Selling an Accounting Practice: What CPA Firms Sell For and the Best Way to Sell Yours

The median US accounting practice sold for $425,000 over the five years to 2025, at 1.02 times annual gross fees or 2.04 times seller discretionary earnings. The upper quartile got 2.66x on the same kind of earnings and the lower quartile 1.61x. On a practice earning its owner $208,303 that spread is worth $218,718, slightly more than the practice pays you in a year, and nearly all of it is decided before a buyer is in the room.

Accounting is unusual among professional practices in that its rule of thumb is right. One times gross fees has been repeated in the profession for decades, and against five years of closed US transactions the median practice sold at 1.02x revenue. That accuracy is worth money: accounting practices close at 97 percent of asking, the tightest price discipline in financial services. Insurance agencies, whose owners price on an equivalent rule that overstates by a quarter, concede 8 percent. A realistic rule of thumb produces a realistic asking price and a short negotiation.

What the rule does not tell you is which buyer to sell to, and that decision moves more money than the multiple does.

How much do accounting practices sell for?

Accounting practices sell for 1.61x to 2.66x seller discretionary earnings, with a median of 2.04x, which works out to 0.92x to 1.17x annual gross fees with a median near 1.02x. The median sale price was $425,000 against a median asking price of $449,000, on median gross fees of $400,000 and median owner earnings of $208,303.

Those figures come from practices that actually closed, not from listings. The median practice spent 162 days on the market, so five to six months from listing to close before you count preparation. That is faster than an insurance agency at 186 days and a dental practice at 215. The full quartile distribution and the arithmetic behind it sit on our accounting firm valuation page.

One number is worth knowing because it tells you which of your own figures to trust. Multiply the median owner earnings of $208,303 by the median 2.04x multiple and you get $424,938, against an observed median sale price of $425,000. That is an error of $62. The gross fees route, $400,000 times 1.02, lands 4 percent away. Even in the one profession whose revenue rule of thumb is accurate, earnings still predict the price more precisely. Use one times gross to sanity-check a number; use the earnings multiple to produce one.

Is my practice really worth one times gross fees?

For a typical owner-operated practice, yes. The median closed sale was 1.02x annual gross fees and the middle half of practices sold between 0.92x and 1.17x. Where one times gross goes wrong is at the edges.

The rule breaks in both directions and for the same reason: it ignores who does the work. A compliance-heavy book that you personally prepare and review is worth less than one times gross, because the buyer is purchasing a job. A practice with recurring monthly work where staff own the client relationships can clear the upper quartile comfortably, because the buyer is purchasing revenue that arrives whether or not anyone shows up at your desk.

There is a second edge case that catches people out when they research this online. You will find a widely quoted figure drawn from more than 600 accounting transactions: a median of about 1.0x revenue or 2.75x SDE. Our closed data agrees on the first and says 2.04x on the second. Both are right. A practice at 1.0x revenue and 2.75x SDE has a 36 percent owner earnings margin, which describes a staffed firm. The practices in this dataset run closer to 50 percent, which describes an owner-operated one. Different cost structures, same price per dollar of fees. Whichever applies to you is decided by your own margin, not by which article you read.

The three routes out of an accounting practice

There are three realistic buyers and they are not variations of one deal. They price different numbers, on different timetables, and leave you in very different positions the day after closing.

The capacity buyer is the one most owners overlook and the one most likely to pay the upper quartile. A firm down the road that is turning away work has a reason to pay above the individual-buyer price, because they are not just buying your clients, they are buying the people who serve them. They also do not have to pay a second salary out of the practice, which as we will see is the constraint that caps everyone else.

Should I sell my accounting practice to private equity?

Only if you are big enough for a platform to take the call, and only if you are comfortable with the structure. Platform deals are quoted at 4x to 7x adjusted EBITDA but pay a meaningful part in rollover equity and earnout rather than cash at close.

The consolidation is real. Capstone Partners reported that financial acquirers made up 54.8 percent of accounting services M&A activity year to date in July 2026, with deal volume involving those buyers up 69.1 percent year over year. That is a genuine change in who owns accounting firms in the United States, and it is being written about in a way that leads practice owners to expect platform pricing on a practice that will never see a platform buyer.

Those buyers are reported engaging above roughly $2M to $3M of revenue. The median practice in the closed data bills $400,000. Between the two sits a wide band of firms that would be worth more on a platform multiple than any individual buyer will pay, to a buyer who will not return the call. If you are close to that threshold, the gap between selling at $1.8M of fees and at $3M is not one multiple. It is a different buyer pool, and it may be worth two more years of growth to reach it.

