The Frankfurt succession market in numbers (2026)

Published: 26 August 2026 · 16 min readSuccessionRhein-Main

The Frankfurt succession market in numbers (2026)

On 25 August 2026, 412 companies in Hesse were listed for sale on nexxt-change, the state-backed succession exchange run by the federal government, the KfW and the chambers. 39 of them sit in Frankfurt am Main. Against them stood 291 buyer listings, meaning buyers who have placed an advertisement of their own there. We counted both figures ourselves on that day, by region, sector, asking price and headcount, and this page is recounted every quarter.

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Your Steuerberater and Anwalt decide before anything binds.

The decision

Anyone who wants to sell in Frankfurt or the Rhein-Main region in 2026 should not open with the listing. The public exchange is the bottom end of the market. Of the 373 Hessian offers that state a headcount, 245 have at most five employees, and of the 254 offers that state a price, 150 sit below €250,000. A company with €150,000 or more of adjusted annual profit sits above that crowd rather than inside it. The order the numbers suggest: first the free Sprechtag at the IHK, the regional chamber of industry and commerce every German company belongs to, where a Sprechtag is an advice day with a one-to-one appointment that costs nothing (four dates are still open in Frankfurt for 2026), then get the figures in order, then list, and in parallel approach the buyers who already have a buyer listing running. That flips if the ratio flips. Today Hesse has 1.42 sale offers per buyer listing against 3.02 nationwide. If Hesse passes three offers per buyer listing at the next count, the exchange is finished as a sales channel and direct approach is the only route left.

What is for sale in Hesse

nexxt-change is the exchange for Unternehmensnachfolge, the handover of a company to a new owner, which the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, the KfW (the German state development bank) and the chamber associations have run together since 2006. Listings appear anonymously under a code, 431 regional partners release them, and the KfW puts the handovers initiated since the start at 22,300 (KfW Research, January 2026). Over more than twenty years that is around 1,100 brokered handovers a year for the whole of Germany.

The first finding is the ratio of supply to demand. Hesse accounts for 6.4% of the national sale offers and for 13.8% of the buyer listings. Every Hessian listing faces more than twice as many searching buyers as the national average.

Metric Hesse Germany Hesse share
Sale offers 412 6,390 6.4%
Buyer listings 291 2,114 13.8%
Sale offers per buyer listing 1.42 3.02 –
Offers through a broker 62 (15.0%) 781 (12.2%) –
Offers direct from owner or company 350 (85.0%) 5,605 (87.7%) –

As of 25 August 2026, our own count of the public nexxt-change search.

Regionally the supply concentrates in southern Hesse. The Darmstadt administrative district, meaning the Rhein-Main region with Frankfurt, Offenbach, Wiesbaden and Darmstadt, carries 196 of the 412 offers.

Region Sale offers Buyer listings
Darmstadt administrative district (Rhein-Main, southern Hesse) 196 49
of which Frankfurt am Main 39 17
of which Main-Kinzig-Kreis 24 6
of which Wiesbaden 23 7
of which Groß-Gerau 14 3
of which Wetteraukreis 13 3
of which Hochtaunuskreis 11 1
of which Darmstadt-Dieburg 11 1
of which Darmstadt, city 9 5
of which Bergstraße 8 3
of which Offenbach, city 5 5
of which Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis 5 0
of which Main-Taunus-Kreis 4 3
of which Offenbach, district 3 4
of which Odenwaldkreis 2 1
Gießen administrative district (central Hesse) 55 18
Kassel administrative district (northern Hesse) 91 26
Recorded at state level only 70 198
Hesse total 412 291

As of 25 August 2026, our own count. The district figures do not add up to the administrative-district figure: a sale offer has exactly one seat, a buyer listing can tick several districts. 70 offers and 198 buyer listings carry "Hessen" and nothing finer.

By sector the skilled trades lead. A listing can carry several categories, so the column adds up to more than 412.

Category Sale offers in Hesse
Skilled trades (Handwerk) 109
Services 97
Trade and retail 88
Hospitality 38
Manufacturing 37
Construction 27
Health and social care 19
Information and communication 15
Infrastructure 9
Real estate and housing 5
Arts, entertainment and recreation 5
Agriculture, forestry and fishing 5
Mining and quarrying 0

As of 25 August 2026, our own count. Multiple categories possible, total 454 across 412 listings.

