US searchers have been told UK businesses sell at half the American multiple. They do not: that figure was a size effect. The real case is competition. Our register counts ~15 investor-backed UK searches started in 2024 and 2025, against 181 new US and Canadian funds, and most UK targets sit on a free public register long before any adviser is selling them.
Set your sector, region and EBITDA range, owner age included, and see which UK companies fit. The free trial includes 3 unlocks to reveal the companies behind the matches.
Start free trialA US searcher entering the market in 2026 faces a crowded home pipeline, and has probably been told the UK is half price. It is not. That figure set a UK business earning £200k against the American search-fund median and called the size difference geography; at matched size, the published UK multiple is 5.6x against the 6.2x American search funds pay. The case for the UK is competition. There are far fewer searchers here, the businesses they want sit on a complete, free, identity-level register, and most of those businesses will never be put through a sale by an adviser, which is where every published multiple comes from. That is the trade. This article makes it with numbers, including the ones that cut against it.
The problem a US searcher is trying to escape is not price. It is other searchers. Stanford confirmed 181 new core search funds in the United States and Canada across 2024-25, and that count leaves out every self-funded and SBA-financed buyer chasing the same businesses.
Our register of UK search funds records ~15 investor-backed UK searches started in the same two years. Count self-funded searchers too and ~40–60 UK searches are under way today. Against 28,083 PURSUE-grade UK companies, that is ~450–700 qualified targets for every search in progress. We cannot give the American equivalent, and the reason is the next section: nobody can score the US register, because there isn't one.
Every UK multiple later in this article comes from a sale run by an adviser. Dealsuite's figures are M&A advisory firms reporting on the deals they advised. That is the price of a business somebody has decided to sell, prepared for sale and shown to a list of buyers.
Most small UK businesses never get there. 468,495 companies have a single director aged 60 or over and nobody else on the board. When that owner decides to go, the first credible buyer to make contact may well be the only one.
That is the point of proprietary search, and the international data says searchers know it. IESE's 2024 study of search funds outside North America finds proprietary search, meaning direct contact with owners, is their main source of deals, and observes that buying a small business through a competitive process may, in many cases, fail to deliver a reasonable price. In the UK, a searcher can find those owners on a free public register before any adviser has been hired.
The single biggest reason to consider the UK is one most US searchers don't appreciate until they've actually run searches in both markets. Every active UK limited company files at least the following with the public register, free of charge:
Full director details: name, month and year of birth, appointment date, current and former directorships. Annual accounts: balance sheet at minimum for small companies, full statutory accounts for medium and larger entities. Confirmation statement, listing all persons with significant control (PSCs), shareholdings and voting rights. Charges register: every secured loan, every floating charge, every debenture. Filing history: late filings, methodology changes, restatements, every dissolution attempt.
All of it is machine-readable through the bulk data API. The complete dataset of 3.8 million active companies is downloadable as a single file. Director-level data goes back decades. Accounts data filed in iXBRL format is fully parseable.
There is no equivalent in the US. Delaware, the most popular US incorporation state, does not publish director names. Most US states require essentially nothing beyond a registered agent. Owner-operated businesses are functionally invisible until they hire a broker or list on a platform. US searchers spend the bulk of their search-phase budget paying for proprietary databases, broker relationships and outbound prospecting, much of it duplicating what Companies House gives away free.
Stanford's 2026 study reports that searchers in the 2024-25 cohort raised a median of $550,000 per principal, from a median of 13 investors, and then searched for a median of 21 months. A meaningful share of that budget pays for data access, list-building, broker outreach and CRM tooling, which is work that Companies House performs for the UK market at zero marginal cost. A US searcher with a UK thesis can redirect that budget to relocation, legal structuring and travel. The dollar value of the data subsidy is hard to pin down precisely, but the directional saving is significant: tens of thousands of dollars on data alone, plus weeks of compressed timeline.
For context on US deal-sourcing economics, the average US searcher contacts more than 3,000 companies to make one acquisition. We broke down the full funnel (outreach to LOI to close) in our search fund deal sourcing analysis. The UK pipeline density flips the funnel ratio at the top, because more pre-qualified targets are visible from day one.
