UK businesses are widely said to sell at half the US multiple. They do not. That figure compares the smallest UK deal anyone publishes against the largest US benchmark available, and calls the difference geography. Match the size and the gap is 0.7 of a turn at the bottom of the market and runs the other way in the middle. Here is the honest arithmetic — and the advantage that survives it, which is sourcing, not price.
A US searcher entering the market in 2026 faces a crowded home pipeline, and has probably been told the UK is half price. It is not, and the version of that claim this article used to make was wrong in a specific and instructive way: it set the smallest UK deal anyone publishes a multiple for against the largest US benchmark available, and attributed the whole difference to the Atlantic. Corrected for size, the UK is modestly cheaper at the very bottom of the market and modestly dearer in the middle. What is not modest, and needs no multiple to defend, is the sourcing gap — a complete, free, identity-level register of every company in the country, against a US market where owner-operated businesses are invisible until somebody hires a broker. That is the trade. This article makes it with numbers, including the ones that cut against it.
You will read, in a lot of places including earlier versions of this article, that UK businesses sell at roughly half the American multiple. The usual construction sets a UK small-company multiple of 3.3x against Stanford's search-fund median of 7.0x and reports the difference: 53% cheaper.
The arithmetic is right. The comparison is not, for three reasons that all push the same way.
The two figures describe businesses of wildly different sizes. 3.3x is what a business earning £200,000 of EBITDA fetches. Stanford's median acquisition in 2024-25 had a median EBITDA of $2.5M and a median price of $16.0M. That is not the same business in two countries. It is a corner shop set against a company an order of magnitude larger, with the entire small-firm discount quietly relabelled as geography.
They are not even the same measure. US deals below $2M of purchase price are conventionally quoted on Seller's Discretionary Earnings, which adds the owner's own pay back into profit. SDE is structurally the bigger number, so its multiple is structurally the smaller one. Comparing a UK EBITDA multiple to a US SDE multiple flatters the UK before anybody has looked at a business.
And they count different buyers. Stanford's study covers core search funds in the United States and Canada — funds "led by a first-time search entrepreneur and funded in the search phase by multiple investors". Self-funded searchers and SBA-financed buyers are excluded outright. If you are an SBA buyer, the benchmark you are being sold the discount against does not contain a single deal like yours.
Here is every published figure we can stand behind, with the size each was struck at.
| Market | Deal size | Multiple |
|---|---|---|
| UK & Ireland | £200,000 EBITDA | 3.3x |
| UK & Ireland | mid-market average | 5.4x |
| UK & Ireland | £10,000,000 EBITDA | 8.4x |
| United States | $2M–$5M enterprise value | 4.0x |
| United States | $5M–$50M enterprise value | 4.5x |
| US search funds | $16.0M median price | 6.2x |
Every multiple in that table is struck on EBITDA. That is the whole reason it is short.
UK figures are Dealsuite's UK&I M&A Monitor of February 2026, covering deals closed in the second half of 2025 — 435 advisory firms contacted, 106 responding. US small and lower-mid figures are the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse for Q1 2026, from around 300 brokers and M&A advisers. US search-fund figures are Stanford GSB's 2026 Search Fund Study, Case E-967, covering 862 core funds with data to 31 December 2025.
Three rows of the US survey are missing from that table on purpose: Under $500K at 2.0x, $500K–$1M at 2.8x, $1M–$2M at 3.3x. Those are the SDE bands, and putting them in an EBITDA column would manufacture exactly the false bargain this section is about.
Two rungs of that ladder can be compared without cheating, and they point in opposite directions.
At the bottom, the UK is cheaper — by 0.7 of a turn. 3.3x at £200,000 of EBITDA against 4.0x for US deals at $2M–$5M of enterprise value. That is about 18%, and it is generous to the UK, because the American band describes a substantially larger business than the British one.
