Australia guides

Is there free data on Australian small business sale multiples?

No, not in the form most people want. There is no free, reliable, publicly maintained table of what Australian small businesses actually sell for, because private sale prices are not recorded on any public register and no government collection captures them. What is free and genuinely useful is data about the inputs rather than the outcome: ATO small business benchmarks give cost and expense ratios by industry and turnover band, ABS collections give business counts, entry and exit rates and industry-level profitability, and ASIC and ABN Lookup let you verify who you are dealing with. Used together those sources will tell you whether your earnings figure is credible, which is the half of the valuation you can actually control.

By the bizflip team · Published 2 September 2026 · Facts checked 2 September 2026 · Sources listed below

The question behind this one is usually simple: someone has been told their business is worth a certain multiple, and they want to check it against something independent and free. The honest answer is that the check they are looking for does not exist in Australia. It is worth understanding why, because the reason also tells you which parts of a valuation you can verify and which parts are always going to be a judgement.

Why sale prices are not published here

Australian small business sales are private contracts between private parties. Unlike a house sale, there is no title register that records the consideration, and no regulator collects it. The main national business collections each capture something else entirely:

So the only routes to real Australian transaction evidence are disclosed corporate acquisitions, which are almost always much larger and structured differently to an owner-operated business, and proprietary broker databases, which are paid, self-reported, unaudited and usually thin once you narrow to a single industry at a single size. That is the whole reason the tables circulating online are adviser estimates rather than measured market data — and why they so often mix earnings bases, quoting a corporate EBITDA multiple next to an owner-operator figure as if the two were comparable.

What free data does exist, and what each one is good for

ATO small business benchmarks

This is the most directly useful free source for a seller. The ATO publishes performance benchmarks drawn from tax returns — the current set uses 2023–24 returns and covers around a hundred industries, listed alphabetically from air conditioning services through to a long tail of trades and retail categories. For each industry you get expense-to-turnover ranges split into two or three annual turnover bands, so you can compare a business of your size against businesses of the same size. The benchmarks are also published as a dataset on data.gov.au if you want the underlying ratios rather than the web pages.

What it gives you: a check on whether your reported cost of sales, labour, rent or motor vehicle expenses are normal for your trade. What it does not give you: a multiple, a valuation, or anything about price. And the coverage is uneven — the benchmark program is built around industries that supply goods and services directly to consumers, so professional services categories such as accounting practices are simply absent.

ABS Australian Industry

The ABS publishes earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation and operating profit before tax by industry division each year. For 2024–25 it recorded, for example, construction EBITDA of $67.1 billion and retail trade EBITDA of $53.1 billion. This is division-level aggregate data, so it will never describe your business, but it is a real, free, methodologically documented read on which industries are getting more or less profitable — which is the direction of travel a buyer will be thinking about.

ABS Counts of Australian Businesses

Useful for context on market depth and churn. In 2025–26 the entry rate was 16.9 per cent and the exit rate 13.8 per cent. If you are trying to work out whether there are plausible buyers for a business like yours, business counts by industry and by employment size are a better starting point than a multiple table.

ATO taxation statistics

The ATO's most comprehensive statistical publication covers individuals, companies, super funds, partnerships, trusts and industry benchmarks, and the company detailed tables split data by entity size as well as taxable income range. It is the closest thing to a free national picture of business profitability by industry, and the material is published under terms that allow you to copy and adapt it.

ASIC registers and ABN Lookup

These are due-diligence tools rather than valuation tools, but they are free and they matter. ABN Lookup gives public ABN information with no login: whether an ABN is active or cancelled, the business type, GST status, the public details on the Australian Business Register and historical trading names where available. ASIC's registers cover companies and other organisations, the business names register, professional registers of who is licensed to do what, and lists of banned and disqualified people and organisations. If you are buying, run these before you spend money on anything else. Our guide on due diligence before buying a business covers where they fit in the process.

Asking prices on marketplaces

Current listings are free to browse and they do tell you something: what sellers in your category believe they can ask, and how long comparable businesses have been sitting there. Treat asking prices as an upper bound on the market rather than evidence of it. The gap between an asking price and a settled price is exactly the information nobody publishes. You can see what Australian businesses are currently listed at here.

How to triangulate without a multiple table

The honest bottom line

A free, reliable table of Australian small business sale multiples would be a genuinely useful thing, and its absence is not an oversight anyone is about to fix — it follows directly from private sales being private. Any page that hands you a confident Australian multiple for your industry is either reproducing an adviser's estimate, or importing a figure from a market where sale data is collected differently. Both are worth knowing about; neither is a substitute for building your own earnings figure carefully. Our guide to valuation multiples by industry sets out the published sector ranges along with what they rest on, and how much a business is worth walks through the method.

bizflip's free market appraisal is ungated and publishes its methodology rather than presenting a number from a black box. It is an indicative starting point, not a valuation — for anything a lender, a court or a counterparty will rely on, engage an accountant, a business broker or a qualified valuation practitioner.

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.