Childcare Centers Valuation Calculator
Cited Band
1.9x to 4x SDE (sold quartiles)
Source: BizBuySell day care and child care benchmarks (sold listings, 2021 to 2025 quartiles)
Implied Range
$950,000 to $2,000,000
A band, not a price. Answer the drivers below to place this business inside it.
Testing a real deal at a price in this range? Underwrite it end to end with the midpoint and the earnings carried over.
Where This One Sits
How much revenue recurs?
How concentrated are the customers?
What happens when the owner leaves for a month?
How clean are the books?
Do the licenses, leases and contracts transfer?
Nothing answered yet, so there is no reading. This does not default to the middle: a midpoint shown for a blank form would say your business is average when you have not told it anything.
The drivers that move the number in this trade specifically are in the full Childcare Centers guide. The picker holds every trade whose cited band is a multiple of one earnings figure; the 13 priced on cap rates, collections, revenue or two bases at once are named with their reasons rather than left out silently. Every cited band, with its drivers and source, is listed below on this page.
What Moves the Multiple
Reported EBITDA bands run near 3.0x to 4.4x with single-location independents framed at 2x to 4x; sustained enrollment at or above 85% of staffed capacity is the federal benchmark, where 80% is a loss and not a healthy line, and licensed capacity (space and ratio rules) caps the upside above it.
Band cited from BizBuySell day care and child care benchmarks (sold listings, 2021 to 2025 quartiles). What moves a business inside it, what licensing applies, and what diligence to run are in the Childcare Centers buy guide.
How Often These Loans Go Bad
Childcare Centers
1.28%
3 of 234 seasoned loans
Every Industry
4.20%
Pooled charge-off rate
The share of SBA acquisition loans in this industry that were ultimately written off, computed from the loan-level file the SBA publishes. A price inside the band is not the same as a business worth buying: the rate by industry and franchise brand is the other half of the question.
Embed This Band
The card below is free to embed with the link intact; it always shows this page's current cited band.