In the middle, the UK is dearer — by about 20%. The UK&I average across the whole mid-market is 5.4x. US deals at $5M–$50M of enterprise value clear at 4.5x. Run the original comparison in the other direction and it produces a British premium, which is a fair indication of how much work the choice of rung was doing.
At search-fund size, nobody has published the number. Stanford's median target earned $2.5M. Dealsuite prices £200,000 and £10,000,000 and nothing in between, and declines to price below £200,000 at all — its stated reason is that normalised EBITDA is too unstable in very small firms. So the UK multiple at the size a search fund actually buys is bracketed between 3.3x and 8.4x, and that is all anyone can honestly say. We are not going to interpolate it. A curve fitted between two points is not a survey result, and inventing one here would repeat the original error in a more sophisticated font.
Take a UK B2B services business with £750,000 of EBITDA, a 15-year client base, a sole owner aged 64. Sterling at 1.35 makes that $1.01M of earnings.
That is the number the American comparison has to use. The previous version of this article did not: it applied Stanford's 7.0x to the seven hundred and fifty thousand as though the pounds were dollars, and reported a 13% discount that was an artefact of the currency slip rather than a finding about either market.
Done properly, and staying inside the one US band quoted on EBITDA at a comparable size, that business prices at 4.0x — $4.05M, which lands squarely inside the $2M–$5M enterprise-value range the band describes. The UK business at 3.3x, the small-company rate, is £2.48M, or about $3.34M.
The dollar buyer saves about $710,000 on a $4.05M deal. Real money, worth having, and roughly 18% — not half.
Sterling is not a second discount. Earlier versions of this article added "another 10–15%" for the exchange rate. That is not how it works. Converting dollars at 1.35 buys the pounds the deal costs; it does not make the business cheaper, and the same rate applies to every pound of working capital, every UK salary and every pound of eventual sale proceeds. A weak pound is a real gain only if you have a view that it will strengthen before you exit — which is a currency bet, not an acquisition thesis, and it can as easily run against you.
Note also what happens to the financing. A smaller multiple is a smaller cheque, but UK acquisition debt at this size is thinner and dearer than SBA 7(a) — Part 5 covers the UK lenders now moving into that gap. The entry discount is not free money; some of it is handed back in the capital structure.
The most useful fact in this whole comparison is not about Britain.
Stanford's median search-fund entry multiple peaked at 7.3x in 2020-21. It has fallen two cohorts running since — 7.0x in 2022-23, then 6.2x in 2024-25. That is 1.1 turns off the peak, about 15%.
So to whatever extent a transatlantic gap is closing, it is closing because American prices came down, not because British ones went up. A searcher who read the 7.0x figure in a 2024 write-up and has been budgeting against it since is working from a number the market has moved away from twice.
It is worth being precise about what the 3.3x reflects, because it is a real phenomenon — just not a national one.
Below about £10M of enterprise value the UK buyer pool thins sharply. UK private equity is paid on deployment, not deal count; a £3M ticket does not move a £500M fund. That is true in the US too, which is why the American small-deal bands sit at 4.0x and 4.5x rather than anywhere near the search-fund median.
UK business brokers complete only around 20% of mandates, and that figure flatters the small end because it includes mid-cap deals where success rates are higher. Most viable small sellers never reach an open market at all.
UK trade buyers are slower and more sceptical than US peers — a function of post-2008 caution, post-Brexit uncertainty and a domestic equity culture that has never been as acquisitive.
The result is thousands of viable sellers with no qualified buyer. That is a genuine market failure and it is genuinely exploitable. It is just not what "the UK is half price" means, and a searcher who arrives expecting the latter will misprice their first three offers.
The single biggest reason to consider the UK is one most US searchers don't appreciate until they've actually run searches in both markets. Every active UK limited company files at least the following with the public register, free of charge:
Full director details — name, month and year of birth, appointment date, current and former directorships. Annual accounts — balance sheet at minimum for small companies, full statutory accounts for medium and larger entities. Confirmation statement — listing all persons with significant control (PSCs), shareholdings and voting rights. Charges register — every secured loan, every floating charge, every debenture. Filing history — late filings, methodology changes, restatements, every dissolution attempt.
