What is the average EBITDA multiple for an urgent care center?

Urgent care has no published index of transaction multiples, so the numbers come from the research and advisory firms that track the deals. Scope Research maintains a healthcare M&A valuation database and publishes an urgent care update; its 2026 edition sets out three tiers. Single centers and small portfolios, typically under $10M of revenue, "usually sell for lower multiples, ranging from 3x to 7x EBITDA," which Scope attributes to higher operational risk, limited geographic reach, low barriers to entry and heavy reliance on the owner-operator. Regional multi-location operators with $10M to $50M of revenue and proven profitability "can range from 6x to 11x EBITDA, depending on size, local market conditions, service mix, growth rate, and the stability of the cash flow." Companies with considerable scale, or a value-based care or virtual care strategy and a management team that stays, "can command multiples in the 10x to 15x EBITDA range." Read that top tier with the caveat Scope attaches to it, because it is the most useful sentence published on the topic: the majority of the deals at the high end of that range are from the mid 2010s. A 15x comparable from 2016 is not a 2026 offer. Scope does report recent deals in its database with EBITDA multiples up to 16.7x, so the ceiling exists, but it is rare and it is not a planning assumption. Scope's revenue bands are approximate (it says "typically" for the first tier) and the top tier has none, so place yourself by revenue, by adjusted EBITDA and by whether the business runs without you. One market fact frames the rest. Scope reports announced urgent care M&A deals fell from a peak of 44 in 2021 to 29 in 2025, so this is a thinner buyer market than the roll-up years. We publish no EBITDA-margin benchmark for urgent care, because no source we could open states one, and a margin borrowed from another specialty would not be a benchmark. Worked example on Scope's tiers: a two-site operator under $10M of revenue with $600K of adjusted EBITDA sits in the bottom tier, so 3x to 7x puts it at $1.8M to $4.2M. Grow the same operator past $10M of revenue and to $2.5M of adjusted EBITDA and it moves to the middle tier at 6x to 11x, or $15M to $27.5M. The bottom of the range doubles (3x to 6x), the top rises from 7x to 11x, and both apply to about four times the earnings, which is why scale is the lift. Work out your adjusted EBITDA first, because the earnings figure you negotiate from moves the outcome more than the multiple does.