We analysed the entire active UK company register to map where the search-fund opportunity actually sits.
| Population segment | Count |
|---|---|
| Active UK companies with director and financial data | 3,762,514 |
| Single-director companies | 2,200,542 |
| Companies with average director age 60+ | 865,182 |
| Single-director companies, director 60+ | 468,495 |
| Single-director companies, director 70+ | 121,653 |
| Sole director, 15+ years tenure | 299,540 |
| Sole director 60+, £50k+ total assets, no internal successor | 174,311 |
| PURSUE-grade: strong business + strong exit signals (the addressable pipeline) | 28,083 |
The single-director figure deserves attention. McKinsey's Great Ownership Transfer report describes US succession failure as a behavioural problem: owners who don't plan ahead. In the UK, it's structural. Nearly two-thirds of companies have no internal successor because there's nobody else in the building with legal authority. When that single director ages out, the only options are sell or dissolve.
Companies House recorded 787,120 dissolutions in the year to March 2026, up 8.31% on the prior year (published 25 June 2026). Average dissolved-company age: 4.93 years. The pipeline of forced succession events is intensifying, not slowing.
For a US-based searcher, this matters specifically because the pre-approach signal is fully visible. Tighten the filter to sole directors over 60 with at least £50k in total assets and no internal successor: 174,311 companies, £202.3 billion in balance-sheet assets. None listed for sale. None with a broker. None that any other US searcher is currently looking at.
The most defensible single number we publish is this: 28,083 UK companies are PURSUE-grade, meaning a strong business meets strong exit signals.
PURSUE on the ExitRadar model means the intersection of two lenses: a business that clears the quality gate (reasonable financial health: positive net assets, sustained filings, no insolvency flags) AND shows strong exit-timing signals (director age, single-director risk, sole-officer history), in a sector with active acquirer demand.
This is the genuinely addressable pipeline. Established, asset-backed, owner-operated businesses with visible succession pressure and no buyer in sight. Almost none have a broker. Most have never had an unsolicited acquisition approach. A US-based searcher can filter this dataset by sector, region, score band and director age in minutes.
None of this is a claim that UK businesses are cheap. The published figures say they are not, and this section sets them out at matched size. Read every multiple in it for what it is: the price paid in a sale run by an adviser or a broker.
You will read, in a lot of places including earlier versions of this article, that UK businesses sell at roughly half the American multiple. The usual construction sets a UK small-company multiple of 3.3x against Stanford's search-fund median of 7.0x and reports the difference: 53% cheaper.
The arithmetic is right. The comparison is not, for three reasons that all push the same way.
The two figures describe businesses of wildly different sizes. 3.3x is what a business earning £200k of EBITDA fetches. Stanford's median acquisition in 2024-25 had a median EBITDA of $2.5M and a median price of $16.0M. That is not the same business in two countries. It is a corner shop set against a company an order of magnitude larger, with the entire small-firm discount quietly relabelled as geography.
They are not even the same measure. US deals below $2M of purchase price are conventionally quoted on Seller's Discretionary Earnings, which adds the owner's own pay back into profit. SDE is structurally the bigger number, so its multiple is structurally the smaller one. Comparing a UK EBITDA multiple to a US SDE multiple flatters the UK before anybody has looked at a business.
And they count different buyers. Stanford's study covers core search funds in the United States and Canada, meaning funds "led by a first-time search entrepreneur and funded in the search phase by multiple investors". Self-funded searchers and SBA-financed buyers are excluded outright. If you are an SBA buyer, the benchmark you are being sold the discount against does not contain a single deal like yours.
Here is every published figure we can stand behind, with the size each was struck at.
| Market | Deal size | Multiple |
|---|---|---|
| UK & Ireland | £200k EBITDA | 3.3x |
| UK & Ireland | £500k EBITDA | 4.3x |
| UK & Ireland | £1m EBITDA | 4.9x |
| UK & Ireland | £2m EBITDA | 5.6x |
| UK & Ireland | £5m EBITDA | 7.1x |
| UK & Ireland | £10m EBITDA | 8.4x |
| United States | $2M–$5M enterprise value | 4.0x |
| United States | $5M–$50M enterprise value | 4.5x |
| US search funds | $2.5M median EBITDA | 6.2x |
| International search funds | $2.2M median EBITDA | 5.7x |
Every multiple in that table is struck on EBITDA.
UK figures are Dealsuite's UK&I M&A Monitor of February 2026, covering deals closed in the second half of 2025 (435 advisory firms contacted, 106 responding). US small and lower-mid figures are the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse for Q1 2026, from around 300 brokers and M&A advisers. US search-fund figures are Stanford GSB's 2026 Search Fund Study, Case E-967, covering 862 core funds with data to 31 December 2025. International search-fund figures are IESE's International Search Funds – 2024 (ST-658-E): core funds formed outside the US and Canada, to the end of 2023, on Stanford's definition.