All of it is machine-readable through the bulk data API. The complete dataset of 3.7 million active companies is downloadable as a single file. Director-level data goes back decades. Accounts data filed in iXBRL format is fully parseable.
There is no equivalent in the US. Delaware, the most popular US incorporation state, does not publish director names. Most US states require essentially nothing beyond a registered agent. Owner-operated businesses are functionally invisible until they hire a broker or list on a platform. US searchers spend the bulk of their search-phase budget paying for proprietary databases, broker relationships and outbound prospecting — much of it duplicating what Companies House gives away free.
Stanford's 2026 study reports that searchers in the 2024-25 cohort raised a median of $550,000 per principal, from a median of 13 investors, and then searched for a median of 21 months. A meaningful share of that budget pays for data access, list-building, broker outreach and CRM tooling — work that Companies House performs for the UK market at zero marginal cost. A US searcher with a UK thesis can redirect that budget to relocation, legal structuring and travel. The dollar value of the data subsidy is hard to pin down precisely, but the directional saving is significant: tens of thousands of dollars on data alone, plus weeks of compressed timeline.
For context on US deal-sourcing economics, the average US searcher contacts more than 3,000 companies to make one acquisition. We broke down the full funnel — outreach to LOI to close — in our search fund deal sourcing analysis. The UK pipeline density flips the funnel ratio at the top, because more pre-qualified targets are visible from day one.
We analysed the entire active UK company register to map where the search-fund opportunity actually sits.
| Population segment | Count |
|---|---|
| Active UK companies with director and financial data | 3,655,270 |
| Single-director companies | 2,113,320 |
| Companies with average director age 60+ | 841,122 |
| Single-director companies, director 60+ | 458,271 |
| Single-director companies, director 70+ | 119,404 |
| Sole director, 15+ years tenure | 296,938 |
| Sole director 60+, £50k+ total assets, no internal successor | 172,982 |
| PURSUE-grade — strong business + strong exit signals (the addressable pipeline) | 11,068 |
The single-director figure deserves attention. McKinsey's Great Ownership Transfer report describes US succession failure as a behavioural problem — owners who don't plan ahead. In the UK, it's structural. Nearly two-thirds of companies have no internal successor because there's nobody else in the building with legal authority. When that single director ages out, the only options are sell or dissolve.
Companies House recorded 726,735 dissolutions in financial year 2025 — up 9.6% on the prior year, the highest figure on record. Average dissolved-company age: 4.5 years. The vast majority were viable businesses that simply had nobody to take over. The pipeline of forced succession events is intensifying, not slowing.
For a US-based searcher, this matters specifically because the pre-approach signal is fully visible. Tighten the filter to sole directors over 60 with at least £50k in total assets and no internal successor: 172,982 companies, £244.5 billion in balance-sheet assets. None listed for sale. None with a broker. None that any other US searcher is currently looking at.
The most defensible single number we publish is this: 11,068 UK companies are PURSUE-grade — a strong business meeting strong exit signals.
PURSUE on the ExitRadar model means the intersection of two lenses: a business that clears the quality gate (reasonable financial health — positive net assets, sustained filings, no insolvency flags) AND shows strong exit-timing signals (director age, single-director risk, sole-officer history), in a sector with active acquirer demand.
This is the genuinely addressable pipeline. Established, asset-backed, owner-operated businesses with visible succession pressure and no buyer in sight. Almost none have a broker. Most have never had an unsolicited acquisition approach. A US-based searcher can filter this dataset by sector, region, score band and director age in minutes.
The 11,068-company PURSUE pipeline isn't evenly distributed. Four sectors concentrate the strongest combination of fragmentation, succession pressure and pipeline density.
