What is a UK garage business actually worth in 2026?

Most garage owners find out what their business is worth at the worst possible moment: when they have already decided to sell, or when their health has made the decision for them. By then the things that would have added value take two or three years to build, and there is no time left to build them.

This post is about the number, where it comes from, and the gap between what a garage advertises for and what actually changes hands.

The figures below come from live UK listings in October 2026 and from the way buyers and brokers actually price these businesses. I will flag clearly where I am estimating, and I will show you one listing whose numbers cannot be right, because learning to spot that is most of the skill.

The short answer

Most independent UK garages sell for two to four times adjusted EBITDA.

Adjusted EBITDA is the profit the business makes after paying somebody a proper wage to do the job you currently do for free, or for drawings. It is not turnover, it is not gross profit, and for most owner-run garages it is a lot lower than the number in your head.

If you own the building, that is valued separately as property and added on top. For a lot of garage sales, the freehold is the larger half of the deal.

What garages are actually advertised at

These are real listings on Daltons Business, read in October 2026. They are asking prices, not completed sales, which matters and I will come back to it.

• Sheffield, established 1990. Leasehold. Turnover £569,874, gross profit £207,895. Asking £299,995.
• Hertfordshire MOT and service centre. Turnover around £701,000, adjusted EBITDA £80,000.
• Yorkshire independent, MOT and servicing. Turnover £621,000, adjusted EBITDA £226,000.

Run the multiple on the two that state EBITDA and you land in the two-to-four range that brokers quote. The Sheffield one you cannot run at all, and that is the first lesson.

Gross profit is not profit

The Sheffield listing states gross profit, not net profit and not EBITDA. Gross profit is what is left after parts and direct labour, before rent, rates, insurance, utilities, software, your salary and everything else that keeps the doors open.

On a £569,874 turnover, £207,895 of gross profit is a 36 percent gross margin, which is entirely normal and tells you almost nothing about what the business earns. By the time the overheads come out, net profit might be £40,000 or it might be nothing.

An advert that leads with gross profit is not necessarily hiding anything. Sellers lead with the biggest defensible number, the same way you would. But if you are valuing on it, you are valuing on the wrong number.

The listing that cannot be right

One Hampshire listing in the same search advertised at £204,000, with turnover of £460,000 and net profit stated as £279,000.

A net profit of £279,000 on £460,000 of turnover is a 61 percent net margin. Our own analysis of UK garage profit margins puts the realistic figure around 14.5 percent. Nobody in this trade nets 61 percent. Either that is gross profit mislabelled, or it includes the owner's drawings, or it is simply wrong.

And note the shape of it: the business is advertised for less than one year of its own claimed profit. If a garage really netted £279,000 a year, nobody would sell it for £204,000.

Use the margin as your lie detector. If a listing implies a net margin far above the mid-teens, the number is not net, and you should ask what it actually is before you ask anything else.

Working out your own number

Four steps, on figures you already have.

1. Start with net profit from your last full set of accounts. The real one, after everything.

2. Add back what a buyer would not inherit. Your own drawings. One-off costs that will not repeat, such as a tribunal, a rebuild, a van you bought outright. Anything personal running through the business. Depreciation and interest, since you are working towards EBITDA.

3. Subtract a real salary for your own job. This is the step everybody skips and it is the one that moves the number most. If you are turning spanners four days a week and doing the books on Sunday, a buyer has to pay somebody to do that. At current rates that is a technician's wage plus a manager's time, and our post on what to pay a vehicle technician has the ranges.

What you have left is adjusted EBITDA.

4. Pick your multiple, honestly.

• Nearer 2x if the business is you. Customers ask for you by name, the diary is in your head, there is no manager, and the accounts are rough.
• Nearer 3x if it runs without you for a fortnight, the records are in a system a buyer can inspect, and there is repeat work booked ahead.
• Nearer 4x if it has all of that plus something hard to replicate: a long MOT-station history, a specialism with no local competition, contracts with fleets or dealers, or a site nobody else can get planning for.

Then add the freehold, valued as property, if you own it.

