What Margins Look Like
The Margins
A buyer staring at a CIM has a prior question before any specific number: is 18% even normal in this trade, or is the add-back schedule doing the work? These are the IRS's own aggregates of every Schedule C in the country, and Schedule C net income is earnings before any owner salary, which makes net income over receipts the closest public analog to an SDE margin that exists.
| Legal services | 43.8% | 49.5% | 10.4% | 316,370 | – |
| Accounting services (CPA and other) | 40.7% | 53.8% | 9.6% | 361,556 | – |
| Computer systems design services | 37.0% | 51.2% | 12.1% | 318,183 | The line holds solo consultants alongside managed-service firms; an MSP with contracts and a bench runs lower margins on higher revenue quality. |
| Insurance agencies and brokerages | 36.1% | 46.1% | 7.5% | 313,543 | – |
| Real estate agents, brokers, and property managers | 35.0% | 48.6% | 3.7% | 1,046,471 | Dominated by commission agents with near-zero cost structures; do not read this as a property-management company's margin. |
| Offices of dentists | 27.1% | 32.3% | 25.6% | 56,157 | – |
| Personal and laundry services | 24.4% | 42.7% | 6.4% | 2,957,905 | Mostly salons, barbers, and beauty services by count; a coin-operated laundromat's economics sit inside this line but are not typical of it. |
| All industries (the national baseline) | 18.3% | 31.4% | 8.5% | 31,125,909 | – |
| Specialty trade contractors | 15.7% | 21.2% | 11.1% | 2,521,516 | One line covers all the trades; HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing sit inside it together. |
| Home health care services | 12.7% | 40.6% | 17.6% | 478,730 | Dominated by solo caregivers; an agency with a real roster runs a heavier payroll line than this aggregate shows. |
| Truck transportation | 10.1% | 18.0% | 5.2% | 837,211 | Owner-operators with one truck dominate the count; fleet economics differ. |
| Auto repair and maintenance | 8.0% | 18.7% | 10.5% | 465,852 | – |
| Restaurants and drinking places | 3.4% | 13.6% | 18.8% | 653,372 | The widest gap between the two margins on the page: restaurant losses are real and common, and the all-filers figure carries them. |
How to Read These
Two margins ship for every line on purpose. The all-filers figure includes every side gig and every money-loser in the country, which drags it below what a real business earns. The profitable-only figure excludes the failures, which lifts it above the typical. A buyable business usually lives between the two, and the width of the gap is itself information: restaurants show the widest spread on the page because restaurant losses are real and common.
These are sole-proprietorship aggregates, not comparables for your target's LLC. Use them for the sanity check they are good at: a listing claiming twice the profitable-only margin of its industry is making a claim diligence has to prove, usually about add-backs. Industries whose tax treatment makes even this bracket misleading, like real-estate lessors whose depreciation turns the aggregate negative, are omitted rather than published soft.
IRS SOI, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorship Returns, Table 1 (TY2023), tax year 2023, from the SOI sole-proprietorship tables. The earnings a specific deal claims are built line by line in the Business Valuation Calculator, and what payroll should run per employee is in What Labor Costs.