Guide
GRF multiples: what an accountancy practice sells for
Updated
Every broker quotes a multiple. Almost nobody says where it came from. Here is the only professional-body figure we can find, what it covers, and what it does not.
The one published figure
ICAEW's guide to selling your practice says: "The price paid for a practice is usually based on a multiplier of GRI (gross recurring income, excluding one-off fees), which is currently a factor of between 0.8 and 1.2 of annual fees" (ICAEW, published 10 September 2020). That article is the nearest thing to an authoritative UK range, and it is the one we use here.
That figure carries a September 2020 date. It has not been restated by ICAEW since, so treat it as a professional-body anchor rather than a current market quote, and test it against what buyers are actually offering for practices like yours today.
Why there is no official statistic
There is no register of practice sales, no regulator that collects the prices, and no statistics publisher that reports them. Practice sale prices come from brokers, from acquiring firms and from accountants comparing notes. ICAEW's own Ethics Advisory Service helpsheet on buying and selling fees puts the position plainly: where multiples are used in the calculation "they will depend on a wide range of factors, there is no one 'correct' multiple to be used, it will be for the buyer and seller to determine" (ICAEW helpsheet, first published 2016, updated 19 August 2025).
Anyone quoting you a precise current market multiple to two decimal places is quoting their own book, not a statistic. That is not necessarily wrong, and a broker who sells twenty practices a year knows things no dataset would tell you. It is just not evidence in the way a published index would be.
What the multiple is applied to
- Gross recurring fees, the annual income you can expect to bill the same clients again next year, excluding one-off work.
- Not turnover. Project work, one-off tax investigations, corporate finance fees and disbursements are usually stripped out first, or valued separately at a much lower rate.
- Not profit, which is why a practice with poor margins can still command a fee multiple: the buyer intends to run the same fees through their own cost base.
ICAEW's helpsheet lists gross recurring fees, turnover, future fee income and profitability as bases that may be used as the starting point for the calculation. If a buyer quotes a multiple, the first question is always which of those it is a multiple of.
Testing an offer
- Ask which base the multiple applies to, and get the definition of recurring in writing.
- Ask for the split between cash on completion and deferred consideration.
- Ask for the clawback mechanic: what percentage, measured over what period, against what baseline.
- Work out the worst case: the multiple, times the fees, minus the maximum clawback. That is the number to compare between offers.
- Only then compare headline multiples, because a 1.2 offer with aggressive clawback can pay less than a 0.9 offer with none.
Nothing here is a valuation of your practice. Use the form to get brokers and acquiring firms to put their own number and their own terms in writing.