Cleaning Business Valuation Checklist for Australian Buyers
To value a cleaning business in Australia, you multiply the normalised EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation, adjusted for owner add-backs) by a multiple — typically 2x to 3.5x for residential cleaning and 2.5x to 4x for commercial cleaning businesses. But the multiple you deserve to pay depends on what you find when you look under the bonnet. This checklist is designed for buyers, not sellers — it's the verification process you run before you commit to a price.
Most content about cleaning business valuation is written for sellers who want to maximise their asking price. This checklist takes the other side of that conversation: what you need to check, verify, and often discount before you make an offer.
Why cleaning business valuation is trickier than it looks
A cleaning business looks simple from the outside: contracts, staff, cleaning products, a van. What makes them tricky to value is that the quality of that contract book varies enormously — and sellers often present the headline revenue without making it obvious how much of it is recurring, how concentrated it is in one or two big clients, or how dependent the whole operation is on the owner showing up every morning.
I've seen cleaning businesses priced at 3x EBITDA where the EBITDA disappeared when you removed the revenue from one contract that the seller had personally brought in and that was informal — no written agreement, no notice period, nothing. That's not a 3x business. That's closer to zero.
Understanding what a cleaning business is worth in Australia starts with the multiples. But it ends with the verification. That's what this checklist covers.
Three things to check before you spend a dollar on due diligence
1. Ask for the contract register, not just the revenue figure. Get a list of every active contract: client name, contract value, contract duration, notice period, renewal date. If the seller can't produce this in a spreadsheet within a day, that tells you something about how the business is run (nothing positive).
2. Call two or three clients yourself. With the seller's permission (which a genuine seller will give), ring a few clients and ask how long they've been with the business and whether they're happy. You're not doing a formal reference check — you're testing whether the clients even know who they're dealing with, or whether the relationship lives entirely in the owner's phone.
3. Check the staff and subcontractor arrangements. Cleaning businesses often use a mix of employees and subcontractors. Verify that subcontractors are genuinely engaged as contractors (not employees misclassified for convenience), and check that all employees are paid correctly under the Cleaning Services Award. Wage underpayment is endemic in this industry and it becomes your liability the moment you settle.
For the full breakdown of what EBITDA multiples for trades businesses typically look like, and how to normalise EBITDA before you calculate them, those are covered in detail in Module 4 of the Playbook.
If you want the full checklist — covering all eight phases of the valuation process from revenue quality through to your final offer price calculation — grab it below.
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