The short answer: most accounting practices trade in a band around one times annual revenue. Published analyses from brokers and M&A advisors generally place typical firms between roughly 0.8x and 1.3x gross revenue, and across roughly 1,500 practices listed on our own marketplace with both figures published, the median asking price is about 1.1x revenue.

That is the answer you came for, and it is honest as far as it goes. It is also incomplete in a way that costs sellers real money.

Here is the moment behind this search. An owner who has spent twenty or thirty years building a practice finally lets the question surface: what is all of this actually worth? Maybe retirement is getting close. Maybe a buyer called out of nowhere. Maybe you just want to know what the years added up to.

Then you start reading, and every page gives you a different multiple, cites a private database you cannot check, and ends with a sales call.

This article takes a different route. Every range below is attributed to a named, linked source you can read yourself. Where the sources disagree, we show the disagreement instead of averaging it away. And because Dream Firms operates a live marketplace of accounting practices for sale, we can show you something no private deal file can: what real sellers are asking, right now, in the open market.

One question. Three numbers. No mystery. The market band, your position inside it, and the terms translation. That is the whole method, and by the end of this page you can run all three on your own firm.

One note on where this article sits in our library. This page answers the worth question. The full selling process, from decision to closing day, lives in our complete guide to selling your accounting firm. And if you want a range for your specific firm in a few minutes instead of an afternoon of reading, the free firm valuation exists for exactly that.

The Honest Ranges, All Sources Named

Here is the summary table first, because you should not have to scroll 4,000 words to get the numbers. Each row names who published the range, and each source is linked so you can check it.

Every external range above is that source’s own published figure, from its own deal file or appraisal work. None of them is an audited industry statistic, and they do not fully agree with each other. The next section explains why.

Notice what the table does not contain: a single number. Anyone who hands you one number for your practice without examining your practice is guessing, whatever their letterhead says.

Notice also that the ranges overlap around a familiar center of gravity. The old benchmark of one times gross did not come from nowhere. It is a real pattern in real deals. The mistake is treating the center of a distribution as a law of nature.

If a deeper dive into how those published multiples break down by firm profile is what you are after, that analysis deserves its own article and gets one in this library. This page stays on the question you actually typed: what your practice is worth, and what moves that number.

Why the Published Numbers Disagree

Line the sources up and a pattern jumps out. The appraisers report lower numbers than the brokers.

Peak Business Valuation, an appraisal shop, puts revenue multiples at 0.71x to 1.09x. Poe Group Advisors, a brokerage that sells practices for a living, reports well-structured firms commonly at 1.1x to 1.3x. Those two ranges barely touch.

Neither one is lying. They are looking at different pools of firms.

An appraiser’s book includes firms valued for divorces, partner disputes, estate planning, and internal buyouts, many of which were never groomed for sale at all. A broker’s public commentary naturally centers on the marketed, sale-ready practices they represent. Sale-ready firms are, by definition, the better-prepared end of the distribution.

There is a second reason for skepticism, and it applies to every range in the table: almost every published multiple comes from a private deal file nobody outside that firm can inspect. One advisory cites its analysis of 600+ transactions. A brokerage cites decades of closings. An appraiser cites its own engagements. All of them may be perfectly sincere. None of them can be checked.

This is also why the smartest sellers treat every published range, including the ones on this page, as calibration rather than gospel. The band tells you the neighborhood. It cannot tell you the address.

What it can do, honestly used, is protect you from the two classic errors: pricing your life’s work off one optimistic anecdote from a conference hallway, or letting a buyer talk you into a discount because everyone knows practices only fetch some lowball figure. Named sources beat folklore in both directions.

What a Live Marketplace Actually Shows

Here is the part of this article nobody else in the search results can write.

Dream Firms operates a live marketplace of accounting, tax, and bookkeeping practices for sale across the country. Real listings, real asking prices, browsable by anyone, free. So instead of pointing at a private deal file, we computed the numbers directly from our own listing database and can show you the open market.

Source: computed from the Dream Firms Marketplace listing database, aggregate figures only. Browse the listings and check the market yourself.

Three honest observations about that data, because integrity is the whole point of this page.

