into the foreman-led multiple band. You have to grow into it — which means lever 3 is lever 1, several seasons later.
What a buyer will ask you for
Whichever buyer turns up, the request list is the same, and it is the reason record-keeping is a valuation issue rather than an admin one:
- Three years of tax returns, and a profit and loss that reconciles to them
- The client list with start dates and what each one pays
- Which revenue is under a repeating agreement and which is one-off — this is the single biggest driver of the multiple, and it has to be evidence, not an assertion
- The route and schedule, so a buyer can see the work is organised rather than remembered
- Equipment list, age and condition; insurance; anything contracted that transfers
That third line is where most small operators lose money, and it is a records problem rather than a business problem. If your recurring work lives in a spreadsheet and your invoices live in a chequebook, you can say 100% of your revenue is contracted maintenance but you cannot show it — and an unprovable claim gets underwritten at zero.
Landscapey is a CRM, and it is worth being exact about which half of this it touches. It records recurring jobs with their billing model — flat monthly or per visit — so contracted work is a record rather than a memory; it holds the client list, the schedule and the routes; it tracks invoices, payments and expenses; and /app/financials produces a profit and loss by month, quarter, year to date or last year, plus an Export for accountant CSV. If you bill your recurring clients through it, the contracted-revenue share of your book is something you can print. How to set that billing up is a separate piece.
What it does not do, stated plainly: Landscapey has no valuation tool, no SDE or EBITDA calculation, no data room, no broker introductions, no churn or retention metric and no appraisal feature of any kind. None of those exist in the product and none is planned. It keeps the records a valuation is built from. It does not perform the valuation, and anyone selling should be paying an appraiser who works from the actual returns.
Frequently asked questions
What is a landscaping business worth in 2026?
For an owner-operated residential book, realistically 2.0x to 2.8x SDE from an individual buyer, or 3x to 4x EBITDA from a company buyer — which on the same business can be a two-to-five-fold difference in price. The published headline ranges of 8x to 12x EBITDA are real but are measured on companies with $500,000 or more of EBITDA.
What is the difference between SDE and EBITDA?
SDE includes the owner's own compensation; EBITDA does not. On a book where the owner works a crew seat, that single difference was $41,148 versus $7,356 — 5.6 times. The smaller the business, the wider the gap, because the owner's labour is a larger share of everything it earns.
Why do published multiples disagree so much?
Mostly scope. Each source measured real transactions in a size band, and the bands rarely overlap with an owner-operated book. Read the column headers before the numbers: if the smallest band in the table is ten times your revenue, the table is not describing you.
Do recurring maintenance contracts really raise the price?
Yes, and it is the most consistently reported driver on page one — Sofer puts contract-versus-project revenue at one to three turns of multiple. But it has to be provable. A verbal arrangement with a client who has renewed for nine years is worth far more when the renewals are documented than when they are remembered.
Will a private equity roll-up buy my residential book?
Almost certainly not. The 2026 platforms — Elevation in the west, Visterra in the east — are commercial maintenance vehicles buying established companies with crew infrastructure. At $7,356 of EBITDA, the diligence would cost more than the deal.
How much does taking cash off the books cost me?
At a 2.4x multiple, $2,400 of sale price per $1,000 of undocumented revenue. Against roughly 30% in tax saved, the break-even is about eight years to a sale — and if the buyer needs SBA financing, undocumented revenue can cost you the deal outright rather than just the price.
Sources and limits
- Every multiple quoted here is what that source publishes, read first-hand on 10 September 2026. None is a transaction this site observed.
- BizBuySell's valuation benchmarks page ranked fifth on this query and is the only genuine transaction dataset on page one. It returned HTTP 403 to our request on 10 September 2026, so none of its figures are used above. That is a real gap in this analysis and we would rather name it than quote a number we could not open.
- FirstPageSage's tables are labelled Q1 2025, not 2026.
- MidStreet's page carries a date of 15 February 2021. Its ranges may still be current; we cannot confirm that they are.
- The Trinity Hunt announcement is dated 21 May 2026 and is quoted only for what it says about the platform's commercial focus.
- The house book is one illustrative business, not a market average. The $24,900 of overhead and the $52.80 fully-loaded hourly rate are figures you have to bring for yourself; get the hourly rate wrong and every row above it is invalid.
- Nothing here is a valuation, tax or legal opinion. A defensible valuation is produced by an appraiser working from your actual returns.
The short version
Page one of this query will tell you your business is worth somewhere between $22,068 and $299,520, and every number in that range is honestly published. The reason is that almost none of it was measured on a business your size, and the one rule that was gives the lowest answer on the page.
The number you can actually change is not the multiple. It is the earnings, and on a 60-client book the cheapest earnings available are on the streets you already drive: $1,290 a client, and thirty-two of them is worth a whole multiple turn. Everything else — the foreman-led band, the commercial repositioning, the institutional buyer — is downstream of getting there first.
If you want the recurring revenue and the profit and loss on record while you do it, Landscapey is $19.99 a month with a 14-day trial. It will not tell you what your business is worth. It will let you prove it.