The Gap Between the Headline and the Job Site
If you own an electrical, fire and life safety, HVAC, plumbing or other B2B blue-collar services business, you have probably seen some version of the headline by now: global M&A set a record in the first six months of 2026. Roughly $2.8 trillion in announced transactions, up about 48% year over year, the largest first half in recorded history.
You may find yourself asking: Am I missing the window? In reality, that headline describes a different market than the one you are selling into.
Deal value set a record while deal count went the other direction, and the split matters more than the headline number. Globally, deal count fell roughly 9%, to a six-year low, with a small number of megadeals doing most of the lifting. The business services category, the one that best captures companies like yours, told a narrower and more useful story: PCE Investment Bankers tracked 990 trailing-twelve-month transactions through Q1 2026, a 21% rebound off the Q1 2024 trough, while the median disclosed multiple compressed from 11.73x to 9.96x over that same window.
In this article, we discuss where the capital in B2B blue-collar services actually went in the first half, what is setting valuations for companies in the $3–25 million EBITDA range, and the handful of variables that move your number far more than the calendar does.
What Actually Happened in the First Half of 2026
For B2B blue-collar service owners, three things matter.
Capital concentrated in a small number of platforms. In May 2026, Apollo agreed to invest roughly $2 billion in Apex Service Partners, the residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical consolidator, at a valuation near $10 billion. Blackstone’s February 2026 acquisition of Champions Group priced near 18.5x EBITDA. That kind of capital is chasing scaled, multi-trade platforms, a position a $5 million EBITDA business does not occupy on its own, but one it can plug into.
Sector appetite is real and broad-based. Business services ranked first among all sectors by total U.S. private equity deal activity in 2024, and the pace has held into 2026. Within facilities services specifically, Lincoln International’s Q1 2026 update priced its Facilities Services Index at 15.6x EV/EBITDA and named Pye-Barker Fire & Safety, Sciens Building Solutions, Service Logic, and Summit Fire & Security among the most active acquirers of the quarter. The relevant question is not whether buyers are active. It is which platform is the right fit for a business your size, and whether they know you exist.
Pricing is bifurcated, not uniformly booming. At the smaller end, GF Data shows lower-middle-market multiples averaging 7.2x for full-year 2025 across sponsored deals in the $10–500 million range, essentially flat with 2024. But the range inside that average is wide. Fire and life safety and pest control (now roughly 60% private-equity-penetrated) command premiums. Undifferentiated single-trade shops without recurring revenue trade closer to 3x–5x. The assembled platforms above them, once built, trade well into the teens.
The Size Gradient
Most owners think of “B2B blue-collar services” as a single price point. It is not.
GF Data’s lower-middle-market reporting shows deals under $10 million of enterprise value averaging roughly 5.5x to 5.6x EBITDA, the $10–25 million tier moving up to 6.2x–6.7x, and the full $10–500 million universe landing at 7.2x for full-year 2025. Layer sub-sector on top of that and the range widens further. Bolt-on HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses generally trade at 4x to 8x depending on their recurring-revenue mix, while the platforms they roll into, names like Apex, Wrench, Service Logic, Pye-Barker, and Sciens, trade in the mid-to-high teens once assembled.
On $3 million of EBITDA, moving meaningfully up that gradient, from a standalone shop to a well-documented, recurring-revenue business run through a competitive process, is worth more than several years of organic growth. It is very likely the largest single financial event available to you.
What is driving that gradient? Some of it is simply size. A larger operation carries more route density, more management depth, and less owner dependency, and a buyer values that. You cannot manufacture that scale in the twelve months before a sale.
The other meaningful portion of the gradient is the same thing driving the multiple-arbitrage math behind nearly every platform in this market: process. How many qualified buyers saw the opportunity. Whether any of them believed there was a real alternative to their bid. How clean the financials and technician records were when they arrived. Those are not accidents of size. They are outcomes of preparation.
Who Is Actually Buying Right Now
Ask most owners in electrical, fire and life safety, HVAC, plumbing, or facilities services who buys businesses like theirs, and they will say private equity. In the lower middle market, they are largely right.
There are now more than 200 PE-backed platforms actively acquiring across electrical, roofing, HVAC, plumbing, pest control, and landscaping alone, and the pace has not slowed. Apex Service Partners closed roughly 60 add-on acquisitions in 2025. Pye-Barker Fire & Safety acquired 57 companies that same year. Sciens Building Solutions has completed 13 or more acquisitions and grown revenue more than 35-fold since its Carlyle-backed formation. For a business doing $2 million to $15 million in EBITDA, the buyer most likely to show up is a sponsor-backed platform running an active bolt-on strategy.