A note on what this section does not do. It gives UK multiples where a survey publishes them, and it does not pair them with American sector figures. Earlier versions did, and those pairings were the same error as the headline in miniature: unsourced US ranges, on unstated deal sizes, set against UK ones to imply a country-level discount. No public dataset prices UK and US businesses sector by sector at matched size, so we are not going to imply one exists.
Electrical contracting, mechanical services, plumbing and heating, civil engineering, demolition and groundworks. Median UK multiples for these trades sit at 3–5.5x EBITDA — around and a little above the 3.3x small-company floor, which is what you would expect of businesses this size.
Why the pipeline is deepest here: UK specialised construction is intensely fragmented and owner-operated. Its owners do not in fact skew older than the national average — 20.8% of construction companies have an average director age of 60 or over, against 24% across the register — but the sector is so large that it still holds the biggest PURSUE pipeline of any we track. The work itself is non-cyclical at the small end (residential and commercial maintenance demand is structural) and the relationships are local. A US searcher targeting a regional buy-and-build platform in UK electrical contracting can typically build a £3–5M EBITDA platform across three to five tuck-ins — and can identify every one of those tuck-ins from the public register before making a single call.
Owner-operated consulting practices with established client bases, often founded in the early 2000s. Multiples sit at 5–8x for established firms, with quality premiums for recurring revenue, contracted services and concentration in growth-segment clients (tech, financial services, regulated sectors).
Dealsuite's H1 2025 sector cut has UK&I business services trading around 6.0x — comfortably above the 3.3x small-company floor, and above Stanford's 6.2x search-fund median. This is the sector where a searcher expecting a bargain is most likely to be surprised: the UK price for a good B2B services business is a full price. What is denser in the UK is the pipeline at the £500k–£2M EBITDA band, not the discount.
Care homes, dental practices, veterinary, allied health. Subject to CQC and other regulatory regimes that US searchers underestimate, but pricing power is strong, exit demand from PE-backed roll-ups is consistent, and the demographic tailwind (UK over-65 population growing 1.5% annually) is structural. UK&I healthcare and pharmaceuticals trades at 7.6x in the same H1 2025 sector cut — the highest sector multiple after software, and well above anything in the US tables above. Small independent practices and homes still transact at 4–6x, particularly outside major metro areas, and that is the band a searcher can actually reach.
A US searcher with a healthcare-services background can target consolidation plays in regional dental, optometry and veterinary chains where the regulatory complexity is the moat that keeps PE roll-ups from cherry-picking the entire market.
Particularly the West Midlands and Cambridgeshire clusters. UK precision engineering trades at 4.5–6.5x EBITDA — a full turn or more above the small-company floor, because the asset backing supports it.
This sector punches above its weight in our exit-readiness data because the founder cohort is heavily weighted to 1980s and 1990s incorporations. Engineers who founded businesses at 35 are now 65–75. Internal succession is rare — children typically don't enter the family engineering business at the rate they once did. Trade buyers exist but are slow. The combination produces a deep pipeline of viable, asset-backed manufacturers with motivated sellers.
Property management, lettings agencies, surveyors. Highly fragmented, owner-operated and chronically under-marketed, and searchers do buy them — multiples sit at 4–6x for established firms with recurring revenue. It sits outside our scored universe, though: property is not one of the sectors we score, so nothing in the pipeline figures above speaks to it either way. It is here because searchers ask about it, not because our data recommends it.
London holds the largest exit-ready pipeline by absolute count. But the highest concentrations — exit-ready companies per 10,000 active companies — sit outside it, and London ranks last of the twelve UK regions on that measure. The pattern reflects a generation of business builders who left London after the 1980s, established companies in commuter and industrial regions, and built them over 25–35 years. Those owners are now ageing out.
For a US-based searcher, the practical implication is that none of these sectors require relocating to a major financial centre. London is not the deal flow. Reading, Maidstone, Solihull and Cambridge are. House prices are 50–60% lower than London. Operating costs are lower. Quality of life is generally higher. The ETA pattern of acquiring in a smaller commuter market and operating from there is the same one that works in the US, on a register where you can see every candidate before you spend a penny.