Read the structure carefully if you do get there. Normalizing partner compensation to a market salary is the first thing a platform does, and it shrinks the earnings the multiple applies to. Seven times a number that has just been cut is not always better than two times a number that has not.

Why the buyer's salary decides your price

This is the part almost nobody models before listing, and it explains most of what looks strange about accounting practice deals.

Nearly every owner-operated practice is bought with an SBA loan, and that loan has to be serviced out of practice earnings after the new owner has paid themselves. The buyer of an accounting practice is almost always credentialed, so the salary they must draw is high. On the median practice earning $208,303, at ten year amortization, 10.5 percent, a 10 percent equity injection and a 1.25x coverage requirement, a buyer paying themselves $100,000 can finance 2.85x. At $125,000, a normal salary for an experienced CPA, the ceiling falls to 2.20x. At $150,000 it falls to 1.54x, below the median sale multiple.

So the lender, not buyer enthusiasm, sets the ceiling on what an individual can pay you. That is why sellers carry notes, why so many deals pay out on collections retained over two to three years, and why the buyer who actually pays the upper quartile is usually a firm rather than a person. It is also, quietly, why the one times gross fees rule has survived: one times fees on the median practice works out to 1.92x owner earnings, comfortably inside what a bank will fund. Two times gross would not be financeable at all.

Decide in advance how much you are willing to carry and on what terms. The seller note is where the real price is set, and arguing about the headline multiple while ignoring the terms is how owners end up with a good number and a bad deal. Our guide to seller financing in a business sale covers what to ask for.

What to fix in the two years before you list

The $218,718 between the quartiles is won in the two years before the listing, not in the negotiation. Nothing about the fee base changes across that range. What changes is who does the work and whether the fees recur.

1. Move client relationships onto named staff. The highest-value item and the slowest, which is why it goes first. A practice where you review and sign everything prices at the bottom of the range regardless of how the numbers look. Assign a manager to each significant client, introduce them properly, and let them be the person the client calls.
2. Split recurring fees from project fees in your reporting. Buyers pay differently for monthly bookkeeping, annual compliance and one-off consulting. If your practice management system blends them, a buyer assumes the least favorable mix. Do it a full year before listing so there is a clean comparative.
3. Reprice the underpriced clients now. An unrepriced book is discounted twice, once for the low fees and again for the risk that raising them costs the client. Do the increases yourself, absorb whatever attrition follows, and list a practice whose fees have already been tested.
4. Publish realization and retention. Fees billed against fees collected, client counts retained year over year for three years, revenue per client. Most sellers assert these and cannot support them, and an unsupported number gets treated as the worst plausible one.
5. Get the knowledge out of your head. The single biggest transition risk is that the answer to every unusual client question lives with the person who is leaving. Staff who stay need to find the engagement history, the workpapers and the reasoning behind last year's position without walking into your office, which means it has to sit somewhere searchable across every system the firm uses rather than in a filing habit only you understand. Buyers notice this quickly, because it is the difference between a handover and a hostage situation.

How long does it take to sell an accounting practice?

The median practice sold on the open market spent 162 days listed, so plan on five to six months from listing to close, plus preparation in front of that.

Time on market has stretched. It ran 124 days in 2021 and 169 in 2025, up 36 percent, while the sale to ask ratio never left the 0.95 to 0.99 band across the whole period. Practices are taking a month and a half longer to sell without sellers conceding any more on price. That is a thin buyer pool rather than a weak market: the hard part is finding somebody with the credential and the financing, not agreeing what the practice is worth once you find them.

Plan the timing around your season. Many owners deliberately close right after busy season so the buyer inherits a full cycle, and the transition period afterward, where you introduce clients and stay available, commonly runs one to three years and is usually tied to retention payments.

What is my accounting practice worth right now?

Start with your owner earnings, not your fees. Add back your own compensation, personal expenses running through the practice, one-off items and any owner perks, then apply 1.61x at the low end and 2.66x at the high end. Where you land inside that depends on how much of the work leaves with you. Sanity-check the answer against one times your annual gross fees; if the two are far apart, your margin is telling you something about which kind of practice you own.

Run your numbers through the estimator on our accounting firm valuation page to see where you sit against the closed transactions, then read how to increase business value before selling for the longer preparation playbook. If you value client practices as well as your own, business valuation software for accountants compares what the practitioner tools actually cost.