Payments Valuation Benchmarks: PayFac, Orchestration, and Infrastructure Multiples

Lower middle market payments companies trade in three tiers: PayFacs at 3x to 6x net revenue, orchestration platforms at 10x to 15x, and infrastructure and rails businesses at 12x to 20x. The spread is driven by gross margin, liability exposure, and scarcity, not volume. Window: Q1 2024 through Q3 2026. Refreshed quarterly.

By Jeff Barrington, Founder and Managing Director, Windsor Drake. Updated August 11, 2026.

Valuation multiples by payments business model

On EBITDA, mature profitable processors and infrastructure assets trade at 10x to 18x and above, with the Rule of 40 (growth plus profitability above 40 percent) acting as the valuation floor test buyers actually apply.

Net revenue versus gross revenue: the distinction that decides the multiple

Every multiple in this report is stated against net revenue unless marked otherwise. This is the single most common source of confusion in payments valuation. A PayFac reporting 2.9 percent gross capture surrenders 1.8 to 2.2 percent to interchange before earning anything; its economic revenue is the net spread, and applying an orchestration-tier multiple to its gross line overstates value by multiples of the real answer. Conversely, orchestration and infrastructure businesses book revenue that is already net, at 70 to 85 percent gross margins, which is precisely why their revenue multiples run two to four times higher. When comparing offers or comps, confirm which revenue line the multiple references before comparing anything else.

Revenue quality benchmarks buyers price against

Take rate and unit economics benchmarks

Typical PayFac gross capture runs near 2.9 percent of volume, with interchange consuming 1.8 to 2.2 percent, capping gross margins at 40 to 60 percent. PayFac-as-a-Service providers net 20 to 40 basis points on embedded volume. Every 10 percent of volume that shifts from debit to rewards credit costs roughly 15 to 20 basis points of net margin, a mix-shift risk buyers now model explicitly. Orchestration platforms, by contrast, run 70 to 85 percent gross margins and can document authorization-rate improvements of 2 to 5 percent, which is the operating metric their premium actually rests on. Transaction-linked revenues across the industry are growing about 6 percent annually against under 3 percent for non-transactional revenue.

The public market anchor

Public comps frame the private bands, and the spread is wide. On August 2026 trailing data, Adyen traded at 7.9x EV/Revenue on a 53 percent EBITDA margin while Euronet traded at 0.75x, roughly a tenfold spread inside one sector. Part of that gap is accounting rather than quality. Adyen reports net revenue while Shift4, Toast, and Block report gross revenue including pass-through interchange, which is why Shift4 screens at 1.6x. Restate Block against its own disclosed gross profit and the multiple moves from 1.9x to about 4.1x. The margin hierarchy does the rest: the 50 percent margin names, Adyen and Corpay, carry 13x to 15x EV/EBITDA, the at-scale processors in the 34 to 38 percent margin band, Fiserv, FIS, and Global Payments, trade at 7x to 11x, and distress compresses multiples regardless of scale, with Worldline below 1x revenue after a 93 percent share decline.

Data: stockanalysis.com (S&P Global), trailing twelve months as of August 8 to 11, 2026. These are GAAP-basis trailing multiples; deal multiples quoted on adjusted EBITDA run lower for the same company. For published forward medians, Houlihan Lokey’s Q1 2026 FinTech update puts the payments sector at 2.1x EV/Revenue and 6.9x EV/EBITDA on 2026 estimates, with merchant acceptance at 2.3x and 6.5x and B2B payments at 3.4x and 10.0x.

Recent transactions, and what was actually disclosed

Most payments deals never publish a price. Of the 36 deals The Strawhecker Group counted in the first half of 2026, only 11 disclosed terms. The table below is limited to transactions where the value is public, and multiples appear only where the acquirer stated them or where they compute from disclosed figures, in which case they are labeled computed.

Who is buying, and at what size

The buyer map churned hard through 2025 and 2026, and a list from even a year ago misleads. Global Payments and FIS are integrating the largest deals in their histories and divesting rather than hunting. The reliable bidders in the $5 million to $300 million band are the sponsor-backed consolidators and Shift4, with Fiserv still writing $50 million to $500 million tuck-in checks and Deluxe arriving as a new strategic through its $625 million Celero agreement.

Behind them sits refreshed sponsor capital. GTCR exited Worldpay at roughly two times its money in about two years, FTV Capital closed a record $4.05 billion raise in January 2025, and Great Hill Partners raised $7 billion. In this band the constraint is not buyer demand but diligence: The Strawhecker Group’s 2026 annual letter describes payments M&A in a more disciplined phase, where the portfolios that stand out are not the biggest but the cleanest.

Merchant portfolios and residual streams price on a different scale

Straight portfolio and residual sales do not price on EBITDA multiples at all. The published convention is a multiple of net monthly residuals, and the current guidance from portfolio advisory 733Park runs 28x to 46x monthly residuals: roughly 40x to 46x for portfolios with annual attrition under 7 percent on premium processors, 36x to 42x in the 7 to 12 percent band, 30x to 36x at 12 to 18 percent, and 28x to 30x for distressed books, with sub-ISO arrangements discounted a further 15 to 30 percent. Attrition is the swing variable and it is strongly size-dependent: The Strawhecker Group’s benchmarks put annual attrition near 21 percent for merchants under $250,000 in card volume against roughly 10 percent for merchants processing $1 million to $10 million. Two books with identical residual lines can differ by half in price on attrition and portability alone, which is why portfolio buyers open diligence with the merchant tape rather than the income statement.

Structural tailwinds priced into current multiples

Embedded payments are compounding at 30.3 percent annually through 2032, with embeddedness treated as proven once install-base adoption passes 40 percent. B2B payments remain the largest underpenetrated pool: a $135 trillion flow of which only 7 to 10 percent is digitized, with automation cutting processing costs 25 to 30 percent and B2B customer lifetime values running 3 to 4 times consumer fintech. The orchestration market itself is projected to grow from $1.8B in 2025 to $13.4B by 2034. On the regulatory side, US money transmitter license approval timelines have compressed roughly 35 percent, and stablecoin legislation has added a premium of about 25 percent to stablecoin-adjacent infrastructure since September 2025. AI-enabled payments capabilities carry a 20 to 30 percent premium in current processes.

Methodology

Multiples reflect disclosed transaction data, public comparables, and Windsor Drake analysis for the Q1 2024 through Q1 2026 window, with sources including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, McKinsey, BCG, Bain, FT Partners, PitchBook, and Houlihan Lokey research published through Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, plus deal filings. Named third-party figures on this page trace to their sources: the Global Payments and FIS deal multiples per the April 16, 2025 announcement; subsector medians per Houlihan Lokey’s Q1 2026 FinTech Market Update; public comparables per stockanalysis.com (S&P Global) as of August 8 to 11, 2026; deal counts per The Strawhecker Group as reported by Payments Dive, July 20, 2026; residual portfolio ranges per 733Park’s published valuation guide and TSG’s attrition benchmarks. Revenue multiples are stated against net revenue unless marked gross. Private ranges are stated as ranges, not point estimates, because sample counts in individual cells of this market are thin; where a figure is a single-transaction marker rather than a distribution, it is labeled as such. Transaction dates are stated in every comp. This page is the canonical version of the Windsor Drake payments valuation report; the PDF edition is a supplementary download of the same data. Related research: fintech valuation multiples, the Fintech Exit Index, and EBITDA multiples by industry. Advisory: fintech M&A advisory.

Windsor Drake is a sell-side M&A advisory firm for founder-led fintech, B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, and AI software companies. Headquartered in Toronto with a US office in New York.