A painting business in Australia typically sells for 1.5x to 3.5x EBITDA, with goodwill ranging from under $100,000 for a sole trader with two subcontractors and a van to $1.5 million or more for a commercial painting firm with a stable crew, repeat government and industrial clients, and a business that functions when the owner is on holiday. The number that matters most isn’t your turnover — it’s whether you’ve built a business or a job with a good spray gun.
What a Painting Business Is Actually Worth
The method most buyers use to value a painting business is an EBITDA multiple. EBITDA is your earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation — essentially your underlying operating profit after stripping out the accounting noise. You normalise that figure by adding back owner’s salary above a market rate, one-off expenses, and any personal costs run through the business (see our guide on EBITDA add-backs when selling a business).
For Australian painting businesses, the current multiple range looks roughly like this:
- Sole trader or micro business (1–2 staff, mostly residential): 1x–1.75x EBITDA
- Small residential painting business (3–6 painters, mix of residential and light commercial): 1.75x–2.5x EBITDA
- Established commercial painting firm (6+ painters, repeat government, strata, or industrial clients): 2.5x–3.5x EBITDA
A rule of thumb worth quoting: a commercial painting business with $300K+ in normalised EBITDA and proven recurring clients typically achieves a 2.5x to 3.5x multiple in an arm’s-length sale in Australia.
For industry-specific EBITDA multiples across trades and other sectors, painting sits roughly in line with other residential trade businesses — below plumbing or electrical (which carry licensing scarcity value) but comparable to landscaping and cleaning when the commercial mix is similar.
Residential vs Commercial — the Split That Changes Everything
This is the variable most painting business owners underestimate when thinking about what their business is worth.
Residential painting is competitive, price-sensitive, and highly dependent on word-of-mouth and review platforms. The work is real and the margins can be solid, but it’s hard to lock in; every job is essentially a new sale. When a buyer looks at a residential painting business, they’re asking: if I buy this, can I replicate what the current owner does to get the phone ringing? Often the honest answer is “maybe, eventually” — and they’ll price accordingly.
Commercial painting is different. Strata plans, hospitals, industrial facilities, government bodies, property management groups — these clients book repeat work, often annually, and they care less about being the cheapest quote and more about showing up reliably and doing clean work. That predictability is exactly what buyers pay a premium for.
I spoke to a broker last year about a deal in Queensland — a painting business with $2.4 million in revenue, split roughly 60% commercial and 40% residential. The commercial work included two strata management groups and a regional hospital on a maintenance agreement. The business sold for 3.1x EBITDA. A comparable business in the same city doing 80% residential with similar turnover had sold the year before for 1.9x. Same industry, same revenue, very different outcome. The strata contracts were the difference.
The Owner-Operator Problem
If you are the person who quotes every job, manages every client relationship, and knows where every can of paint is stored — you have an owner-dependency problem. That’s not a personal failing; it describes most painting businesses under $1 million in revenue in Australia. But it is the single biggest discount applied to your valuation.
A buyer considering your business is asking one quiet question: “If I buy this, does the work come with the business, or does it come with the person?” If the answer is the person, they’ll either walk away or offer you much less. Because they’re not just buying a business; they’re buying a retention problem.
The test is simple. If you stopped quoting for three months — genuinely stepped back — would revenue hold? Would your commercial clients still call the office, or would they call your mobile? If the answer is the mobile, that’s key person risk (and it’s worth reading about how buyers specifically price for this: key person risk when selling a business).
What Drives a Higher Multiple
Buyers of painting businesses in Australia are paying for predictable, transferable cash flow. Here’s what creates it:
Recurring commercial clients with documented agreements. A maintenance painting schedule with a property manager — where the agreement is with the company entity, not with you personally — is worth real money. If the relationship is a handshake because “Karen at LJ Hooker knows me,” that’s not transferable. Get the agreement on paper before you sell.
A licensed crew who will stay. Trade licensing creates real barriers in painting (Qld, SA, and WA require a contractor’s licence for most commercial work). If your business has three licensed painters on staff who are likely to remain post-sale, that de-risks the transition enormously. If it’s you plus two subcontractors with their own ABNs and no intention of staying, a buyer is starting from scratch on staffing. That’s priced in.
Three years of clean financials. Most buyers want to see three years of financials with consistent or growing EBITDA, no unexplained jumps or dips, and ideally an accountant-prepared profit and loss. A business that ran all its utes and tools through the accounts for tax minimisation looks great at tax time and terrible at due diligence (which is, as one seller discovered, not the ideal sequence of events).
Documented systems. Quoting templates, job scheduling software, quality control checklists, onboarding processes for new painters — these don’t have to be sophisticated. They just need to exist and to be used. Systems signal to a buyer that the business can operate without your brain storing all the processes.
Preparing to Sell Your Painting Business
If you’re thinking about selling in the next one to three years, the preparation you do now will move your multiple more than any single factor at the time of sale.
Start by building or documenting recurring commercial relationships. Even if you don’t have formal contracts today, a letter of engagement or a recurring service agreement with your top three commercial clients adds significant value and is often surprisingly easy to get signed — clients like predictability too.
Then work on reducing the jobs that only you can do. Can a site supervisor quote residential work? Can a senior painter manage a small commercial site without you? Every system you build, every responsibility you delegate, adds dollars to your eventual sale price.
Our guides on how to increase business value before selling and preparing your business for sale cover this in more depth, but the core principle applies to any trade business: buyers buy businesses, not people. Build a business.
For painting businesses specifically, the process for selling a trade business in Australia is worth reading before you start any formal process.
Getting a Painting Business Valuation
If you want a more precise number — not a range, but an actual assessed value based on your specific financials, client list, and team — the place to start is with an experienced corporate advisor or business broker who understands trade businesses.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation using your last year’s EBITDA and the multiples above will give you a rough guide. But the real number emerges when you normalise your earnings properly, stress-test your client concentration, and look at the business the way a buyer will — which is where having someone in your corner who’s been through this before makes the difference.
If you want a starting point, use our business valuation calculator to get a preliminary read. For a more detailed conversation about what your painting business is actually worth, get in touch with the team at Miro Capital.