Measured from the crawl of August 19, 2026 across 2,089 active Florida business listings. Computed when this page was built — not copied from a survey, and not a rule of thumb. It moves every week.
SDE stands for seller's discretionary earnings. It is the single number almost every small-business listing advertises, it is the number a valuation multiple gets applied to, and it is the number most likely to be quietly generous. Understanding how it is built is the difference between reading a listing and being sold one.
SDE is what the business earned for one full-time owner-operator, before that owner pays themselves. You start with net profit as the tax return reports it, then add back the things that exist because of how this particular owner runs the business rather than because of the business itself:
The logic is reasonable: strip out this owner's personal choices so a buyer can see what the business would produce for them. Every one of those add-backs is also an opportunity to overstate, and nobody audits the list.
1,796 of 2,089 active listings publish an SDE figure. Here is the whole distribution — not an average, which one $4M outlier would distort:
| Percentile | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 10th | $40,787 | One in ten advertises less than this |
| 25th | $75,000 | A quarter of the market is at or below |
| 50th (median) | $139,730 | The middle listing |
| 75th | $261,001 | Top quarter starts here |
| 90th | $453,802 | One in ten advertises more than this |
Median revenue among those same listings is $564,169, so the typical business here keeps about 25 cents of SDE per dollar of sales. That ratio is a fast sanity check: a listing claiming a far higher margin than its industry normally earns is either exceptional or has been generous with its add-backs, and it is worth finding out which.
454 of the 1,796 listings publishing SDE — 25% — advertise $75,000 or less. That is at or under what it would cost to hire a manager to run the place. Deduct a market wage from the median listing and $139,730 becomes $64,730.
This matters because SDE is explicitly earnings for an owner-operator. It already assumes you are the labour. If the SDE is roughly what the job pays, you are not buying a business that earns money — you are buying a job, and paying a multiple of your own future salary for the right to do it. That can still be a fine decision. It is a very different decision from the one the listing appears to be offering.
"Can I see the add-back schedule?" Ask for SDE reconciled line by line back to the tax return. A prepared seller has this. If the add-backs are large relative to net profit, each one needs its own justification.
"Which add-backs will actually go away when I take over?" The owner's salary genuinely does. A family member doing real work does not — you will have to replace them, and that cost belongs back in the numbers. This single question moves the price on a surprising number of deals.
"What does the business earn after paying someone market rate to run it?" This is the lender's question, and it is the one that separates a business from a job. You can compute it yourself from any listing: SDE minus roughly $75,000.
See what listings publish What multiple gets applied to it What you can afford
Every figure underneath is seller-reported and unaudited. Our checks test arithmetic, not truth. How the screening works →
Published by Main Street Diligence. Screening tools for Florida business buyers. This is general information, not legal, financial or tax advice.