The size distribution explains why the exchange behaves the way it does. 245 of the 373 offers that state a workforce have at most five employees, and only 18 companies in the whole of Hesse have more than 20. Anyone looking for a company with 15 people and a Meister on the payroll, the certified master craftsman a German trades business needs in order to train and in many trades to operate at all, has 60 candidates in Hesse rather than 412.

Employees Offers in Hesse
Up to 5 245
6 to 10 68
11 to 20 42
21 to 50 12
51 to 100 4
Over 100 2
Not stated 39

As of 25 August 2026, our own count.

What the sellers are asking

341 of the 412 Hessian offers state an annual revenue, 254 state an asking price. Both distributions sit well below what the KfW measures for the German Mittelstand as a whole, the band of owner-run small and mid-sized companies.

Band Asking price Last annual revenue
Up to €50,000 52 23
Over €50,000 to €250,000 98 99
Over €250,000 to €500,000 38 62
Over €500,000 to €2.5 million 53 124
Over €2.5 million 13 33
Not stated 158 71

As of 25 August 2026, our own count of the Hessian nexxt-change offers.

59.1% of the Hessian offers with a stated price want less than €250,000. The median therefore sits in the band between €50,000 and €250,000. For the German Mittelstand as a whole the KfW measures an average asking price of €499,000 and a median of €375,000 for handovers through to the end of 2029 (KfW Research, Fokus Volkswirtschaft No. 526, 9 January 2026). The distance is selection at work. An owner expecting €500,000 or more usually sells through an adviser or a direct contact and places no anonymous coded listing.

A second distance sits between the asking price and what actually gets paid. The KfW converts the asking prices into a multiple of annual revenue and arrives at 1.2x on average and 0.6x at the median. It sets those against the FINANCE revenue multiples, corridors drawn from completed transactions and expert estimates in the micro-cap segment (companies up to €20 million of annual revenue, as of November 2025).

Sector Seller expectation (KfW, avg. 2025) Paid, micro-cap corridor (FINANCE, 11/2025)
All sectors, average 1.2x annual revenue –
All sectors, median 0.6x annual revenue –
Construction / skilled trades – 0.25x to 0.50x
Bricks-and-mortar retail – 0.30x to 0.55x
Transport / logistics – 0.41x to 0.75x
Advisory services – 0.56x to 1.03x
Electrical engineering / digital industry – 0.75x to 1.15x
Software / IT services – 1.33x to 2.30x

As of 25 August 2026. Source for both columns: KfW Research, Nachfolge-Monitoring Mittelstand 2025, Table 2, published 9 January 2026, carrying the FINANCE multiples as of November 2025.

For a trades business that reads as follows. The average seller applies 1.2x revenue, and the corridor for construction and the trades stops at 0.50x. On €1.5 million of revenue that is €1.8 million of expectation against a corridor of €375,000 to €750,000. The median seller at 0.6x lands on €900,000 and still sits above the corridor. Exactly that distance is why the KfW finds "agreeing the purchase price" named as a succession obstacle by 30% of Mittelstand companies, and why many conversations end at the second meeting. Deriving the price from adjusted profit instead of revenue produces a number a bank can also finance. How a buyer builds that number is in Selling a company in Rhein-Main: what a buyer reads first.

How many handovers Hesse has ahead of it

The KfW counts the national picture: roughly 109,000 planned handovers a year to the end of 2029, roughly 114,000 planned closures a year, more than 2 million owners aged 55 or older, and an average asking price of about €499,000, up about 34% since 2019 (KfW Research, Nachfolge-Monitoring Mittelstand 2025, 9 January 2026).

There is no Hessian version of that count, and we are not going to manufacture one by multiplying the national number by a population share. What we do have is a measured Hessian share of one specific thing: 6.4% of the sale offers on the public exchange and 13.8% of the buyer listings. Those two shares describe the exchange, not the economy, and the exchange is the bottom end of the market. Anyone quoting "so many thousand handovers in Hesse" is scaling a national survey by a ratio nobody published. We would rather report the count we actually made and leave the rest open.

