Meritech SaaS Index: The Software Pulse, and the One Number the Other Indices Do Not Publish
Meritech Capital's biweekly Software Pulse puts the overall median public-software ARR multiple at 4.2x (11 September 2026). What makes it worth reading alongside the other three references is the line underneath: the top 10 sits at 17.7x, and unlike the overall median, that figure is above where it was before rates rose.
The Number That Only Meritech Publishes
SaaS Capital, Aventis and Bessemer each publish one headline figure. Meritech publishes two: the median across its whole comparable set, and the median across its top 10. In a normal market that distinction is a footnote. In 2026 it is the story.
Meritech's 11 September 2026 Software Pulse states that the overall median ARR multiple “had slipped to 4.2x from 4.7x in our last update”, and that 4.2x is 52% below the pre-ZIRP median of 8.7x. Read on its own, that is a sector cut roughly in half and still falling.
The next line says the opposite. The top-10 median is 17.7x, which Meritech puts at 6% above the pre-ZIRP top-10 median of 16.6x. The best-regarded public software companies are not trading at a discount to the cheap-money era at all. They are trading slightly above it.
Meritech reports the same shape on its growth-adjusted measure, which is designed to put fast and slow growers on a comparable footing rather than rewarding growth twice. There the overall median is 0.27x, 11% below the pre-ZIRP 0.30x, while the top 10 reads 0.79x, 13% above the pre-ZIRP 0.70x. That the split survives adjusting for growth matters: it means the premium at the top is not simply the top 10 growing faster.
What this means if you are selling. “The market is down 52%” and “the market is above 2021 levels” are both true statements about public software right now, and which one applies to you depends entirely on whether a buyer files you in the top decile. That is a question about growth durability, retention and category position, not about the index. Our multiple stress test walks the same inputs a buyer uses.
How Thin the Premium Tier Actually Is
The same Software Pulse gives the distribution behind the median: only 9 public software companies trade above 10x NTM revenue, and 68% trade below 5x. Those two figures are stated on a next-twelve-months revenue basis, which is a different measure from the 4.2x median ARR multiple headline, so they describe the shape of the market rather than restating the same number.
A market where roughly two thirds of constituents sit below 5x and single digits sit above 10x is not a market with a gentle slope. It is a cliff with a short plateau on top. That is why a founder benchmarking against “public SaaS multiples” in the abstract usually ends up with the wrong anchor: the median of a bimodal distribution describes almost nobody in it.
Meritech attaches two drivers to the split. It reports that growth is 4.2x more strongly correlated with multiple than free-cash-flow margin, which is a direct answer to the grow-versus-profit question the 2022-2024 market spent two years arguing about. And it reports that net dollar retention across public software, having declined through 2025, has stabilised in the 107-109% range.
Meritech Software Pulse Terms
- Median ARR multiple
- Meritech's headline: the middle enterprise-value-to-ARR multiple across its public-software comparable set. Currently 4.2x (11 September 2026). Directly comparable in kind to the SaaS Capital and Aventis medians, though computed over a broader universe.
- Top 10 median
- The median across Meritech's ten highest-multiple constituents, published as its own line. Currently 17.7x. No other widely cited SaaS index publishes its top decile separately, which is why this page exists.
- Pre-ZIRP baseline
- Meritech benchmarks current readings against the median that prevailed before the zero-interest-rate period rather than against the 2021 peak. That is a more demanding comparison than "down from the top", because it strips out the bubble year. Its pre-ZIRP overall median is 8.7x and its pre-ZIRP top-10 median is 16.6x.
- Growth-adjusted multiple
- A second Meritech measure that scales the revenue multiple against the company's growth so fast and slow growers can be compared on one axis. Overall median 0.27x, top 10 0.79x.
- Publication cadence
- Biweekly, which makes it the fastest-updating of the four references on this site. SaaS Capital publishes monthly, Bessemer's tile moves daily with the market but is an average rather than a median, and Aventis publishes periodically. Check the archive for the current edition before quoting any figure here.
Meritech Against the Other Three References
| Source | Statistic | Current | Universe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meritech Software Pulse | Median ARR multiple | 4.2x (11 September 2026) | Broad public software, top 10 broken out at 17.7x |
| SaaS Capital Index | Median ARR multiple | 4.6x (31 August 2026) | Equal-weighted pure-play SaaS |
| Aventis Advisors | Median EV/Revenue | 4.6x (August 2026) | ~70 NASDAQ/NYSE pure-play SaaS, $1B+ cap |
| BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index | Average revenue multiple | 8.1x (29 September 2026) | Market-cap-weighted, 60-80 cloud names |
Meritech sitting a little under the two pure-play medians is the expected result, not a disagreement: a broad public-software universe carries mature, slower-growth constituents that a pure-play SaaS screen excludes, and those sit at the bottom of the distribution. Bessemer's figure is higher again because it is an average over a market-cap-weighted basket, so it inherits exactly the premium tier Meritech breaks out separately. The full reconciliation of constituent universes, weighting and statistic is on the three indices page.