Why the multiple is so low

Two to four times earnings feels harsh when software businesses trade at ten times revenue. The reason is concentration of risk.

A buyer is purchasing a local business whose customers can go elsewhere next Tuesday, whose skilled staff can be poached, and whose biggest relationship is often with the person leaving. Everything that makes an independent garage good at its job, the trust, the regulars, the fact that Dave knows the car, is also the thing that walks out of the door with you.

The multiple is not a judgement on your workshop. It is a price for that risk.

What actually moves the number

The levers, in rough order of how much they matter:

The freehold. Owning your site changes the deal more than anything you do to the trade. It is also why some garage businesses are effectively unsellable as businesses but very sellable as property.

Whether it runs without you. Two weeks away without the place falling over is worth more than a year of better margins. A buyer is pricing what they inherit, and if that is a job rather than a business, they will pay for a job.

Records a buyer can verify. This is the one most owners underrate. A buyer's accountant will ask for customer history, repeat rates, how much work comes back, and how much of the turnover is MOT versus repair. If the answer lives in a diary and a shoebox, every one of those questions gets answered with a shrug, and uncertainty gets priced in against you.

Work already in the diary. Bookings ahead and reminders that bring vehicles back on their own are the closest thing this trade has to recurring revenue. A buyer can see them. They are worth real money.

Staff who stay. Key people under contract, with notice periods, and no single irreplaceable technician.

Where workshop software helps

The gap between a 2x garage and a 3x garage is mostly the gap between a business that lives in somebody's head and one that lives in a system. Autera exists to move your records into the second category: every job, invoice, quote and vehicle history against the registration, MOT reminders that bring work back without anybody remembering to phone, and a diary a buyer can actually look at. You can export the lot as CSV whenever you want, which is exactly what due diligence asks for. Autera is free to start on the Solo plan, with no card.

None of that is a reason to buy software. It is a reason to keep records as though someone will one day read them, because eventually someone will, and they will be deciding what to pay you.

What you keep after tax, and why the date matters

The price is not the proceeds. Selling your shares or your business assets is a capital gain, and the relief that used to make this painless is being withdrawn in stages.

Business Asset Disposal Relief charged 10 percent on qualifying gains for years. It charged 14 percent on disposals between 6 April 2025 and 5 April 2026, and it charges 18 percent on qualifying disposals from 6 April 2026 onwards.

On a £300,000 gain that is the difference between £30,000 of tax under the old rate and £54,000 now. It does not change what your garage is worth, but it changes what you walk away with by a figure most owners have not recalculated, and anyone who modelled their retirement on the 10 percent rate should redo that sum. Check your own position with an accountant rather than with this page, because eligibility has conditions about how long you have held the business and what your role in it was.

If you are two or three years out

The things that raise the multiple take time, so if a sale is on the horizon:

• Get your own salary into the accounts properly, so adjusted EBITDA is obvious rather than argued over.
• Stop being the only person who can do anything. Write down what is in your head.
• Get three clean years of accounts. Buyers discount a single good year as luck.
• Move the customer history somewhere a stranger can read it.
• Fix your labour rate if you have been undercharging, because every pound of recovered margin is worth two to four pounds at sale.

That last one is the quiet arithmetic of selling. A £10,000 improvement in annual profit is worth £20,000 to £40,000 on the price. Raising your rate by five pounds an hour is the highest-paid admin you will ever do.

The bottom line

A typical leasehold independent garage turning over £500,000 to £700,000 is worth somewhere between £150,000 and £350,000, depending almost entirely on how much of it survives you leaving. The building, if you own it, is a separate and often larger number.

The advert is not the price. The multiple is not an insult. And the work that raises both is the same work that makes the business better to own in the meantime, which is the only honest reason to do it.

Sources: live listings on Daltons Business read October 2026; HMRC and Companies House filing requirements; our own UK garage profit margin analysis. Multiples are the ranges brokers quote and that current listings imply. Asking prices are not completed sale prices, and no public register of small-business sale prices exists in the UK, so treat every multiple here as a guide rather than a valuation.