Three rows of the US survey are missing from that table on purpose: Under $500K at 2.0x, $500K–$1M at 2.8x, $1M–$2M at 3.3x. Those are the SDE bands, and putting them in an EBITDA column would manufacture exactly the false bargain this section is about.
Three rungs of that ladder can be compared at matched size. Two of them say the UK is not cheap at all. The third is the one a search fund cares about.
At the bottom, the UK is dearer, by 0.3 of a turn. The American survey groups deals by the price paid; Dealsuite groups them by earnings. So each US band has to be converted first, and the conversion is simply price divided by multiple. US deals at $2M–$5M of enterprise value go at 4.0x: a $2M deal at that multiple is a business earning $0.50M, and a $5M one $1.25M, or roughly £370k to £930k at 1.35 to the pound. Dealsuite's band inside that range, £500k, goes at 4.3x: about 7% more.
Higher up, the UK is dearer still. US deals at $5M–$50M clear at 4.5x. By the same conversion, that band is businesses earning roughly £820k to £8.2m. The UK bands in that range price at £1m at 4.9x, £2m at 5.6x, and £5m at 7.1x: 0.4 to 2.6 of a turn above the American figure.
At search-fund size, the UK is about 10% cheaper than what American search funds pay. Stanford's median 2024-25 target earned $2.5M, about £1.9m, which sits in Dealsuite's £2m band: 5.6x against Stanford's 6.2x. IESE's international study, which counts search-fund deals outside North America on Stanford's definition, puts its median at 5.7x on $2.2M of EBITDA. Two independent datasets, one answer.
Dealsuite declines to price below £200k at all; its stated reason is that normalised EBITDA is too unstable in very small firms. And we compare only at a band it publishes. A business earning between two of its bands gets no figure of its own here, because a point fitted between two survey results is not a survey result.
Put the three together and the shape is clear. American search funds pay more than the American market does at the same size: 6.2x against 4.5x for the broker band their deals fall in. The UK sits between the two. A US searcher who crosses the Atlantic is not buying into a cheaper country. They are buying at the UK's going rate rather than at the premium American search funds have been paying.
Take a UK B2B services business with £2,000,000 of EBITDA, a 15-year client base, a sole owner aged 64. Sterling at 1.35 makes that $2.70M of earnings, close to Stanford's median target.
That is the number the American comparison has to use. An earlier version of this article did not: it applied Stanford's 7.0x to a business earning seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds as though the pounds were dollars, and reported a 13% discount that was an artefact of the currency slip rather than a finding about either market. The version after that priced the same business at the multiple Dealsuite gives a business earning £200k, which is the size error this article exists to correct.
At the UK rate for its size, 5.6x, the business is £11.20M, or about $15.12M. At Stanford's median, a US search fund pays $16.74M for the same earnings. Through the American broker market, at 4.5x, it would be $12.15M.
The dollar buyer saves about $1,620,000 against the search-fund price. Real money, roughly 10%. Not half, and no saving at all against the American market as a whole.
Sterling is not a second discount. Earlier versions of this article added "another 10–15%" for the exchange rate. That is not how it works. Converting dollars at 1.35 buys the pounds the deal costs; it does not make the business cheaper, and the same rate applies to every pound of working capital, every UK salary and every pound of eventual sale proceeds. A weak pound is a real gain only if you have a view that it will strengthen before you exit. That is a currency bet, not an acquisition thesis, and it can as easily run against you.
Note also what happens to the financing. A smaller multiple is a smaller cheque, but UK acquisition debt at this size is thinner and dearer than SBA 7(a); Part 6 covers the UK lenders now moving into that gap. The entry discount is not free money; some of it is handed back in the capital structure.
The most useful fact in this whole comparison is not about Britain.
Stanford's median search-fund entry multiple peaked at 7.3x in 2020-21. It has fallen two cohorts running since, to 7.0x in 2022-23, then 6.2x in 2024-25. That is 1.1 turns off the peak, about 15%.
So to whatever extent a transatlantic gap is closing, it is closing because American prices came down, not because British ones went up. A searcher who read the 7.0x figure in a 2024 write-up and has been budgeting against it since is working from a number the market has moved away from twice.