None of this is free. Three frictions need to be solved. None are absolute. All are routinely navigated by experienced cross-border operators. The honest answer is that they add roughly six months and £15,000–£40,000 of professional fees to a transaction. They don't change the underlying math.
A US citizen cannot legally operate a UK business they own without an appropriate visa, unless they hold dual UK or Irish nationality. Since the closure of the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) and Tier 1 (Investor) routes, the realistic options are:
Self-Sponsorship via the Skilled Worker route. Set up a UK Ltd, obtain a sponsor licence, then sponsor yourself as a Skilled Worker in a CEO or director role. Five years to indefinite leave to remain. Cost typically £3,500–£5,000 in fees on top of the acquisition itself. This is the standard path for international ETA operators. It works because the acquired business can serve as the sponsoring entity once the deal closes — but structural sequencing matters and benefits from specialist advice.
Innovator Founder visa. Designed for genuinely novel businesses with endorsement from an approved body. Wrong fit for traditional ETA acquisitions of established businesses, but occasionally relevant for buy-and-build platforms with a clear innovation thesis.
Standard Visitor visa (with ETA from 25 February 2026). Sufficient for site visits, management meetings, deal negotiation and signing — up to six months per visit. Not sufficient for actually running the business.
Passive ownership with a UK-resident operator. A US searcher who doesn't want to relocate can structure an acquisition as a passive ownership stake with a UK-based operating partner running the business day-to-day. Genuinely viable for buy-and-hold theses but creates principal-agent dynamics that need careful structuring upfront.
The Self-Sponsorship route is the standard path for hands-on operators. Total time to operating residency: typically 4–6 months from first solicitor engagement to visa issuance. This adds time but doesn't kill the deal.
This is the friction US searchers underestimate most often, and the one that catches people out late in a deal.
A US citizen who owns 10% or more of a UK Ltd faces obligations under the US Internal Revenue Code that don't apply to UK-resident owners.
Form 5471 must be filed annually with the IRS for any US person owning 10%+ of a foreign corporation. Penalties for non-filing start at $10,000 per year per company. This is paperwork, not a tax bill, but it is non-optional.
GILTI (Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income) taxes the profits of a Controlled Foreign Corporation owned by US persons even if those profits are not distributed. A single-member UK Ltd is almost always a CFC. The effective US tax rate on GILTI income depends on individual versus corporate ownership and whether you elect Section 962 treatment.
Subpart F taxes certain types of passive or related-party income from a CFC immediately, regardless of distribution.
The structural fix most US-side advisors recommend is the UK LLP rather than a UK Ltd, particularly when there is more than one US member or a mix of US and UK members. A UK LLP with two or more members can be treated as a flow-through entity for US tax purposes — meaning profits are taxed once on the partner's US return and the GILTI/Subpart F machinery does not engage.
The entity choice has to be made before the deal closes. Restructuring afterwards is possible but expensive and tax-inefficient. Cross-border tax counsel typically charges $15,000–$30,000 for the full structuring exercise on a single acquisition, more for buy-and-build platforms. That's one to two report unlocks per percentage point of multiple discount you're capturing — on a £3M deal it pays back many times over.
Running a small business remotely from another time zone is hard. The five-hour US-Eastern-to-UK gap is workable — most of the working day overlaps — but founder-led SMEs require physical presence in the early integration period.
The patterns that work in practice:
Relocate for the first 12–18 months, then move to a part-time supervisory model with a strong UK-based number two. Most successful cross-border ETA operators we see follow this pattern.
Acquire in matched pairs — a US-based investor with a UK-based operator, with the investor handling capital strategy and the operator running day-to-day execution. Common for institutional search-fund vehicles targeting cross-border deals.