Where buyers and sellers meet for nothing

Four standing appointments in the region cost the participant nothing. All four were checked on 26 August 2026.

Appointment Who runs it Where Dates and cost What to bring
Sprechtag Unternehmensnachfolge IHK Frankfurt am Main Börsenplatz 4, Frankfurt Four dates left in 2026: 16 September, 21 October, 11 November, 16 December. Free The transferor questionnaire and the last three annual accounts as PDFs, in advance. Registrations without them are not processed
Betriebsberatung and Betriebsbörse Handwerkskammer Frankfurt-Rhein-Main Frankfurt On request. Free for member businesses and founders The Betriebsbörse passes contact details between the two sides, so a short profile of the business
Beratungsangebot für Unternehmen und Existenzgründungen RKW Hessen Eschborn, alongside Sprechtage in Darmstadt, Wiesbaden and ten other Hessian locations On request. The initial consultation is free, and RKW gives more than 4,000 of them a year Nothing prescribed for the first conversation
Financing and funding Sprechtag WIBank, the Hessian development bank, at the IHK Frankfurt We could not confirm the 2026 dates on the WIBank pages on the day. Ask the IHK when booking the succession Sprechtag The financing question, ideally with the figures

As of 26 August 2026. The IHK dates and document requirement come from the chamber's own Sprechtag page, the Handwerkskammer terms from its Betriebsbörse page, the RKW figures from its own advisory pages. The WIBank row is the one we could not verify, and it is marked rather than dropped.

Method

Every figure on this page is either counted by us or taken from a named publication. Here is how they came about, with their weaknesses.

The nexxt-change figures. On 25 August 2026 we queried the public nexxt-change search mask, once per filter combination, and took the hit count the page itself returned. We filtered on the "Bundesland" field, the federal state, for Hesse, and below that on administrative districts and districts, on the categories, the asking price, the last annual revenue, the headcount and the listing type. Not a single listing page was opened and no company name was recorded, and only totals are published. Three weaknesses. A listing can carry several categories, so the sector total exceeds the overall count. 158 of the 412 offers state no asking price at all, so the price distribution describes 62% of the stock. And a buyer listing can tick several districts and several federal states, so a Hessian buyer listing does not mean the buyer is searching in Hesse alone.

We could not count DUB.de. The second large German company exchange returns its hit lists only inside the browser and blocks the /api/ path in its robots.txt. A count would need an account and would work against the provider's own access rule, so we left it alone. We therefore report only what DUB publishes itself: "über 5.000 geprüfte Unternehmen aus ganz Europa", more than 5,000 vetted companies from across Europe, more than 90,000 registered users, and on its own Hesse page the statement that by 2026 "Berechnungen zufolge bis zu 11.500 Firmen", up to 11,500 companies according to calculations, were preparing for an Unternehmensnachfolge in Hesse (DUB.de, retrieved 25 August 2026). Whose calculation that is does not appear there, and the figure cannot be checked.

The chambers do not count themselves. The IHKs in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt and Offenbach and the Handwerkskammer Frankfurt-Rhein-Main, the chamber every skilled-trades business in the region belongs to, publish no stock figure of their own for succession cases. They are regional partners of nexxt-change and release the listings from their district, so the 412 Hessian offers already contain the chamber stock. The Betriebsbörse of the Handwerkskammer, its own company exchange, runs alongside with no published count.

Every price and multiple figure comes from the KfW Nachfolge-Monitoring Mittelstand 2025 (Fokus Volkswirtschaft No. 526, 9 January 2026) and from the FINANCE revenue multiples as of November 2025 reprinted there. Both are national figures. There is no Hessian version, and we did not invent one.

