Private equity has spent the last decade rolling up commercial mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) specialty contractors. The traditional playbook: buy regional independents at 4x–6x EBITDA, integrate operations, build a regional MEP platform, and exit at 9x–11x to the next sponsor or a strategic. Same structure as home services — different entry and exit multiples.
That's been the model. The market just gave it a new option.
Public comps have run.
The equal-weighted EV/EBITDA multiple for the major MEP publics — Comfort Systems USA, EMCOR Group, and IES Holdings — has climbed from a 2021 calendar-year average of 13.2x to 22.9x in 2025, and sits at 24.2x as of late March. The primary driver: data center exposure. Hyperscaler capex is filling MEP order books with multi-year, high-margin work, and the public markets are paying up for it.
The IPO exit comes into focus.
If public comps hold in the 20x+ range, an MEP platform with the right scale and the right earnings mix has a path to a public-market exit at 15x+ — meaningfully above the 9x–11x historical PE-to-PE exit comp. That's a different IRR story for sponsor and LPs alike. We're hearing more PE-backed MEP platforms actively considering an IPO path that wasn't really on the table 18 months ago.
The open question.
Public-comp multiples here are tied to data center demand. If the hyperscaler buildout continues, 20x+ holds. If it doesn't, the IPO window closes quickly. The platforms being built right now are betting on the former.
So: do these multiples hold long enough for the platforms in market today to walk that path?
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