Selling your accounting practice? Recurring fees are priced like an asset class.
Accounting practices trade in the most established succession market in Australian professional services — with pricing conventions, active consolidators, and a demographic wave of retiring principals.
Australian accounting practices are typically priced at 80 cents to $1.10 per dollar of gross recurring fees — equivalent to roughly 2.5 to 4.5 times normalised EBITDA — with the premium end reserved for practices whose clients deal with the team rather than the principal. It is the most liquid succession market in professional services: consolidators, acquisitive mid-tier firms and demographic pressure from retiring principals keep genuine buyer depth at every size.
To 5.5× at the premium end: recurring compliance fees, corporate clients, staff-held relationships; often quoted as $0.80-$1.10 per $1 of recurring fees.
Indicative market observation, not a valuation of your business. Where your business sits in — or beyond — the band is exactly what a valuation establishes.
What buyers pay a premium for
- ·Recurring compliance and advisory fees on direct debit or fixed-fee agreements — the closer to subscription, the better the price
- ·Client relationships held by employed accountants and managers, not exclusively the selling principal
- ·Business and corporate clients over individual returns — higher fees, lower churn, more cross-sell
- ·Modern, cloud-based workpapers and ledgers that a buyer can integrate without re-platforming
- ·Fee growth and low write-offs — WIP discipline is diligenced hard
What quietly kills practice sales
Principal dependence, overwhelmingly: if clients believe they are clients of you rather than the firm, the buyer prices attrition into everything, and clawback clauses put the risk back on you for years. Fee stagnation is second — a flat-fee book in an inflating cost market signals under-pricing that the buyer must fix at relationship risk. Third, key-person concentration below the principal: a practice held together by one senior manager the buyer might lose is discounted almost as heavily as principal dependence itself.
Who is buying accounting practices
Listed and PE-backed consolidators running programmatic acquisition, mid-tier firms buying growth and talent, first-time principals backed by practice-finance lenders, and — for sub-$500K fee books — tuck-in buyers absorbing clients into existing overheads. Clawback and retention structures are standard across all of them: expect 20 to 30% of price contingent on fee retention over one to two years.
When to start
Longer than any trade: transferring client relationships to your team credibly takes two to four years, and buyers can tell the difference between genuine transition and a retirement announcement with a handover memo. The practices that clear $1 per dollar of fees started acting like institutions years before the sale.
Common questions.
Cents-per-dollar of fees or a multiple of EBITDA — which is right?+
They are the same judgement expressed twice, and serious buyers cross-check both. Fee-based pricing embeds assumptions about margin a buyer can achieve; EBITDA pricing tests whether your cost base already achieves it. If the two methods disagree materially, that gap is exactly what a valuation should explain before a buyer uses it against you.
How do clawbacks actually work?+
A portion of the price — commonly 20 to 30% — is held or repayable against fee retention 12 to 24 months post-completion. The stronger your team-held relationships and documented transition, the smaller the clawback you should accept. It is negotiable, and preparation is the negotiating position.
Is my bookkeeping division worth more separately?+
Sometimes — recurring bookkeeping books have their own buyer pool and subscription-like pricing. Whether to sell whole or in parts is a structuring question worth answering with numbers before going to market, not during it.
Where does your business sit in the band?
Five minutes, free, and private. An instant indicative range from your figures, with a human read-through to follow.
What is my business worth?Talk to a valuer
Tell us what you need valued.
A fifteen-minute call confirms the tier, the fixed fee and the delivery date — before you commit to anything.
0433 475 518Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm AEST
Fixed fees from $1,495 + GST · 10–35 business days