It is worth being precise about what the 3.3x reflects, because it is a real phenomenon, just not a national one.
Below about £10M of enterprise value the UK buyer pool thins sharply. UK private equity is paid on deployment, not deal count; a £3M ticket does not move a £500M fund. That is true in the US too, which is why the American small-deal bands sit at 4.0x and 4.5x rather than anywhere near the search-fund median.
UK business brokers complete only around 20% of mandates, and that figure flatters the small end because it includes mid-cap deals where success rates are higher. Most viable small sellers never reach an open market at all.
UK trade buyers are slower and more sceptical than US peers, a function of post-2008 caution, post-Brexit uncertainty and a domestic equity culture that has never been as acquisitive.
The result is thousands of viable sellers with no qualified buyer. That is a genuine market failure and it is genuinely exploitable. It is just not what "the UK is half price" means, and a searcher who arrives expecting the latter will misprice their first three offers.
The 28,083-company PURSUE pipeline isn't evenly distributed. Four sectors concentrate the strongest combination of fragmentation, succession pressure and pipeline density.
A note on what this section does not do. It gives UK multiples where a survey publishes them, and it does not pair them with American sector figures. Earlier versions did, and those pairings were the same error as the headline in miniature: unsourced US ranges, on unstated deal sizes, set against UK ones to imply a country-level discount. No public dataset prices UK and US businesses sector by sector at matched size, so we are not going to imply one exists.
Electrical contracting, mechanical services, plumbing and heating, civil engineering, demolition and groundworks. Median UK multiples for these trades sit at 3–5.5x EBITDA, around and a little above the 3.3x small-company floor, which is what you would expect of businesses this size.
Why the pipeline is deepest here: UK specialised construction is intensely fragmented and owner-operated. Its owners do not in fact skew older than the national average (20.4% of construction companies have an average director age of 60 or over, against 23.5% across the register), but the sector is so large that it still holds the biggest PURSUE pipeline of any we track. The work itself is non-cyclical at the small end (residential and commercial maintenance demand is structural) and the relationships are local. A US searcher targeting a regional buy-and-build platform in UK electrical contracting can typically build a £3–5M EBITDA platform across three to five tuck-ins, and can identify every one of those tuck-ins from the public register before making a single call.
Owner-operated consulting practices with established client bases, often founded in the early 2000s. Multiples sit at 5–8x for established firms, with quality premiums for recurring revenue, contracted services and concentration in growth-segment clients (tech, financial services, regulated sectors).
Dealsuite's H1 2025 sector cut has UK&I business services trading around 6.0x, comfortably above the 3.3x small-company floor, and close to Stanford's 6.2x search-fund median. This is the sector where a searcher expecting a bargain is most likely to be surprised: the UK price for a good B2B services business is a full price. What is denser in the UK is the pipeline at the £500k–£2M EBITDA band, not the discount.
Care homes, dental practices, veterinary, allied health. Subject to CQC and other regulatory regimes that US searchers underestimate, but pricing power is strong, exit demand from PE-backed roll-ups is consistent, and the demographic tailwind (UK over-65 population growing 1.5% annually) is structural. UK&I healthcare and pharmaceuticals trades at 7.6x in the same H1 2025 sector cut, the highest sector multiple after software, and well above anything in the US tables above. Small independent practices and homes still transact at 4–6x, particularly outside major metro areas, and that is the band a searcher can actually reach.
A US searcher with a healthcare-services background can target consolidation plays in regional dental, optometry and veterinary chains where the regulatory complexity is the moat that keeps PE roll-ups from cherry-picking the entire market.
Particularly the West Midlands and Cambridgeshire clusters. UK precision engineering trades at 4.5–6.5x EBITDA, a full turn or more above the small-company floor, because the asset backing supports it.
This sector punches above its weight in our exit-readiness data because the founder cohort is heavily weighted to 1980s and 1990s incorporations. Engineers who founded businesses at 35 are now 65–75. Internal succession is rare, as children typically don't enter the family engineering business at the rate they once did. Trade buyers exist but are slow. The combination produces a deep pipeline of viable, asset-backed manufacturers with motivated sellers.
Property management, lettings agencies, surveyors. Highly fragmented, owner-operated and chronically under-marketed, and searchers do buy them; multiples sit at 4–6x for established firms with recurring revenue. It sits outside our scored universe, though: property is not one of the sectors we score, so nothing in the pipeline figures above speaks to it either way. It is here because searchers ask about it, not because our data recommends it.
