BizBuySell Valuation Alternative: Value Your Business With Comparable Sales

Here is the honest version: BizBuySell does not publish a standalone price for the Valuation Report on the report page itself. The form asks for your industry and location and then routes you into checkout or a signup, which is why the question keeps showing up in search. What the company does state clearly is that a valuation report is included with a paid listing when you sell a business through the marketplace, and its sell-a-business marketing has historically framed that inclusion as a bundled value of roughly $180. Treat any specific figure you see quoted elsewhere as unconfirmed until you see it at checkout.

Two adjacent prices are published. The free BizWorth-powered quick estimate costs nothing. BizBuySell Edge, the buyer-side membership with deal alerts and market data, is advertised from about $20 a month, though it is a research subscription rather than a valuation product. The quarterly Insight Report is free to read.

For comparison, Businessappraisal publishes its price on the page: from $29 a month, month to month, no free tier and no sales call. If you want the wider price landscape, our business valuation software comparison lays out what every category costs, and what a business valuation costs covers the professional end.

Comparable sales are the strongest single input in small-business valuation, and we show them too. The trouble starts when they are the only input. Two restaurants with identical revenue in the same metro can be worth wildly different amounts because one has a transferable lease, a manager who runs the floor and clean books, while the other is entirely the owner. A comp screen cannot see that. It sees the SIC-style category, the geography and the top-line numbers.

The second problem is the input itself. A benchmark is only as good as the earnings figure you feed it, and most owners feed it the wrong one. Tax-return net income understates real earnings when personal expenses run through the business, and overstates them when the owner is not drawing a market salary. Getting to a defensible SDE multiple means normalizing first. If you skip that step, a comps engine will confidently multiply a bad number.

Third, listing data and sold data are not the same thing, and BizBuySell says so itself. Multiples derived from asking prices run high because sellers price in negotiating room and tend to overvalue their own businesses. Sold comps are the useful set. Our guide to what multiple your business sells for walks through the gap between the two.

These are complements more often than substitutes. One tells you what the market is paying. The other tells you what your specific numbers support.

The practical distinction is what each one can be wrong about. A comps benchmark is wrong when your business is unusual for its category: unusually high margins, a concentrated customer base, a below-market lease, an owner who is also the top salesperson. A methods-based estimate is wrong when your inputs are wrong or when the local market has moved faster than the multiples you assumed. Running both narrows the space where you can be badly wrong in either direction, which is the actual goal before you set an asking price or respond to an offer.

A sensible sequence: normalize your earnings, run a three-method estimate on your own numbers, then pull BizBuySell comps and the quarterly Insight data to check the range against the live market. If the two disagree by a lot, the disagreement itself is the finding. Our comparable sales benchmarks page explains how we use comp data inside the estimate. If the free BizWorth estimate is what you actually used, our BizWorth comparison covers that product directly.

The quarterly BizBuySell Insight Report is free and worth reading before you price anything. It tracks roughly 50,000 businesses for sale and recently sold across more than 70 US markets and 65 industries, with closed transactions reported voluntarily by brokers nationwide. That voluntary reporting is a real methodological caveat, and BizBuySell discloses it.

The Q2 2026 edition reported 2,117 closed transactions, down 10% year over year, with total enterprise value of $1.8 billion. Median sale price held at $349,250, the average cash flow multiple rose 2% to 2.7 and the average revenue multiple stayed near 0.7. Median cash flow came in at $155,921 on median revenue of $692,087. Nearly eight in ten buyers said they expected to use SBA financing.

Segment detail is where it earns its keep. Service businesses made up 40% of Q2 transactions with a median price holding at $350,000 and median days on market improving 9% to 155. Restaurant median sale prices fell 12% to $205,000 while the average cash flow multiple rose, which tells you buyers repriced the category rather than abandoned it. That is the kind of context that turns a raw multiple into a decision, and it lines up with our breakdown of business sale multiples by industry.

One statistic in that report explains why pages like this exist: only 14% of owners with an exit plan have completed a professional valuation, half have a rough guess and 35% admit they have no idea what the business is worth. Market data tells you the weather. It does not tell you what your business is worth, and a benchmark against 500 loosely similar companies is not the same as running your own numbers through three methods and seeing where they disagree.