How Much Is My Alarm Company Worth? Verified 2026 Multiples and What Buyers Actually Pay

I've spent 23 years in this industry. I founded and ran Protect America, created over 800,000 customer accounts, and did over $600 million in sales along the way. I've sat on both sides of these deals, and I'll tell you what most valuation content won't: there is no single multiple for an alarm company. There are three different kinds of companies in this industry, and buyers use three different kinds of math.

The inflated numbers you see circulating — the tiered charts promising multiples far beyond anything in a closed transaction — come from people who get paid when you list, not when you close. What follows is what buyers actually paid in verified 2026 deals. Ranges, not fantasy.

Before you can price your company, you have to know which company you are. Buyers sort every seller into one of three buckets, and the bucket determines the formula.

If the bulk of your value is a book of monitored accounts, buyers ignore your profit-and-loss statement almost entirely. They count your monthly recurring revenue and multiply it. Verified 2026 transactions land between 30x and 50x monthly RMR, with quality commercial books — dense, contracted, low-attrition — commanding 35-45x.

Where you land inside that range comes down to account quality: attrition history, contract terms, average account age, geographic density, and how clean your billing records are. A book bleeding accounts at the industry-typical 10-13% a year sits at the bottom. A book holding attrition under 10% earns a real premium, because the buyer is purchasing future payments, and attrition is the rate at which those payments disappear.

If your revenue comes mostly from installation and integration projects — cameras, access control, fire, low-voltage work — you're a tuck-in acquisition. Verified 2026 data puts project-heavy companies in the $1-3M revenue range at roughly 3-5x EBITDA. That number stings when you've spent decades building the business, but understand the buyer's view: project revenue has to be re-won every year. They're buying your crews, your licenses, your customer relationships, and your market position — not a stream of contracted payments.

I ran trucks doing residential and commercial installs for my first decade in this business. I know exactly how hard that revenue is to earn. But buyers don't pay for hard — they pay for predictable.

The best-priced private deals in this industry go to regional companies that have both scale and stickiness: a management team that runs the business without the owner, and 35-50% of revenue recurring. Verified 2026 transactions put these companies at roughly 5-9x EBITDA, with 7-8x and above once recurring passes the 40-50% mark. What pushes a company toward the top of that range:

• ▸Recurring revenue at or above 40-50% of total revenue — the single strongest driver.
• ▸A management team the buyer can keep, so the deal doesn't depend on you staying.
• ▸Attrition under 10% annually — proof the recurring revenue actually recurs.
• ▸Diversified customer base — no single account that could sink the earnings.
• ▸Clean financials that survive due diligence without restatement.

Here's the arithmetic that should change how you run your company. Verified 2026 data shows recurring-revenue mix is worth roughly 2-3 full turns of EBITDA multiple. Take two companies each earning $1M in EBITDA. The project shop sells at 3-5x — call it $3-5M. The company with 40%+ recurring sells at 7-8x or better — $7-8M. Same profit. Millions apart at closing.

To be clear: recurring revenue does not double your multiple, and anyone telling you it does is selling something. It adds turns — roughly two to three of them — and those turns are the most valuable thing an owner can build in the years before a sale.

Most independent dealers are hybrids — an install business plus a monitoring book. Here's the trap I see sellers walk into: the buyer absorbs the whole company into one EBITDA number and applies a project-shop multiple to all of it. Your monitoring book, which would fetch 30-50x monthly RMR on its own, quietly gets priced at 3-5x EBITDA inside the blend.

A properly priced hybrid deal values the two pieces separately, or applies a blended multiple that visibly reflects the RMR component. If a buyer hands you one EBITDA number for a company that's 40% monitoring revenue, that's not a valuation — that's a discount wearing a suit. Make them show the math on the book.

You'll hear that big platform deals price at double-digit multiples, and that's true — for the platforms. APi Group paid an SEC-filed 14.6x EBITDA for Chubb and roughly 13x for Elevated. Pye-Barker itself was valued at 17-20x on roughly $350M of EBITDA in its January 2025 recap with ADIA and GIC — north of $6 billion in enterprise value. Platforms overall trade around 13-20x. But those numbers belong to billion-dollar consolidators with hundreds of branches. They are what the consolidator is worth, not what the consolidator pays you.

The gap between the bottom and top of these ranges is worth more than most owners will earn in a decade of operations. Here's what closes it, in rough order of impact:

1. ▸Grow recurring revenue as a share of total revenue — every step toward 40-50% recurring pulls you toward the 7-8x+ tier.
2. ▸Cut attrition below 10% — it re-prices your monitoring book and proves your recurring revenue is real.
3. ▸Build a management layer so the company runs without you — buyers pay less for companies that walk out the door with the owner.
4. ▸Get contracts, billing, and financial records clean enough to survive due diligence without surprises.
5. ▸Reduce customer concentration so no single account can spook a buyer.

Valuation isn't set the day you get an offer — it's set by the two or three years of numbers the buyer reads in diligence. The owners who get top-of-range prices are the ones who started fixing attrition, recurring mix, and management depth years before the first conversation. The ones who wait take the blended lowball, because by then there's nothing left to negotiate with.