London holds the largest exit-ready pipeline by absolute count. But the highest concentrations (exit-ready companies per 10,000 active companies) sit outside it, and London ranks last of the twelve UK regions on that measure. The pattern reflects a generation of business builders who left London after the 1980s, established companies in commuter and industrial regions, and built them over 25–35 years. Those owners are now ageing out.
For a US-based searcher, the practical implication is that none of these sectors require relocating to a major financial centre. London is not the deal flow. Reading, Maidstone, Solihull and Cambridge are. House prices are 50–60% lower than London. Operating costs are lower. Quality of life is generally higher. The ETA pattern of acquiring in a smaller commuter market and operating from there is the same one that works in the US, on a register where you can see every candidate before you spend a penny.
None of this is free. Three frictions need to be solved. None are absolute. All are routinely handled by experienced cross-border operators. The honest answer is that they add roughly six months and £15,000–£40,000 of professional fees to a transaction. They don't change the underlying math.
A US citizen cannot legally operate a UK business they own without an appropriate visa, unless they hold dual UK or Irish nationality. Since the closure of the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) and Tier 1 (Investor) routes, the realistic options are:
Self-Sponsorship via the Skilled Worker route. Set up a UK Ltd, obtain a sponsor licence, then sponsor yourself as a Skilled Worker in a CEO or director role. Five years to indefinite leave to remain. Cost typically £3,500–£5,000 in fees on top of the acquisition itself. This is the standard path for international ETA operators. It works because the acquired business can serve as the sponsoring entity once the deal closes, but structural sequencing matters and benefits from specialist advice.
Innovator Founder visa. Designed for genuinely novel businesses with endorsement from an approved body. Wrong fit for traditional ETA acquisitions of established businesses, but occasionally relevant for buy-and-build platforms with a clear innovation thesis.
Standard Visitor visa (with ETA from 25 February 2026). Sufficient for site visits, management meetings, deal negotiation and signing, for up to six months per visit. Not sufficient for actually running the business.
Passive ownership with a UK-resident operator. A US searcher who doesn't want to relocate can structure an acquisition as a passive ownership stake with a UK-based operating partner running the business day-to-day. Genuinely viable for buy-and-hold theses but creates principal-agent dynamics that need careful structuring upfront.
The Self-Sponsorship route is the standard path for hands-on operators. Total time to operating residency: typically 4–6 months from first solicitor engagement to visa issuance. This adds time but doesn't kill the deal.
This is the friction US searchers underestimate most often, and the one that catches people out late in a deal.
A US citizen who owns 10% or more of a UK Ltd faces obligations under the US Internal Revenue Code that don't apply to UK-resident owners.
Form 5471 must be filed annually with the IRS for any US person owning 10%+ of a foreign corporation. Penalties for non-filing start at $10,000 per year per company. This is paperwork, not a tax bill, but it is non-optional.
GILTI (Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income) taxes the profits of a Controlled Foreign Corporation owned by US persons even if those profits are not distributed. A single-member UK Ltd is almost always a CFC. The effective US tax rate on GILTI income depends on individual versus corporate ownership and whether you elect Section 962 treatment.
Subpart F taxes certain types of passive or related-party income from a CFC immediately, regardless of distribution.
The structural fix most US-side advisors recommend is the UK LLP rather than a UK Ltd, particularly when there is more than one US member or a mix of US and UK members. A UK LLP with two or more members can be treated as a flow-through entity for US tax purposes, meaning profits are taxed once on the partner's US return and the GILTI/Subpart F machinery does not engage.
The entity choice has to be made before the deal closes. Restructuring afterwards is possible but expensive and tax-inefficient. Cross-border tax counsel typically charges $15,000–$30,000 for the full structuring exercise on a single acquisition, more for buy-and-build platforms. That's one to two report unlocks per percentage point of multiple discount you're capturing. On a £3M deal it pays back many times over.
Running a small business remotely from another time zone is hard. The five-hour US-Eastern-to-UK gap is workable (most of the working day overlaps), but founder-led SMEs require physical presence in the early integration period.
The patterns that work in practice:
Relocate for the first 12–18 months, then move to a part-time supervisory model with a strong UK-based number two. Most successful cross-border ETA operators we see follow this pattern.
Acquire in matched pairs: a US-based investor with a UK-based operator, with the investor handling capital strategy and the operator running day-to-day execution. Common for institutional search-fund vehicles targeting cross-border deals.
