Valuation & Benchmarks

Valuation Multiples by Industry (2026)

The fastest way to sanity-check what a business is worth is the multiple its sector trades at. Below: EV/EBITDA, beta, and cost of capital for 91 industries — and the adjustment most people get wrong when they apply them.

The table below gives the current EV/EBITDA multiple, equity beta, and cost of capital for 91 industries, drawn from Aswath Damodaran's NYU Stern dataset, updated January 2026. It's the recognized benchmark for sector valuation, and it refreshes every January — so this page updates once a year.

But a sector multiple is a starting point, not an answer. Two things matter before you apply one:

These are large-cap public figures. Damodaran's numbers come from public companies. A private, founder-led, or small-cap business does not trade at the public multiple — it sells at a discount for size, illiquidity, and key-person risk. In practice that's a 25–40% haircut on the multiple, and the cost of capital runs several points higher than the large-cap figure shown here. Apply the public number to a private company unadjusted and you'll overstate value, often badly.

EBITDA × a multiple is one method, not the valuation. A defensible number triangulates across several approaches — a discounted cash flow, public trading comps, precedent transaction comps, and unit economics — then weights them. The multiple below feeds the comps leg; it isn't the whole answer.

How to use the table

Find your industry, then: rough enterprise value ≈ EBITDA × the EV/EBITDA multiple × a private-company discount (start around 0.65 for a small private business). Transaction values run higher than this because acquirers pay a control premium. The cost of capital column is your discount-rate anchor for a DCF — again, the large-cap floor, to be raised for a smaller company. The beta column is the input if you'd rather build the discount rate up yourself (risk-free + beta × equity risk premium + size and company-specific premiums).

From a multiple to a real valuation

A multiple gets you in the right zip code. Closing the gap to a number you'd put in front of an investor or a buyer means running the four standard methods and weighting them — which is exactly what the Enterprise Valuation Engine does. Pick your industry, enter revenue, margin, and growth, and it runs a DCF, public comps, transaction comps, and unit economics off the sourced multiples above, then blends them into one enterprise and equity value. The first run is free.

Source: Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern School of Business — Enterprise Value Multiples and Cost of Capital by Sector (US), data as of January 2026. EV/EBITDA reflects positive-EBITDA firms. Educational reference, not professional advice.

jiesen Li · Finance & accounting transformation · Valuation · Multi-entity controllership