Australia guides

How do I get a free business valuation in Australia?

You can get a free indicative figure for an Australian business in three practical ways: run your own numbers through a free online calculator, ask a business broker for an obligation-free market appraisal, or check your earnings against the ATO's small business benchmarks and apply published sector ranges yourself. None of these is a business valuation in the professional-standards sense. That is a paid engagement with an accountant or a registered business valuer, and it is what a bank, a court, the ATO or a departing partner will expect. bizflip publishes this page and runs one of the free calculators, so weigh that when reading it.

By the bizflip team · Published 3 September 2026 · Facts checked 3 September 2026 · Sources listed below

There are three practical ways to get a free indicative figure for an Australian business: a free online calculator, an obligation-free broker appraisal, or your own working from the ATO's benchmarks and published sector ranges. Each gives a different quality of answer, and none is a business valuation in the professional-standards sense. This page sets out what each route involves and when a paid valuation stops being optional.

What 'free' gets you, and what it does not

In Australia the word valuation has a technical meaning for accountants. APES 225 Valuation Services, the standard issued by the Accounting Professional and Ethical Standards Board, binds members of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, CPA Australia and the Institute of Public Accountants whenever they provide an estimate of value. It separates a full valuation engagement from a calculation engagement, where the member and the client agree in advance on the approaches, methods and procedures to be used, and which generally does not include all of the procedures a full valuation requires. Every free route on this page sits on the calculation side of that line or outside the standard altogether.

The ATO's own guide to market valuation for tax purposes makes a related point: for tax, the acceptability of a valuation usually depends on the process undertaken rather than who conducted it, but a report by a suitably qualified professional following industry standards is considered more reliable. The ATO also notes there is no formal admissions board in Australia for business valuers. What matters is whether the working is shown and who has to accept the number.

Route 1: a free online calculator

bizflip publishes this page and runs one of the free calculators described here, so treat this section as a disclosure as much as a recommendation. bizflip's free appraisal tool is free, asks for no email address, prices the business on proprietor's earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (PEBITDA), anchors on your newest complete financial year and names the year it used, and calls its output a market appraisal rather than a valuation.

It is not the only free, ungated option. Value My Business Australia, published by Spark Equity, describes itself as a free tool with no email gate that applies EBITDA and SDE multiples across more than twenty industries, with adjustments for management structure, customer concentration and recurring revenue. Scale Suite's estimator is free with no signup, takes revenue, expenses and an industry, prints its multiplier ranges on the page and lets you type in your own. Not every tool that ranks for the word free is free and ungated: Business Value Calculator charges A$99 for its report, and bizval's express version is complimentary but asks for your name and email before it returns a result. Whichever you use, check that it names the earnings basis, works from a complete Australian financial year of 1 July to 30 June, and shows the multiple rather than only the result. Our guide to how much a business is worth explains why the earnings basis matters as much as the multiple.

Route 2: an obligation-free broker appraisal

Many Australian business brokers will appraise a business at no charge. Lloyds Corporate Brokers states that a qualified broker will provide an obligation-free pre-sale appraisal so you know roughly what price and timeframe to expect; BCI Business Brokers offers a twenty-question online appraisal returning a sale-readiness report at no charge and no obligation. Stockbridge Business Brokers describes the difference plainly: an appraisal is a practical, market-based estimate usually prepared by a broker, while a valuation is a formal, detailed assessment prepared by a qualified business valuer for legal or tax purposes.

A broker appraisal has one thing no online calculator, ours included, can offer. Members of the Australian Institute of Business Brokers can consult Bizstats, which the institute describes as Australia's largest database of completed business sales, exclusive to its members. The Bizstats site reports more than A$2 billion of transaction value and over 350 contributing brokers, valuers and advisers; access is by request, not public. Settled prices are exactly what every free calculator lacks, so a broker who has checked comparable completed sales is working from better evidence than any formula.

The trade-off is the broker's incentive. An appraisal is usually the opening step towards a listing, and a figure pitched to win your business is not the same as a figure pitched to sell it. The AIBB's code of conduct requires members to act with integrity and objectivity, to disclose actual or potential conflicts of interest, and to be transparent about their qualifications. Ask which comparable sales the number rests on and on what earnings basis. Business Queensland adds two practical points: budget for broker and legal fees if you go on to engage one, and expect that a buyer may want their own independent valuation. Our guides on what a business broker does and whether you need one cover the rest. bizflip's broker directory is not yet open: the live page shows simulated sample profiles while the directory feed is wired up, so it cannot be used to find a broker today.

Route 3: do it yourself with free government data

business.gov.au sets out the standard methods without charge: market comparison with similar businesses, return on investment (net annual profit divided by selling price, times 100), asset value, cost to build from scratch, and projected future profit. Business Queensland groups the same ideas into market-based, income-based and asset-based approaches. For a trading business going to market, the earnings-multiple version of the market approach is the one buyers actually use.

The free input check is the ATO's small business benchmarks, built from 2023–24 tax returns, which let you compare cost-of-sales and expense ratios against similar businesses in the same industry and turnover band. Two limits matter: the benchmarks are currently restricted to businesses that supply goods and services directly to consumers, and the calculation excludes turnover under A$30,000 or over A$15 million. They produce no multiple and no value; they tell you whether the profit figure you are about to multiply is plausible, which is the half of a valuation you can control.

For the multiple itself, no free Australian dataset of settled prices exists, for reasons set out in our guide to free data on Australian sale multiples. What you can do is take the published adviser ranges in our multiples by industry guide, apply the low and high ends to your normalised earnings, and treat the spread as your working range. For a cross-check on how industries rank, Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern publishes free EV-to-EBITDA multiples by industry each January, including a combined Australia, New Zealand and Canada dataset. Those are listed-company multiples, well above what an owner-operated business fetches, but they come from a source with no listing to win.

Route 4: free or low-cost government business advisers

business.gov.au's Adviser Finder lists advisory services run by local, state, territory and federal government and by government-supported organisations, available online, by phone or face to face, and business.gov.au says many of the advisers in it offer free or low-cost advice. Their listed topics include business planning, taxation and record keeping, employing people, grants and work health and safety, but not valuation, so do not expect a number. They are useful for the step before the number: getting records reconciled into a form a calculator, a broker or a buyer can work with.

When free is not enough

Some purposes need a valuation by a qualified practitioner, and no free route substitutes for it. The AIBB says its Registered Business Valuers are engaged for sales and acquisitions, bank financing, partnership dissolutions, family law, stamp duty and capital gains tax calculations, compulsory acquisitions and expert-witness work; entry to the RBV program requires at least five years of full-time business broking. Accountants in the professional bodies work under APES 225 for the same engagements. Business Queensland notes that professionals valuing a business will generally ask for five years of financial statements and visit the premises.

For anything that reaches the ATO, its guidance on instructing a valuer is specific: set out the scope and purpose, provide accurate information, acknowledge the valuer's independence, and state that the fee does not depend on the outcome. If you engage and properly instruct a professional valuer, you generally will not be liable for penalties if the valuation later proves deficient, and that protection is much of what you are paying for. Tax on the sale is a separate question: the small business CGT concessions can change what you keep, and eligibility turns on your own circumstances, so ask your accountant before you price the business, not after you accept an offer.

A practical order to do it in

bizflip's free market appraisal is one of the calculator options above. It is ungated, names the earnings basis and financial year it used, and calls its output an appraisal. It is a starting point, not a substitute for a practitioner's valuation where one is required.

Sources

Every load-bearing claim in this guide, and where it comes from:

Ready for your own number? The valuation calculator is free and ungated, and its methodology is public.