First: these are asking prices, not closed prices. An asking price is where a negotiation opens, not where it ends. Nobody, including us, publishes a complete, auditable record of every closed accounting-practice sale in America. Asking data is the most observable market signal that exists, and you should still read it as the seller’s opening position.

Second: the tightness of that band is itself the finding. Half of all listed practices ask within a tenth of a multiple either side of 1.1x. Sellers and their advisors, pricing thousands of real firms with real money at stake, keep landing on the same neighborhood the published sources describe. The rule of thumb is not folklore. It is the market’s visible center.

Third: the edges of the band are where the money is. The gap between a 0.9x ask and a 1.3x ask on a $600,000 practice is $240,000. Every section after this one is about which end of that gap your firm lands on, and what you can do about it.

And unlike every other source in the summary table, you do not have to take our word for any of this. The market is on the Dream Firms Marketplace of accounting practices for sale. Filter to practices that look like yours and read what they ask.

The Three Yardsticks, in Plain English

Valuation articles love to parade six or seven methods. For a real accounting practice changing hands, three yardsticks do nearly all the work, and each one answers the worth question from a different chair.

Yardstick one: the revenue multiple, or what the book is worth

Multiply annual gross revenue by a factor, most often somewhere around 1x. A $500,000 practice at 1.0x is a $500,000 conversation.

Why it survives: it is simple, everyone in the profession speaks it, and for small practices the thing being bought really is the client list and the fees it generates. It is the language of the classic retiring-CPA-sells-across-town deal.

Its blind spot is profitability. Two firms billing identical revenue can take home wildly different profit, and a gross multiple by itself cannot see the difference. That blind spot is exactly where the other two yardsticks come in.

Yardstick two: SDE, or what the owner actually takes home

Seller’s discretionary earnings is the practice’s profit plus everything the owner personally takes out: salary, payroll taxes, benefits, and personal expenses run through the business. It answers the buyer’s real question: if I own this, what does it pay me?

A quick illustration, invented for clarity: a solo practice shows $60,000 of profit on paper, but the owner also drew a $110,000 salary and ran $10,000 of personal items through the firm. SDE is $180,000. At a 2.5x SDE multiple, that is a $450,000 conversation, regardless of what the gross revenue line says.

This is why a brokerage that specializes in accounting and tax practice sales points out something most owners never hear: almost every other small business in North America is priced on a cash-flow multiple, not a revenue multiple. Accounting Practice Sales notes that small businesses overall trade around 2.4 times discretionary cash flow, with service businesses closer to 1.5 to 2 times. Accounting practices are the odd ones out for being priced on gross at all.

Yardstick three: EBITDA, or what the machine earns without you

EBITDA measures the profit of the business as a machine: earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, after paying market-rate salaries for all the work performed, including yours. It is the yardstick of buyers who will not be sitting in your chair, which is why private equity underwrites on it.

The scale difference matters. CT Acquisitions describes 4x to 7x normalized EBITDA as the standard private-equity range, and New Clients, Inc. reports that PE demand has pushed EBITDA multiples for recurring-revenue books from around 3x toward 5x, with many settling near 4x. What that wave of buyers means for ordinary firms gets its own treatment in our guide to private equity in accounting.

Here is the part that makes the three yardsticks click together instead of competing. They describe the same economics from different angles. Picture a $2,400,000 firm with a real management team producing 20 percent margins after fairly paying everyone: $480,000 of EBITDA. At 5x EBITDA, the price is $2,400,000. Exactly 1.0x revenue. Same firm, same price, two yardsticks.

Pick the yardstick that matches how a buyer would actually step into your firm. If you are solo and the buyer becomes you, SDE thinking fits even when the conversation happens in revenue-multiple language. If your firm runs without you, congratulations: you have earned the EBITDA conversation, and it usually pays better.

Pin Down the Inputs Before You Multiply

Here is a failure mode straight from the deal table, described candidly by Accounting Practice Sales: two parties agree on one times gross, shake hands, and then discover at the signing table that they meant different things by the word gross. Deals die there.

Accountants, of all people, should never lose a deal to a definition. Before any multiple means anything, four inputs have to be pinned down.

Which revenue, exactly?

Billings or collections? A practice that bills $650,000 and collects $600,000 is a different purchase depending on which number anchors the price. Cash basis is common in these deals, but the two sides have to say so out loud.