Buy-and-build platforms with a UK-resident managing director. Particularly viable for sectors where the searcher's strategic value is M&A capability rather than operating expertise.
What doesn't work: trying to run an owner-operated UK SME from Austin on weekly Zoom calls. The seller has not done that, and the staff you're inheriting will not accept it.
Adding up the realistic friction:
Total professional fees: roughly £30,000–£60,000 ($40,000–$80,000) above what a domestic UK searcher would pay.
On a £4M enterprise-value deal, that's 1–2% of transaction value, comfortably inside an entry discount of 7%, and comfortably inside the value of a search that finds its target faster because the register is open. It is not, however, rounding error against a discount that no longer claims to be half. Budget it properly.
The sourcing advantage is not permanent either. Three forces are slowly closing it. Note that all three are about competition for the deals, not about price.
More international searchers are noticing. IESE and INSEAD ETA programmes are training operators specifically for European deals. INSEAD's 2026 ETA conference takes place in Fontainebleau in May. The international search-fund cohort tracked by IESE has roughly tripled over the past decade. Most of that growth is European searchers, but the share of US-trained operators specifically targeting UK acquisitions is rising.
UK PE is moving down-market slowly. Lower-mid-market UK PE funds are starting to write tickets at the £5–10M EV level. As fund sizes compress and dry powder pressure builds, the £3–5M segment will see more competitive bidding within the next three to five years.
Search-fund-friendly UK debt is becoming available. In our record of completed UK searcher deals, HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays were the lender of record on 5 in 2025 and 2026 alone, against 3 across the four years before, alongside specialists such as Shawbrook, Arbuthnot and Close Brothers. None of it carries a government guarantee, so nothing mirrors SBA debt yet, but as leverage availability improves, more UK-based searchers will enter the market.
None of these trends is fast. The advantage that exists today is likely to persist for the next five years, narrow over the following five, and look very different by 2036. A US searcher acting in 2026–2028 meets the least competition for an open register.
The forcing function on the supply side is the demographic curve. The UK has 1,064,959 active companies whose directors are currently in the 50–60 age bracket, and they will age into the 60+ cohort over the next decade. Behind them sit another 1,048,993 in the 40–50 bracket. The pipeline of structural succession events extends decades into the future. Supply is rising. Demand is rising more slowly. That is the imbalance worth acting on, and unlike the multiple, it is measured on our own data rather than inferred across an ocean.
If the math works for you, the operational sequence is straightforward.
1. Resolve the immigration question first. Talk to a UK-based immigration solicitor familiar with the Self-Sponsorship route, ideally one with experience in ETA and search-fund deals. The answer determines everything downstream.
2. Engage a cross-border tax adviser. Specifically one fluent in both UK corporate tax and US Form 5471 / GILTI / Section 962 treatment. The entity choice (UK Ltd versus UK LLP) needs to be made before signing.
3. Run your first searches in Companies House data directly. Build conviction that the dataset is real, complete and useful. Use ExitRadar or another data layer to filter, but verify against the underlying public register so you understand what you're working with.
4. Pick a sector and a region. Don't run a generalist search. The depth is in specific fragmented sectors with clear succession pressure: specialised construction, B2B services, healthcare services, precision manufacturing are where the data shows the strongest concentration of viable, unrepresented targets. Concentrate geographically (Essex, Kent, Surrey, Hampshire or the West Midlands) to make site visits tractable from a single base. The UK Acquisition Thesis Guide tests specific theses against the register, each with a ready-made buy box.
5. Plan for 18 months minimum. Cross-border ETA adds friction at every stage. The deals exist. The friction is real. Both can be planned around if you start with realistic expectations.
ExitRadar identifies UK businesses showing succession and exit signals using public Companies House data. Every active UK company in our database is scored against an exit-readiness model that combines director age and tenure, single-director risk, financial health, sector context and twelve other signals. Each unlocked report includes:
Full director profile with tenure history. Estimated revenue and EBITDA, with confidence ranges and method provenance. Indicative valuation range based on sector multiples adjusted for quality and earnings volatility. Recommended acquisition approach: channel, timing, opening narrative and deal-structure signals. Risk and diligence flags specific to the company and sector. Group-structure detection (parent and subsidiary relationships) so a US-based searcher doesn't approach the wrong entity. A draft approach letter calibrated to the owner profile.
