Alarm Company RMR Multiples in 2026: The Real Ranges Buyers Pay

RMR — recurring monthly revenue — is the contracted monitoring and service revenue that shows up every month whether your trucks roll or not. An RMR multiple prices your book of accounts as a number of months of that revenue. A book producing $30,000 a month at a 40x multiple sells for $1.2 million. Simple math, but the multiple itself is where deals are won and lost.

I created over 800,000 customer accounts building Protect America, and I can tell you why buyers pay months of revenue up front: acquiring an account is brutally expensive. Creating a new account typically takes 30-40+ months of RMR to recoup the fully loaded cost. Buying your book at 30-50x is often cheaper and faster for them than building it — that's the entire logic of the trade.

Verified 2026 transaction data puts monitoring account books between 30x and 50x monthly RMR. That's the whole honest range. Quality commercial books sit at 35-45x. Residential books with weaker contracts or higher churn sit toward the bottom.

Commercial accounts hold multi-year contracts, cancel less, pay more per month, and often carry fire or code-required monitoring the customer legally can't drop. That's why a clean commercial book prices at 35-45x while a loose residential book fights to stay above the floor. The buyer isn't paying for this month's revenue — they're paying for their confidence in month sixty's revenue.

Density matters too. Five hundred accounts inside one metro are worth more per account than five hundred scattered across three states, because the buyer can service them with the branch they already run. If your book fits inside a consolidator's existing footprint, you're worth more to them than your spreadsheet says.

There are tiered multiple charts circulating in this industry that promise numbers far beyond anything in a closed transaction — some nearly double the top of the real range. They come from people whose income depends on you listing, not closing. I've watched owners anchor on those charts, turn down real offers, and sell two years later for less after attrition ate the book.

The test is simple: if someone quotes you a multiple above 50x monthly RMR, ask to see a closed transaction at that price. Not a listing, not a letter of intent — a closed deal. The verified 2026 record is 30-50x. Price against reality and you'll negotiate from strength instead of fantasy.

Twenty extra multiple turns is a two-thirds increase in your check, so the drivers deserve your attention years before a sale:

• ▸Attrition history — the single biggest driver. Sub-10% annual attrition earns a premium; above the typical 10-13% costs you turns.
• ▸Contract terms — signed, current, assignable agreements with meaningful remaining term. Month-to-month accounts price like month-to-month accounts.
• ▸Account age and payment history — seasoned accounts that autopay beat new accounts that get invoiced.
• ▸Geographic density — a tight service footprint the buyer can absorb into an existing branch.
• ▸Average RMR per account and rate integrity — books that have taken regular rate increases prove pricing power.
• ▸Clean records — billing, contracts, and monitoring data that reconcile without a forensic project.

Industry-typical attrition runs roughly 10-13% a year. Under 10% marks a healthy book. Every buyer will compute your real attrition from cancellation records in diligence, and the difference between 9% and 14% is the difference between the top and bottom of the range — sometimes the difference between a deal and no deal.

Here's the part owners miss: attrition compounds against you while you wait. A $30,000 book losing 12% a year is a $26,400 book next year, and the multiple applies to what's left. If your book is bleeding, either fix the bleed before you sell or recognize that waiting has a real monthly cost.

RMR multiples price books of accounts. EBITDA multiples price operating companies. Verified 2026 data: project-heavy installers at $1-3M revenue sell for roughly 3-5x EBITDA, and regional companies with a management team and 35-50% recurring revenue sell for 5-9x EBITDA — 7-8x+ once recurring passes 40-50%. If you're selling only your monitoring accounts, RMR math applies. If you're selling the whole company, buyers look at both.

Recurring mix is worth roughly 2-3 full EBITDA turns of multiple on a whole-company sale. It does not double your multiple — anyone claiming that is repeating broker folklore — but it's the strongest lever you have.

If you run installs plus a monitoring book, watch for the oldest move in the buyer's playbook: absorbing your book into one blended EBITDA number and pricing the whole company like a project shop. A book worth 35-45x monthly RMR on its own can silently get valued at 3-5x EBITDA inside the blend. That's not a valuation method — that's a transfer of your value to their side of the table.

Insist the book gets priced as a book. Either the deal values the monitoring accounts on an RMR multiple and the install business on its own EBITDA, or the blended number visibly reflects both. If the buyer won't show the split, that tells you what the split looks like.

The directional read from 2021 through 2025: platform pricing held or rose, and there is no verified compression in tuck-in pricing. Consolidators like Pye-Barker — 200+ acquisitions, 57 in 2025 alone — keep buying because the arbitrage works: they buy independents at 3-9x EBITDA and are themselves valued at 13-20x. Demand for quality books isn't the seller's problem. Quality is.

The gap between 30x and 45x isn't luck — it's twelve to twenty-four months of deliberate work. Most owners start that work after the first offer disappoints them. The smart ones start before the first conversation:

1. ▸Convert month-to-month accounts to signed, assignable agreements with real remaining term.
2. ▸Attack the cancellation leaks — save programs, service response, and billing hygiene — until attrition sits under 10%.
3. ▸Take the rate increases you've been afraid to take; rate integrity proves pricing power to a buyer.
4. ▸Reconcile contracts, billing, and monitoring records until diligence is boring.
5. ▸Know your own numbers — real attrition, real collected RMR — before a buyer computes them for you.