Which period? The last calendar year, the trailing twelve months, and a multi-year average can be three different numbers, especially for a growing or shrinking book. A shrinking practice looks best on a three-year average. A growing one looks best on the trailing twelve. Guess which one each side will propose.

What is actually included in the sale?

The thing being bought in a practice sale is mostly goodwill: the client relationships, files, and the fees they generate, usually alongside a covenant not to compete. Hard assets are a footnote. Used office furniture rarely moves a price, and some buyers do not even want it.

Three items need explicit treatment because they are money in motion: accounts receivable usually stays with the seller, work in progress is often prorated between the parties, and existing debt generally remains the seller’s to clear. If the deal includes any of those instead, the effective price just changed without the multiple moving.

What really counts in SDE?

Seller’s discretionary earnings is profit plus the owner’s full economic take. In practice that means adding back the owner’s salary and payroll taxes, owner benefits like health insurance and retirement contributions, clearly personal expenses run through the firm, and genuine one-time costs that will not recur for a buyer.

The integrity line matters here. Real add-backs are documented, not asserted. A buyer’s lender will test every one of them, and an SDE figure inflated with wishful add-backs does not raise the price. It stalls the deal in diligence and marks everything else you claimed as suspect.

What makes EBITDA “normalized”?

For the EBITDA yardstick, the key adjustment runs the other direction: subtract the market cost of replacing your own labor. If a buyer must hire a $150,000 manager to do what you did for a $60,000 salary, the practice’s real earning power is $90,000 lower than the books suggest. Sophisticated buyers make that adjustment automatically. Sellers who make it first control the conversation instead of losing it.

None of this is exotic. It is the same discipline you apply to a client’s books every week, aimed at your own firm for once. The sellers who do it before listing negotiate from definitions. Everyone else negotiates from vibes.

The Dream Firms Three-Number Method

Everything above gives you vocabulary. Here is the method that turns it into your answer. We use it because the question what is my practice worth genuinely has three parts, and every expensive mistake we see comes from answering only one of them.

Band. Position. Terms. Run all three and you have an answer you can defend to a buyer, a lender, or your own family. Skip one and you have a guess wearing a suit.

The Eight Dials That Move Your Number

Buyers are not mysterious. Every one of them, from the CPA across town to a private-equity platform, is pricing the same fear: that the revenue they buy walks out the door after you do. Each dial below either calms that fear or feeds it.

A few of these deserve a sentence of translation, because the industry loves to state them abstractly.

Recurring revenue is dial number one for a reason. A buyer can model a monthly engagement surviving the handoff. A once-a-year client is a once-a-year decision to leave. Practices heavy in monthly work are the ones New Clients, Inc. reports drawing the strongest buyer demand, and it matches what we watch on our own marketplace daily.

Owner dependency is the silent killer. It hides while you run the firm, because being personally loved by your clients feels like an asset. To a buyer it is the single largest risk on the page: they are buying relationships that may be loyal to a person who is leaving.

Location still matters, with a modern twist. Poe Group Advisors estimates that firms in desirable, economically active areas can command 10 to 20 percent more than otherwise identical practices nearby, while noting that cloud-based practices increasingly draw buyers from anywhere. A clean virtual practice has quietly become its own kind of good location.

These eight dials are a summary on purpose. The full deep dive, what each driver looks like in diligence and how to fix it, is its own article: what makes an accounting firm sellable. Read it next if the dials above made you wince.

Price vs. Proceeds: The Terms Translation

Now the section that should exist on every valuation page and almost never does. The multiple tells you the headline. The terms tell you the money.

Brokers know this cold. An old saying in practice sales runs along the lines of: name your price and I will name my terms, and I will win. Here is what it means in real dollars.

Take one hypothetical practice, invented for this walkthrough: $600,000 of annual revenue, priced at 1.1x, a $660,000 headline price. Watch the same headline get paid three different ways.

Same practice. Same 1.1x multiple on the front page of every version. Three different amounts of money, on three different clocks, with three different risk profiles.

This is not a corner case. CT Acquisitions, citing AICPA member surveys, describes the classic small-practice sale as 20 to 40 percent cash at close with a multi-year payout tied to client retention. Deals with a contingent tail are the norm at this scale, not the exception.

