An occupational therapy practice in Australia typically sells for 2x to 5x its normalised annual profit (EBITDA), with the multiple driven primarily by how dependent the practice is on the owner-therapist, the stability of its NDIS and private revenue, and whether there’s a management team in place. A solo OT in Sydney doing $300,000 in billings and a multi-therapist group in Melbourne with $2 million in managed revenue are both OT practices — but they sell for completely different multiples, and for completely different reasons.
Here’s what actually drives the number.
What Is Your OT Practice Actually Worth?
The starting point for any OT practice valuation in Australia is normalised EBITDA — your practice’s profit before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation, with the owner’s personal expenses and above-market salary removed. This is the number buyers apply a multiple to.
A useful rule of thumb: solo OT practices sell at 1.5x–2.5x normalised EBITDA; group practices with two or more associate therapists sell at 3x–5x. Above $1 million in normalised EBITDA, corporate acquirers and private equity become interested, and the multiple can stretch to 5x–7x if the practice is well-structured.
The gap between those ranges is almost entirely explained by one thing: how much of the practice’s revenue depends on you personally.
How NDIS Revenue Affects Your Valuation
Occupational therapy is one of the most heavily NDIS-funded allied health disciplines in Australia. Therapeutic supports — functional capacity assessments, assistive technology reports, therapy plans — are fundable under multiple NDIS support categories, and most OT practices now have NDIS participants as a significant proportion of their caseload.
For valuation purposes, NDIS revenue is recurring but plan-dependent. A participant’s plan gets reviewed annually, and while most are renewed, the revenue isn’t guaranteed in the way that, say, a long-term commercial contract is. Buyers factor this in. A practice with 70% of its revenue from NDIS participants will be valued on the assumption that some churn exists; a practice with strong NDIS coordinator relationships and low historical plan-churn can argue against a discount.
Where NDIS revenue genuinely adds value is in volume. A practice that handles complex NDIS caseloads at scale — with trained therapists, good documentation systems, and reliable coordinator referral networks — is demonstrably less dependent on the owner than one that relies on personal relationships. That’s the model buyers pay for.
Private-pay OT income — school contracts, WorkCover, workers’ compensation, Medicare — is often viewed as complementary and, in some cases, actually preferred by buyers for its simplicity. A mixed revenue base reduces concentration risk and tends to support a more stable valuation.
Key Person Risk: The Biggest Drag on Your Multiple
Most Australian OT practice owners underestimate how much their personal involvement affects the sale price. If you deliver 60% or more of the practice’s billable hours, a buyer faces a specific problem: they’re not buying a business, they’re buying a job for themselves — or worse, a client list that could evaporate when you leave.
The key person risk discount is real and it’s significant. Buyers model what the practice looks like without you in it. If the answer is “substantially smaller,” they’ll pay accordingly. This isn’t punitive; it’s a realistic assessment of what they’re purchasing.
The practical fix is to reduce your own clinical load before you sell. Hire associate therapists. Move yourself into a supervision or practice management role. Build referral relationships that belong to the practice, not to you personally. Twelve to eighteen months of demonstrated transition is worth more to a buyer than any amount of verbal reassurance. (I’ve watched owners spend years trying to negotiate a higher price rather than spending twelve months making their practice genuinely less dependent on them. The second approach is faster and more effective.)
What Buyers Look For in an OT Practice
Corporate allied health groups — Plena Healthcare, Ability Action Australia, and similar operators — are the most active buyers of OT practices in Australia above a certain scale. They’re systematic acquirers running roll-up strategies, which means they know what they want and they move efficiently once they’ve decided to proceed.
What these buyers look for, in order of priority:
- A stable and growing revenue base with no single referrer accounting for more than 20–25% of income
- Associate therapists who are employed or contracted and will stay post-sale
- Clean NDIS registration (particularly NDIS registration with provider status under relevant support categories)
- Documented clinical systems and operational processes
- A practice principal willing to stay for a transition period — typically 6 to 12 months
Independent OT buyers (experienced practitioners wanting to own rather than build) are a different audience. They move more slowly, tend to have less capital, and often want vendor finance or earn-out arrangements. These deals can work, but they require more structuring and a longer process.