What this means for you

For owners who want to sell in the next two to five years

  • Your company probably sits near the top of the size distribution. 245 of the 373 Hessian offers with a stated headcount have at most five employees. A company with 12 people and running maintenance contracts does not compete with those 245.
  • The price is derived from adjusted profit rather than from revenue. The seller side applies 1.2x revenue on average, and the paid micro-cap corridor for construction and the trades stops at 0.50x.
  • If your company sits in the Rhein-Main region, earns €100,000 to €400,000 of annual profit and runs without you: talk to us as a buyer. Purchase price €300,000 to €1 million, permanent ownership, the first conversation confidential and with no broker in the price.
  • If you want a number first: succession and sale preparation costs from €9,500 fixed price with us, and never for a company we want to buy ourselves.

For the Steuerberater and bank adviser beside the owner

  • The gap between 1.2x revenue and the paid corridor is why clients drop out in the second round of negotiation. The bridge from reported to adjusted earnings is your work and the part the buyer reads first.
  • The free appointments in the table above are the cheapest first step for your clients. The IHK Sprechtag asks the seller for three annual accounts in advance.

For other buyers

  • 291 buyer listings in Hesse against 412 offers means you are not alone, and competition nationwide is three times weaker than it is here. Searching in Hesse means searching where the buyers are.
  • 62 of the 412 offers run through a broker. The other 350 come straight from the owner or from the chamber, and no commission sits in the price.

For founders building a holding

  • The size distribution is the real news. 18 companies in the whole of Hesse with more than 20 employees are publicly for sale. A programme that needs several units cannot be fed from the exchange alone.
  • The buyer-listing side is the cheapest visibility in the market. A buyer listing of your own costs nothing and is read by 431 regional partners.

Where we could be wrong

  • The number 412 is a snapshot of a stock, not an annual statistic. Listings run for different lengths of time, and a stock of 412 can mean twice the annual flow at a short dwell time that it means at a long one. nexxt-change publishes no dwell time. If the next count in December 2026 comes in above 500 or below 320, the snapshot was not representative and the order in the decision changes.
  • The ratio of 1.42 offers per buyer listing overstates demand if many buyer listings search nationwide and only tick Hesse alongside. 198 of the 291 Hessian buyer listings name no district. If a sample shows that more than half of those run in five or more federal states at once, Hessian demand is smaller than the number looks.
  • Scaling the KfW figures to Hesse assumes that Hesse's age structure and sector mix match the national average. That is demonstrably not exactly the case. If the Hessian statistical office or the KfW publishes a Hessian analysis that departs from our calculation by more than 20%, their figure applies and ours does not.
  • The price distribution describes only the 254 offers with a stated price. If the 158 offers without a price are systematically more expensive because their owners keep the price open on purpose, the true median sits above the band of €50,000 to €250,000.

FAQ

How many companies in Hesse are looking for a successor?

Publicly listed it was exactly 412 on nexxt-change on 25 August 2026, of which 196 in the Rhein-Main region and 39 in Frankfurt am Main. That is the visible part. The total stock lies far above it, because most handovers are never listed publicly.

What does a company in Hesse cost on average?

On nexxt-change 254 Hessian offers state an asking price, and 150 of them sit below €250,000. Nationwide the KfW measures an average asking price of €499,000 for handovers through to 2029, at a median of €375,000 (January 2026). Payment follows adjusted profit rather than revenue. What a seller asks and what a bank finances are two different numbers.

Where do I find free succession advice in Frankfurt?

At the Sprechtag Unternehmensnachfolge of the IHK Frankfurt am Main, at the business advisory service and the Betriebsbörse of the Handwerkskammer Frankfurt-Rhein-Main, at the RKW Hessen advisory offering in Eschborn and at the financing and funding Sprechtag of the WIBank held at the IHK. All four cost nothing. The dates are in the table above, with the four open 2026 dates for the IHK Sprechtag and a note on the WIBank row that we could not confirm its dates on the day.

How many buyers are there per seller?

In Hesse 291 buyer listings face 412 sale offers, so 1.42 offers per buyer listing. Nationwide it is 3.02. Hesse pulls 13.8% of all German buyer listings onto 6.4% of the offers. In Frankfurt am Main 39 offers face 17 buyer listings. A buyer listing can name several federal states, so the number describes interest in Hesse rather than exclusively Hessian buyers.

Further reading

Sources

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Your Steuerberater and Anwalt decide before anything binds.

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