What your practice is worth

Almost every conversation about what a UK advice firm is worth begins with a multiple of recurring income. It is a blunt measure and it has survived because it is the one thing a buyer can verify quickly. Ongoing adviser charges are the most predictable income in the business, they are documented, and they mostly carry over to a new owner. So the market prices what it can check, and everything else about your firm arrives as an adjustment to that starting number rather than as a line of its own.

The starting number has moved. Gunner & Co reported market average multiples of around 3.5 times recurring income across 2023 and 2024, rising to 4.2 times in the first half of 2025. Averages are useful for orientation and useless as a quote. Two firms with identical recurring income can be priced a long way apart, and the gap between them is not luck. It is the answer to a simple buyer question: how much of this income will still be here in five years, and how much work will it take to keep it?

That question is why client age carries so much weight. A book concentrated in clients already drawing down is a book with a known end date, and a buyer prices the run-off it can see. The same logic applies to income concentrated in a handful of large clients, to income that depends on one adviser's personal relationships, to advice processes that have drifted apart over the years, and to gaps in your file records. None of these change the income you banked last year. All of them change what a buyer believes about next year, and belief is what sets the multiple within the range.

Above a certain size the conversation changes shape. Larger firms with genuine operating profit tend to be priced on a multiple of EBITDA rather than on recurring income alone, because at that scale the buyer is acquiring a business rather than a client bank. Where the switch happens is not fixed, and plenty of deals are argued on both measures at once, with the seller quoting one and the buyer quoting the other.

If you would rather have a number to argue with than a theory, the valuation calculator uses your answers to give an indicative sale range and explain the factors affecting it. The articles below take each part of the pricing in turn: what a multiple actually measures, what raises and lowers yours, why client age matters so much, and when profit takes over from income.