The practical workflow: filter by sector, region, score band and director age in the public dataset; unlock targeted reports; approach selectively. Start with three free reports, then move to a Starter Pack for project work or the Searcher Plan for sustained monthly volume.
The permanently free sample report shows exactly what an unlocked report looks like before a US searcher commits anything.
Pick a sector, a region, a size and an owner profile and ExitRadar counts the companies that fit, live, from every scored company in the UK, then shows the best-fitting one, with its Exit Score and its identity withheld. 28,083 companies currently carry our top acquisition grade.
The platform is sector- and geography-agnostic on the buyer side. A searcher in Boston sees the same data as one in Bristol. Reports are generated on-demand from live Companies House data, so a US-based searcher running searches at 9am Eastern is looking at the same dataset a UK-based broker is looking at three hours later.
The honest summary is shorter than the one this article used to carry, and it holds up better.
On competition: ~15 investor-backed UK searches started in 2024 and 2025, against 181 in the US and Canada. ~450–700 PURSUE-grade UK companies for every UK search under way.
On price: the published UK multiple at search-fund size is 5.6x, a little under the 6.2x American search funds pay, and the famous half-price figure was a size effect. Those are adviser-run prices. A business found on the register and approached before it is marketed is not in that process.
On sourcing: 3.8 million active UK companies on a register that names directors, dates their appointments, carries filed accounts, secured charges and disclosed ownership, and is downloadable in bulk for nothing. 468,495 UK companies have a single director aged 60 or over and no internal successor. 28,083 are PURSUE-grade on our model. Almost none are with a broker, because the UK broker industry does not serve businesses this size.
There is no US equivalent to the register behind those numbers, and there is no argument about it. That is the trade.
For a US searcher entering the market in 2026, the question is not whether the UK is half price. It is not, and a plan built on that assumption will misprice its first offers. The question is whether an open register, a decade of demographic supply and a thin domestic buyer pool are worth six months of visa and tax structuring and £30,000–£60,000 of professional fees.
For a meaningful subset of US searchers, that is still an obvious yes. It is just a different yes than the one they were sold.
Company figures are ExitRadar's, derived from public Companies House filings on 3,762,514 active UK companies. UK multiples are from Dealsuite's UK&I M&A Monitor, February 2026 edition, covering deals closed in H2 2025 (435 advisory firms contacted, 106 responding); Dealsuite prices six bands of normalised EBITDA from £200k to £10m (its Figure 8a) and none below £200k; we compare only at a published band. International search-fund figures are from IESE's "International Search Funds – 2024" (ST-658-E), covering core funds outside the US and Canada to the end of 2023. US small and lower-mid-market multiples are from the IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse Survey, Q1 2026 (56th edition, ~300 advisers); in that survey deals up to $2M of purchase price are quoted on Seller's Discretionary Earnings and only $2M upward on EBITDA, and only the EBITDA bands are used here. US search-fund figures are from Stanford GSB's "2026 Search Fund Study: Selected Observations", Case E-967, published 30 June 2026 with data to 31 December 2025: 862 core funds, 2024-25 medians of $16.0M purchase price, $2.5M EBITDA and 6.2x entry multiple, and 181 new funds confirmed in that two-year cohort. Stanford's study covers the United States and Canada and counts only funds led by a first-time searcher and backed by multiple search-phase investors; self-funded and SBA-financed buyers are outside it. GBP/USD of 1.35 is used throughout for illustration only. Visa and tax framing is general guidance; every cross-border deal needs specialist advice from qualified UK immigration and US international tax practitioners.
A previous version of this article compared a UK £200k-EBITDA multiple with Stanford's search-fund median and reported the difference, 53%, as a country-level discount. It was a size comparison, not a geographic one, and the article's own worked examples contradicted it. It was corrected on 26 August 2026.
That correction said Dealsuite publishes no multiple between £200k and £10m. Its report prices six bands, and at matched size the comparison at the bottom of the market runs the other way: the UK is dearer there, not cheaper. The price section was rebuilt on the full curve on 29 September 2026.
About ExitRadar: ExitRadar identifies UK businesses showing succession and exit signals using public Companies House data. Reports provide pre-approach intelligence for search fund operators, ETA practitioners and business brokers in the UK, US and Europe. Browse the database and unlock reports at exitradar.co.uk.
Next stage of a search: choosing a thesis. The UK Acquisition Thesis Guide tests a set of theses against the register: how many companies fit each one, how old their owners are, and which buy-and-build platforms are already buying in it.