Buy-and-build platforms with a UK-resident managing director. Particularly viable for sectors where the searcher's strategic value is M&A capability rather than operating expertise.
What doesn't work: trying to run an owner-operated UK SME from Austin on weekly Zoom calls. The seller has not done that, and the staff you're inheriting will not accept it.
Adding up the realistic friction:
Total professional fees: roughly £30,000–£60,000 ($40,000–$80,000) above what a domestic UK searcher would pay.
On a £4M enterprise-value deal, that's 1–2% of transaction value — comfortably inside an entry discount of 18%, and comfortably inside the value of a search that finds its target faster because the register is open. It is not, however, rounding error against a discount that no longer claims to be half. Budget it properly.
The sourcing advantage is not permanent either. Three forces are slowly closing it — and note that all three are about competition for the deals, not about price.
More international searchers are noticing. IESE and INSEAD ETA programmes are training operators specifically for European deals. INSEAD's 2026 ETA conference takes place in Fontainebleau in May. The international search-fund cohort tracked by IESE has roughly tripled over the past decade. Most of that growth is European searchers, but the share of US-trained operators specifically targeting UK acquisitions is rising.
UK PE is moving down-market slowly. Lower-mid-market UK PE funds are starting to write tickets at the £5–10M EV level. As fund sizes compress and dry powder pressure builds, the £3–5M segment will see more competitive bidding within the next three to five years.
Search-fund-friendly UK debt is becoming available. UK challenger banks (HSBC Innovation Banking, Allica, OakNorth) are increasingly comfortable funding ETA acquisitions in the £1M–£10M EV range with structures that mirror US SBA debt. As leverage availability improves, more UK-based searchers will enter the market.
None of these trends is fast. The advantage that exists today is likely to persist for the next five years, narrow over the following five, and look very different by 2036. A US searcher acting in 2026–2028 meets the least competition for an open register.
The forcing function on the supply side is the demographic curve. The UK has 1,011,600 active companies whose directors are currently in the 50–60 age bracket — they will age into the 60+ cohort over the next decade. Behind them sit another 996,119 in the 40–50 bracket. The pipeline of structural succession events extends decades into the future. Supply is rising. Demand is rising more slowly. That is the imbalance worth acting on — and unlike the multiple, it is measured on our own data rather than inferred across an ocean.
If the math works for you, the operational sequence is straightforward.
1. Resolve the immigration question first. Talk to a UK-based immigration solicitor familiar with the Self-Sponsorship route, ideally one with experience in ETA and search-fund deals. The answer determines everything downstream.
2. Engage a cross-border tax adviser. Specifically one fluent in both UK corporate tax and US Form 5471 / GILTI / Section 962 treatment. The entity choice (UK Ltd versus UK LLP) needs to be made before signing.
3. Run your first searches in Companies House data directly. Build conviction that the dataset is real, complete and useful. Use ExitRadar or another data layer to filter — but verify against the underlying public register so you understand what you're working with.
4. Pick a sector and a region. Don't run a generalist search. The depth is in specific fragmented sectors with clear succession pressure: specialised construction, B2B services, healthcare services, precision manufacturing are where the data shows the strongest concentration of viable, unrepresented targets. Concentrate geographically — Essex, Kent, Surrey, Hampshire or the West Midlands — to make site visits tractable from a single base.
5. Plan for 18 months minimum. Cross-border ETA adds friction at every stage. The deals exist. The friction is real. Both can be planned around if you start with realistic expectations.
ExitRadar identifies UK businesses showing succession and exit signals using public Companies House data. Every active UK company in our database is scored against an exit-readiness model that combines director age and tenure, single-director risk, financial health, sector context and twelve other signals. Each unlocked report includes:
Full director profile with tenure history. Estimated revenue and EBITDA, with confidence ranges and method provenance. Indicative valuation range based on sector multiples adjusted for quality and earnings volatility. Recommended acquisition approach — channel, timing, opening narrative and deal-structure signals. Risk and diligence flags specific to the company and sector. Group-structure detection (parent and subsidiary relationships) so a US-based searcher doesn't approach the wrong entity. A draft approach letter calibrated to the owner profile.