The takeaway for the worth question: never compare two offers by their headline multiples. Compare what lands in your account, when it lands, and what has to go right for it to land at all.

Two $600K Firms, $180,000 Apart

The dials and the band are abstractions until you watch them price two actual firms. Both firms below are invented for this illustration, and both bill exactly $600,000 a year. That is where the resemblance ends.

Firm one: the machine

Three quarters of revenue comes from monthly bookkeeping, payroll, and advisory engagements that renew automatically. No client is more than 6 percent of the fee base. Two experienced staff handle most client contact, and both plan to stay. Cloud stack, documented processes, fees reviewed within the last two years, clean books.

Run the dials: recurring revenue high, concentration low, owner dependency low, continuity strong, mix healthy, seasonality mild, fees current, fully transferable. This firm can ask near the top of the band, say 1.2x, a $720,000 conversation, and can defend it line by line in diligence. It also qualifies cleanly for bank financing, which means more Deal A money at closing.

Firm two: the tax-season sprint

Seventy percent of revenue lands between January and April as individual returns. The largest client is 18 percent of the book. Every meaningful relationship runs through the owner personally, staff is one seasonal preparer, and the fee schedule was last raised many years ago.

Run the dials: nearly all of them point down. A buyer prices this firm knowing the book must be personally re-won, the biggest client is a walking risk, and the revenue arrives in one exhausting sprint. This firm trades near the bottom of the band, say 0.9x, a $540,000 conversation, and the buyer will likely insist that more of the price ride on retention, so the certain money is smaller still.

Same revenue. $180,000 apart on headline price alone, before the terms translation widens the gap further. When someone asks what an accounting practice is worth, this pair is the honest answer: it depends which of these two firms you built, and most firms sit somewhere between them.

The encouraging part: firm two is not stuck. Almost every dial that priced it down can be moved, and the section on preparation below is about exactly that.

The Buyer’s Chair: Why the Band Exists at All

Sellers get better prices when they understand the person across the table. So sit in the buyer’s chair for a moment, because the band is not a convention. It is arithmetic.

Most individual buyers of small practices borrow most of the price. That means your asking price has to survive the buyer’s loan payment.

Walk it once, with invented round numbers. A buyer purchases the $660,000 practice from earlier, borrowing $600,000 on a ten-year acquisition loan. At the interest rates typical of small acquisition lending, the payment runs somewhere near $8,000 a month, roughly $95,000 a year, for a decade.

Now give the practice $190,000 of SDE. After the loan payment, about $95,000 remains for the buyer to live on, absorb a lost client, fund a slow month, and sleep at night. Tight, but it works. Now imagine the seller had priced the same practice at 1.6x instead. The loan payment swells past what the practice’s cash flow can carry, no lender approves it, and the deal dies before the negotiation starts.

That is the whole secret of the band. The upper edge is not buyer stinginess. It is the point where the practice’s own cash flow stops being able to pay for itself. Firms with stronger cash flow support higher multiples, which is exactly why the profitability dials move your number.

It also explains why the same firm can be worth different amounts to different buyers. A neighboring firm that already has staff and systems can absorb your book at low marginal cost and pay accordingly. A first-time buyer needs your practice to fund their entire life and a loan. A PE platform prices your EBITDA inside a much larger machine. None of them is wrong. They are running different arithmetic on the same firm.

If you want the full view from that chair, we wrote the buyer’s playbook too: how to buy an accounting practice, and the due diligence checklist buyers use to verify everything a seller claims. Selling well means knowing exactly what the other side will check.

Moving Your Number Before You Sell

Here is the most valuable sentence on this page for anyone not selling this quarter: the multiple your firm earns is decided in the two years before you list it, not in the negotiation.

Buyers pay for reduced risk. Every dial you move before the sale converts directly into price, terms, or both. The 12-to-24-month sequence we walk owners through, in order of impact:

• 1

  Convert annual clients to monthly engagements.

  Every client you move from a once-a-year return to a monthly bookkeeping, payroll, or advisory engagement moves revenue from the risky pile to the valuable pile. This single dial does more for your multiple than any other.

