Given more than 1.5 million private firms in the U.S. each generate over $1 million in annual revenue, they power a substantial share of the country’s output and employment and are attracting larger shares of investment flows.
But unlike public firms, they are difficult to analyze because there are no regulatory requirements at this time to publicly disclose standardized financial statements. As result, investors, lenders, and corporate development teams have historically been reliant on partial information, variable definitions, and small samples to benchmark private companies against key measurements such as revenue, cash flow, capital efficiency, and labor productivity.
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate a unique solution to consider: a practical benchmarking workflow that compares private companies by sector and size across revenue, EBITDA, EBITDA margin, return on assets, and revenue per employee. With our U.S. Private Company Tax-Imputed Financials dataset, we developed a simple scorecard framework (discussed below) to analyze the top 10,000 sponsor-backed (PE- and VC-backed) U.S. private companies.
Our tax-imputed private company financials are modeled estimates that standardize private company performance from U.S. tax reports and a broad set of government and regulatory inputs. Outputs include consistent sets of income statements, balance sheets, and operating metrics (e.g., revenue, net income, EBITDA, margins, assets, employee counts, and productivity measures) designed for benchmarking and screening at scale.
Before we discuss the scorecard framework below, it’s important to note a few caveats:
U.S.-based view: Figures primarily reflect U.S. operations derived from U.S. tax reporting and may differ from global consolidated results.
Standardized employment: Employee counts focus on W-2 full-time U.S. employment, excluding contractors and non-U.S. staff, and may differ from self-reported headcounts.
Reporting and matching variance: Differences in tax strategies and reporting timing (e.g., cash vs. accrual; quarterly vs. annual aggregation), and occasional entity-matching limitations (e.g., post-M&A naming changes), can introduce noise. That’s one reason we emphasize medians and apply minimum sample thresholds.
Financial statement methodology: These are not audited GAAP financial statements. However, they are standardized and comparable, designed for cross-company and cross-sector private market workflows.
Following is a repeatable approach for benchmarking private company fundamentals across multiple lenses with our U.S. Private Company Tax-Imputed Financials dataset and RBICS industry classification system.
It features five lenses with a key question for each. Together, the lenses form a compact scorecard that we will discuss with sector examples.
Revenue: Where is scale concentrated?
EBITDA: Who leads operating cash flow?
EBITDA margin: How does profitability change by size?
ROA: Where is capital used most efficiently?
Revenue per employee: Which sectors are most productive?
Scale is led by everyday-economy sectors, not the headline cycle
Based on median revenue in the following chart, the Insurance sector stands out at $88.1 million, which is about 1.4x the Utilities sector at $62.7million. Mature sectors dominate the remainder of the list, including Hospitality Services, Real Estate, and Industrial Services.
Analysis of median revenue is not meant to predict what will outperform. Rather, it’s a reminder that a revenue-based view of sponsor-backed private markets is often anchored in sectors with recurring demand, regulated economics, and infrastructure-like cash flows.
EBITDA concentration is real, and Mining & Minerals is the clearest outlier sector
Median EBITDA tells a different story than revenue alone. As the sector leader in this lens, Mining & Minerals posted a median EBITDA of $29.7 million—nearly 2x the second-highest sector of Investment Services at $15.0 million. The Hardware and Utilities sector followed in the low teens, while a broader set of sectors clustered around $8 million to $10 million.
In this lens of our private-market analysis, two takeaways matter:
Top-line leaders and cash-flow leaders are not always the same sectors.
The size of the Mining & Minerals sector gap is exactly the sort of signal that becomes obvious with a standardized dataset.
The mid-market margin sweet spot shows up in the tiering
When we tiered companies by revenue, median EBITDA margin peaked in the $250 million to $500 million tier (13.0%, n=601), then dropped for $500 million+ (11.0%). That pattern can reflect scale benefits up to a point, but as firms become larger the analysis should factor in additional complexity, integration costs, price competition, or mix shifts.
The practical implication centers on the workflow: the ability to quickly test (with consistent definitions) whether margins improve, plateau, or compress as private companies scale.
ROA spotlights efficiency in staples, manufacturing, and select industrial categories
The return on assets lens adds a necessary counterweight to EBITDA. It helps reveal how much profit is generated and how efficiently the asset base produces it. The top 10 ROA sectors are led by Food and Tobacco Production (11.6%), Manufactured Products (11.5%), Household Products (11.4%), and Consumer Goods (11.0%).
Notably, only three industries (Mining & Mineral Products, Manufactured Products and Household Products) appear in both the top 10 lists for median EBITDA and median ROA, with no overlap in the remaining sectors. That divergence is material because capital efficiency can look very different from cash-flow scale, and ROA helps separate big earners from efficient earners.
RPE highlights where productivity is structural
Revenue per employee is a blunt but revealing productivity lens. In our analysis, the Utilities sector led at $316,000 per employee, closely followed by Biopharmaceuticals ($314,000), Food and Tobacco Production ($305,000), and Healthcare Equipment ($296,000).
The RPE list below mixes specialized and asset-heavy sectors, suggesting that infrastructure leverage (Utilities) or high-value expertise and pricing power (Biopharma and Healthcare Equipment) can drive high productivity.
The examples in this article represent a fraction of what is possible in private-market analyses, but the core meta-insight from our scorecard approach is that private market leaders vary depending on the lens you choose, and each lens is only as good as the underlying data standardization.
With more than a million private companies modeled and standardized, coupled with the ability to screen directly in the FactSet Workstation, view our integrated private markets deal flows, or access our datasets via feeds and APIs, we provide a comprehensive lens on the U.S. private economy and a high-quality foundation for differentiated private market research. This lets you measure, compare, and screen an opaque market at scale.
In addition, our U.S. Private Company Tax-Imputed Financials enable you to:
Benchmark portfolio companies across sectors (and size tiers)
Identify acquisition targets that combine scale and efficiency (e.g., high EBITDA and high ROA)
Stress test your credit assumptions with a peer set that is broader than only disclosed financials
Build proprietary signals with consistent private-company fundamentals across a million-plus firms
Pressure test assumptions with standardized peer benchmarks
Data Notes
Data sample consists of top 10,000 sponsor-backed (PE- and VC-backed) U.S. private companies by revenue screened in the FactSet Workstation. Sector charts show the top 10 RBICS sectors with 50 or more companies with the metric available; “n” is the sector company count in the screen.
Sources: FactSet U.S. Private Company — Imputed Tax Financials; FactSet RBICS.
This blog post is for informational purposes only. The information contained in this blog post is not legal, tax, or investment advice. FactSet does not endorse or recommend any investments and assumes no liability for any consequence relating directly or indirectly to any action or inaction taken based on the information contained in this article.