The practical workflow: filter by sector, region, score band and director age in the public dataset; unlock targeted reports; approach selectively. Start with three free reports, then move to a Starter Pack for project work or the Searcher Plan for sustained monthly volume.
The permanently free sample report shows exactly what an unlocked report looks like before a US searcher commits anything.
The platform is sector- and geography-agnostic on the buyer side. Whether you're searching from Boston or Bristol, the data is the same. Reports are generated on-demand from live Companies House data, so a US-based searcher running searches at 9am Eastern is looking at the same dataset a UK-based broker is looking at three hours later.
The honest summary is shorter than the one this article used to carry, and it holds up better.
On price: at the bottom of the market a UK business is about 18% cheaper than the nearest American comparison struck on the same earnings measure — 3.3x against 4.0x. In the middle of the market the UK is roughly 20% dearer. At the size a funded search fund actually buys, no UK survey publishes a multiple at all, so anyone quoting you one has interpolated it. Meanwhile the American number everybody benchmarks against has fallen two cohorts running, from 7.3x to 6.2x.
On sourcing: 3.7 million active UK companies on a register that names directors, dates their appointments, carries filed accounts, secured charges and disclosed ownership, and is downloadable in bulk for nothing. 458,271 UK companies have a single director aged 60 or over and no internal successor. 11,068 are PURSUE-grade on our model. Almost none are with a broker, because the UK broker industry does not serve businesses this size.
There is no US equivalent to the second paragraph, and there is no argument about it. That is the trade.
For a US searcher entering the market in 2026, the question is not whether the UK is half price — it is not, and a plan built on that assumption will misprice its first offers. The question is whether an open register, a decade of demographic supply and a thin domestic buyer pool are worth six months of visa and tax structuring and £30,000–£60,000 of professional fees.
For a meaningful subset of US searchers, that is still an obvious yes. It is just a different yes than the one they were sold.
Company figures are ExitRadar's, derived from public Companies House filings on 3,655,270 active UK companies. UK multiples are from Dealsuite's UK&I M&A Monitor, February 2026 edition, covering deals closed in H2 2025 (435 advisory firms contacted, 106 responding); Dealsuite publishes a multiple at £200,000 and at £10,000,000 of normalised EBITDA and none between, and none below £200,000. US small and lower-mid-market multiples are from the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse Survey, Q1 2026 (56th edition, ~300 advisers); in that survey deals up to $2M of purchase price are quoted on Seller's Discretionary Earnings and only $2M upward on EBITDA, and only the EBITDA bands are used here. US search-fund figures are from Stanford GSB's "2026 Search Fund Study: Selected Observations", Case E-967, published 30 June 2026 with data to 31 December 2025 — 862 core funds, 2024-25 medians of $16.0M purchase price, $2.5M EBITDA and 6.2x entry multiple, and 181 new funds confirmed in that two-year cohort. Stanford's study covers the United States and Canada and counts only funds led by a first-time searcher and backed by multiple search-phase investors; self-funded and SBA-financed buyers are outside it. GBP/USD of 1.35 is used throughout for illustration only. Visa and tax framing is general guidance — every cross-border deal needs specialist advice from qualified UK immigration and US international tax practitioners.
A previous version of this article compared a UK £200,000-EBITDA multiple with Stanford's search-fund median and reported the difference, 53%, as a country-level discount. It was a size comparison, not a geographic one, and the article's own worked examples contradicted it. It was corrected on 26 August 2026.
About ExitRadar: ExitRadar identifies UK businesses showing succession and exit signals using public Companies House data. Reports provide pre-approach intelligence for search fund operators, ETA practitioners and business brokers in the UK, US and Europe. Browse the database and unlock reports at exitradar.co.uk.