CleaningExits Market Report · Q4 2026 · Free to republish
Commercial & Residential Cleaning
Compiled from 443 active and 339 closed or withdrawn listings across 185 brokerages. Every figure carries its sample size. Nothing below 8 observations is published as a median.
Median multiple
2.84×
303 obs.
Median asking
$280K
443 obs.
Median SDE
$113K
303 obs.
Days to sale
51
192 closed
Finding 01
Price range across the market
Half of listed cleaning businesses are asking between $150K and $600K, with a median of $280K. The spread is wide because this is a market of owner-operated businesses with inconsistent books, not a market of standardized assets.
Finding 02
Bigger businesses earn better multiples
Multiple rises with size, and not gradually. Each step up in earnings band moves the business into a different buyer pool — individual buyers at the bottom, search funds and strategics at the top.
| SDE band | n | Median multiple | Median asking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $75K | 87 | 3.00× | $140K |
| $75K - $150K | 98 | 2.42× | $261K |
| $150K - $300K | 65 | 2.78× | $525K |
| $300K - $500K | 25 | 3.47× | $1.2M |
| $500K+ | 17 | 4.00× | $2.5M |
Finding 03 · Correction
The days-on-market figure in circulation is wrong
Active listings show a median of 51 days on market. Closed sales show 51.
The gap is not seasonal and it is not a data error. It is survivorship: a listing still on the market is being measured before it finishes, so any average built from live inventory is measuring incomplete runs. Most published time-to-sale figures for small business sales are computed this way, which understates the real figure by roughly 1×.
For an owner planning an exit, the operational number is 51 days from listing to close, before any pre-sale preparation.
Finding 04
Where the inventory is
Active listings concentrate in a small number of states. Only 3 clear the 8-listing minimum for a published median; the remainder are reported as counts only.
| State | Active | Median asking | Median SDE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 21 | $300K | $138K |
| New York | 19 | $165K | $85K |
| New Jersey | 17 | $375K | $150K |
Method
Listings are collected directly from brokerage websites, not from a single marketplace, and observed repeatedly over time. Days on market is measured from first observation rather than from a self-reported listing date, so it reflects when a listing actually appeared.
Multiples are asking price divided by reported seller’s discretionary earnings, restricted to listings reporting both, and winsorized to the 0.5–10× range to exclude data-entry errors. Medians are used throughout because the distribution is heavily right-skewed and means would mislead.
These are asking prices except where explicitly labeled as closed. Asking prices in this market run above closing prices; treat the multiples as a ceiling.
Coverage: 443 active listings across 33 states and 185 brokerages. Data through October 24, 2026. Generated October 24, 2026.
License
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Every figure on this page is released under CC0 1.0. No permission needed, no attribution required. If you would like to credit it anyway:
CleaningExits, "Commercial & Residential Cleaning Market Report Q4 2026." https://cleaningexits.com/market-report. Data through October 24, 2026. CC0.
Journalists and researchers who need the underlying rows rather than the summary can request the dataset directly.