Factors That Push Your Multiple Up or Down
Your base multiple is shaped by the practice’s size and sector. From there, these factors move it in either direction.
Multiples increase when:
- Associate therapists generate 70%+ of clinical revenue
- The practice has NDIS provider registration and an established participant base
- Revenue has grown consistently over 3+ years (even modest growth matters)
- The owner has already stepped back from clinical work into a management role
- Multiple referral sources are documented and diversified
Multiples decrease when:
- The owner-therapist is the primary clinician (the most common scenario)
- A single referral source — one school, one WorkCover insurer, one NDIS coordinator — generates more than 30% of revenue
- NDIS registration is incomplete or has compliance issues
- Lease terms are short or uncertain (key for practices with a physical location)
- Financials are messy, with significant personal expenses run through the business
The normalised EBITDA calculation matters a great deal here. If you’ve been running personal expenses through the practice — car, phone, travel, professional memberships — those should be added back before applying any multiple. The same applies to above-market salary you’ve paid yourself if you’d hire a replacement therapist for less. This process is covered in detail in the EBITDA add-backs guide, and it’s worth doing carefully: a legitimately higher EBITDA number, multiplied by 4x, is real money.
OT Practice Valuations vs Other Allied Health
Compared to other allied health disciplines, OT practices sit in the mid-range for valuations. Physiotherapy practices — with their high volume of private health insurance claims and well-established referral networks from GPs and specialists — tend to command similar multiples. Psychology practices, by contrast, often face a steeper key person discount because the therapeutic relationship is deeply personal. Dental practices typically command higher multiples, reflecting their equipment assets and the higher barriers to competition.
The NDIS business valuation framework is also relevant here, particularly for practices where the majority of revenue comes from NDIS therapeutic supports rather than private-pay or Medicare-funded services. The valuation methodology differs somewhat between a disability services business and an allied health practice, and understanding which lens applies to your business affects the multiple.
Preparing Your OT Practice for Sale
The most impactful preparation steps, ranked by the effect they have on value:
1. Reduce clinical dependency. Hire associate therapists and systematically transition your caseload to them over 12–18 months. Document the transition. Show buyers the financials before and after, demonstrating the practice works without you at the centre.
2. Tidy the financials. Three years of clean profit and loss statements, with personal expenses clearly identified and removed, makes a buyer’s due diligence faster and gives you a clean EBITDA number to negotiate from.
3. Lock in referral relationships. Formal agreements with referral sources — NDIS coordinators, schools, WorkCover case managers — are worth more than informal understandings. Buyers want documented evidence that referrals will continue.
4. Review your NDIS registration. If your practice has NDIS registration, make sure it’s current and compliant. Any NDIS compliance issues slow a sale significantly; buyers either apply a steep discount or walk away.
5. Get your lease sorted. If you operate from a fixed location, buyers want a lease with at least 2–3 years remaining, or an option to renew. A practice facing an imminent lease expiry is a harder sell.
A proper business exit plan — started 12–18 months before you intend to sell — turns most of these into manageable preparation tasks rather than last-minute problems. The sellers who get the best prices for their OT practices are almost always the ones who started preparing before they thought they needed to.
What a Valuation Actually Looks Like
To put some numbers on it: an OT group practice in Perth with four associate therapists, $800,000 in normalised EBITDA, 60% private pay and 40% NDIS, and a practice principal who has reduced their own clinical load to two days a week might achieve a 4x multiple — a sale price in the range of $3.2 million. The same practice with the principal doing 80% of billable hours might achieve 2.5x — $2 million. The difference is $1.2 million for roughly the same revenue.
That gap is the case for taking the preparation steps seriously.
If you’d like a more precise indication of what your OT practice is worth, start with our valuation calculator. Or if you’re further along and want to talk through what a sale process would look like for your specific situation, reach out to us at Miro Capital — we work with allied health practice owners across Australia.