2.6× The typical small business for sale in the US asks 2.6 times its yearly cash flow.

We read every listing on a major US online marketplace for businesses for sale on September 24, 2026, 44,526 in all, and went back to each one from September 25 to 30, 2026 for its full details. We kept the 39,587 established businesses. Franchise offers, startups, real estate, asset-only sales and auctions are out, and a business listed twice counts once.

Cash flow is the seller's discretionary earnings a listing reports: profit before the owner's pay, interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. A multiple is the asking price divided by that cash flow. We left out multiples below 0.3 or above 20, and the 6% of listings whose price includes the property, because that price buys a building too. That leaves 20,975 multiples. A price or cash flow of zero counts as not shown.

Older listings use a flat list of categories and newer ones a two-level list. We mapped the flat list onto the two-level one by hand, checking where newer listings file the same kind of business. Industries and states with fewer than 100 multiples aren't charted, and the tables show every one.

Reasons for selling come from the seller's own line, grouped by their wording. A reason can fall into more than one group.

The marketplace doesn't show when a business was listed. Listing numbers rise with time, so we dated the listings numbered since late January 2026 from the last-modified dates of newer listings, and counted older ones as up for eight months or more. The price-cut flag is the marketplace's own.

A pattern found every listing that mentions AI or artificial intelligence, 531 of them. Jev, a model from TypeSafe that answers yes or no questions with a probability, read the sentences around each mention and answered five questions: whether the mention is about the business, and whether the business sells AI, uses it, could grow with it, or is pitched as safe from it. Another AI model then read every one of those listings and settled each answer, naming the sentences it relied on. A mention of the broker's own tools doesn't count.

Another pattern picked out 9,132 listings that name software, a point-of-sale or booking system, online ordering or sales, or paper records. Jev read the sentences around each mention and answered six questions: whether the listing says the business uses a point-of-sale or payment system, scheduling or industry software, online booking or ordering, accounting or payroll software, or paper records, and whether it offers technology as a way to grow. Review agents answered the same questions for a random sample of 400 of those listings, drawn across Jev's answers, and the shares correct Jev's answers by what the review found. A listing that names no system counts as silent, not as a business without one. Industry shares apply the review's rate for each of Jev's answers to that industry's listings. Brand shares count the listings Jev marked yes that name a brand.

These are asking prices. A business usually sells for less than it asks, and the multiples describe the sellers who show their cash flow. A marketplace at any moment holds more of the businesses that are slow to sell.

Fulkerson Advisors (2026). What Small Businesses for Sale Ask: 39,587 US Listings, September 2026. https://www.fulkersonadvisors.com/research/small-business-multiples

Use any of these numbers or charts. Credit Fulkerson Advisors and link to this page. The data is under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The data is also on Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23320307.