The picture shifts at scale. Once a business moves into commercial mechanical, national fire protection, or large-scale facilities services territory, publicly traded strategics compete directly with sponsors. APi Group folded the Chubb Fire & Security business into its life-safety segment in a $3.1 billion deal, and Comfort Systems USA and EMCOR continue acquisitive growth in commercial mechanical. That looks more like the dynamic in large industrial manufacturing, where strategics still set the pace. But for the great majority of B2B blue-collar service owners, sitting in the lower middle market, the honest answer to “who’s buying” is private equity.
Three buyer motives are important to understand:
Multiple arbitrage. This is the core economics behind nearly every platform in this market: buy small at 4x to 8x, integrate, and exit the assembled platform at a materially higher multiple. Industry roll-up trackers put platform-level exits anywhere from the low teens to 17x–20x for the most scaled home-services platforms. That arithmetic is what funds the acquisition pace you are seeing.
Workforce and licensure scarcity. Buyers are not primarily purchasing capacity. They are purchasing a trained, certified, retained workforce they cannot build fast enough on their own: NICET-certified fire technicians, EPA 608-certified HVAC technicians, licensed master plumbers and electricians. If your business has real depth on its bench and low technician turnover, that is the asset. The revenue is just what it produces.
Route density and adjacent-trade integration. The dominant platform structure has shifted from single-trade roll-ups toward combined HVAC-plumbing-electrical platforms, and from standalone fire protection toward fire, security, and monitoring bundles. Buyers are paying for density in a geography and the ability to cross-sell an adjacent trade into an existing customer base. If you hold strong share in a metro or a compliance niche, you may be worth more to a platform building density there than the standalone multiple on your P&L suggests.
Recurring Revenue and Workforce Depth Have Become the Diligence Line Item
The broader environment remains genuinely unsettled. Trade policy, financing costs, and general macro noise are all live variables, and equipment and parts costs have added some volatility to gross margins across the trades. We are not going to forecast where any of that lands.
What has already changed is how buyers behave. Service agreements, inspection and testing contracts, and membership plans are now diligenced line by line, earlier in the process, and sellers are being asked to document recurring revenue before valuation conversations rather than after. Technician retention, certification depth, and safety and claims history now get the same scrutiny that used to be reserved for the financials alone.
The practical translation is straightforward. A documented, contracted base of recurring revenue reads to a buyer as predictability, and predictability is being paid for. A business built on unlogged project work and a handful of key employees who could walk reads as risk, no matter how strong last year’s number was.
Same EBITDA, Very Different Numbers
Two B2B blue-collar service companies with identical EBITDA are routinely receiving materially different valuations, and the gap has widened over the past two years. Sub-sector and revenue quality now matter more than size alone.
Fire and life safety and pest control, both compliance-driven and recurring-revenue-heavy, are trading at a premium. Undifferentiated single-trade install and repair shops without a service-contract base sit closer to the bottom of the range. Within commercial services, such as HVAC specifically, larger operators with a real membership or maintenance-plan base command the top of the range, while smaller, project-dependent shops trade well below it. The differentiator is rarely growth rate. It is defensibility: how much of your revenue a buyer can count on next year without having to sell it again.
A short diagnostic, worth answering honestly:
- What share of revenue comes from recurring service agreements, inspection and testing contracts, or membership plans, versus one-time installs or project work?
- Which licenses or certifications would take a buyer years to replicate: state trade licenses, NICET, EPA 608, bonding capacity?
- What share of revenue sits with your three largest commercial accounts or general contractors?
- What is your technician turnover rate, and how many are certified beyond entry level?
- Does the company run if you stop showing up for ninety days?
Most owners can answer two or three of these well. The ones answered poorly are typically where we find the valuation gap lives.
If You Are Thinking About 2027
Owners often ask us whether now is a good time to sell. Tariff policy, wage pressure in the trades, and capital concentrating in the largest platforms are all real, and worth understanding. But for a well-prepared business, they are not the reason a deal succeeds or falls apart.
What actually determines your outcome is inside your control: recurring-revenue mix, customer concentration, technician retention and certification depth, financial reporting quality, and the breadth of the buyer universe you eventually run a process to. A business with those fundamentals in order finds a strong market almost regardless of the year, because the platforms in this space are still hungry for well-run, well-documented targets.
The question worth asking isn’t “is this a good year to sell.” It’s “is my business ready.” Those are different questions, and only one of them is something you can act on this quarter.
If you would like to understand what a realistic range of value looks like given your sub-sector and customer mix, let’s have a conversation. Contact us here.