• 2

  Fix legacy underpricing now, not during diligence.

  A buyer who sees below-market fees prices in the pain of raising them. Capture that value yourself, a year or more before listing, so the higher fees show up in your trailing revenue with retention proven.

• 3

  Push relationships from you to your team.

  Every client whose first call goes to a staff member instead of you is a client a buyer believes will stay. If the team does not exist yet, building it is the project.

• 4

  Dilute your largest clients by growing around them.

  Concentration is fixed by addition, not subtraction. A focused growth push that adds smaller recurring clients shrinks the giant’s share of your book without firing anyone.

• 5

  Document the firm out of your head.

  Processes, passwords, workpaper conventions, client quirks. A firm that runs from documentation transfers. A firm that runs from memory discounts.

Each of those items is a summary of work covered deeply elsewhere in this library: the full driver-by-driver preparation guide is what makes an accounting firm sellable, and the process of actually running the sale is how to sell your accounting firm.

One more path deserves naming: if your ideal buyer is already inside your firm, a partner or a senior manager, the preparation list is the same but the transaction is different. That route is succession planning, and it has its own complete guide.

The Mistakes That Cost Sellers Real Money

We watch both sides of this market every day. The same handful of errors keeps repeating, and every one of them is avoidable.

Pricing from one anecdote. A colleague sold at 1.3x, therefore your firm is worth 1.3x. That colleague’s firm had its own dials. Anchor to the band and the data, then adjust for your position honestly.

Comparing offers by headline multiple. A 1.2x offer that is 50 percent contingent on retention can be worth meaningfully less than a 1.0x offer that is nearly all cash at close. Run the terms translation on every offer before ranking them.

Confusing revenue with value. Growing revenue by adding underpriced, low-margin work the year before a sale can actually hurt the price, because buyers read margins, not just the top line.

Waiting until the decision to sell to start preparing. The dials take 12 to 24 months to move. Owners who begin at the listing date sell the firm they have, not the firm they could have had.

Trusting a single unattributed range. If a page will not tell you whose deals its numbers come from, the numbers are marketing. You now know to ask.

Going it entirely alone. Selling a practice involves valuation, negotiation, financing, tax structure, and a client transition, all at once, usually for the first and only time in the seller’s life. The other side often does this professionally. Level the table.

When You Need a Professional Valuation, and When You Don’t

An honest guide should also tell you when its own free tools are not enough. There are two different jobs here, and they need two different instruments.

When a market range is the right tool

If the question is what could I sell for, the market answers it. The band, your dial positions, asking data from comparable listings, and eventually real offers from real buyers. That is what this article, the free firm valuation, and the marketplace are built for, and for most owners planning a sale, it is genuinely sufficient to start.

The final word in any sale is not an appraisal anyway. It is a signed offer. No document tells you what your firm is worth as accurately as a qualified buyer competing for it.

When you need the formal document

Some situations require a defensible written valuation from a credentialed appraiser rather than a market estimate: a partner buying in or out against a buy-sell agreement, divorce or estate matters where a court or the IRS is the audience, gifting ownership to family or staff as part of a succession plan, and disputes where the number will be challenged professionally.

Those engagements exist for a reason: the audience is adversarial, and the document has to survive cross-examination, not just open a negotiation. If your worth question is really a succession question, start with our succession planning guide, because the internal-transition math has its own moving parts.

The practical sequence for a planned sale: run the free range first, move the dials that need moving, and bring in the formal machinery only when a specific transaction demands it. Paying for a full appraisal before you have done the preparation work usually buys you a precise measurement of a firm you are about to improve.

Find Your Number

You came here with one question. Here is the three-step version of getting it answered for your actual firm, free, today.

Then get your own range. The free firm valuation takes a few minutes and gives you a real starting range built from your firm’s own drivers, not a stranger’s average. Every competitor page in this search result gates that answer behind a sales call. Ours is a quiz, and it is free.

And when it turns real, whether that is this year or three dials from now, our Dream Exit Matchmaking Program works both sides of the table with you: positioning the firm, finding the buyer, and translating the terms so the number you sign is the number you understand.

Your practice is probably the largest asset you own. It deserves better than a rule of thumb.

Frequently Asked Questions