Radio Deal Market Poised For Opportunistic Buying In 2026.

More than twice as many radio stations were sold last month as were traded in January 2025. BIA Advisory Services reports three dozen radio station sales were filed last month, worth a combined $15.7 million. That was an improvement from last January, when paperwork for the sale of 15 stations worth a combined $3 million were filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

A third of January’s radio sales volume came from a single deal as Greg Horne and Christopher Hart’s Arkansas River Valley Radio filed to buy 12 full-power stations and four FM translators across Arkansas from Bobby Caldwell’s East Arkansas Broadcasters for a combined $6.7 million. It was also the biggest-ticket deal in January. But it was Audacy that got the most for a single station as it reached a deal to sell WVEI (103.7) in the Providence-Warwick-Pawtucket, RI market to Ocean State Media for $4.9 million.

The television sales market was quieter than radio last month. BIA says nine television station sales were filed in January, worth a combined $3.6 million.

The deal market may ignite in the coming months if the Federal Communications Commission greenlights significant rollbacks of ownership limits as part of its quadrennial review. But more dollars-and-cents issues could have a bigger impact. BIA Managing Director Rick Ducey says broader shifts in the economic and policy environment have also created a level of volatility that isn’t for the faint of heart.

“The gap between what sellers want and fair market valuations is not encouraging for major transactions,” Ducey says. “Rather than seeking to scale inorganic revenue growth via M&A, its seems that margins are a key focus including reducing and restructuring debt and underperforming assets.”

Yet Ducey believes a lot of what happens in 2026 may depend on what the FCC decides to do with media ownership limits. “Unless the FCC changes radio ownership rules to remove barriers to scale and more effective competition for radio groups, the business opportunities will be limited,” he says. The FCC seems to be leaning toward rolling back some radio limits, and Ducey thinks there is plenty of justification to head in that direction.

“Recent research is showing audio overall as more popular than ever both with audiences and advertisers. Curiously, the FCC sees radio as its own market even though clearly it is an actor in a larger and very competitive audio market,” he says. “Radio ownership caps and subcaps are archaic when applied to today’s media market when local stations compete with pure play streams like Spotify, Pandora and of course SiriusXM. They’re all on the same dial. Well, no longer a dial these days. They all show up as apps in the car dashboard.”

Regardless of what happens on the regulatory front, religious broadcasters remain the most likely to be buyers in 2026. For others, Ducey says revenue trends mean it’s not a good time to increase leverage with the expectation their company will be able to grow its way out of it.

“Perhaps there are some strategic buyers that can shop bankruptcies or distressed assets and see beyond today’s balance sheet into local market opportunities and building scale that can be monetized in digital platforms,” Ducey says. But in the current climate, he says there is no magic formula for deal-makers, saying most are just mining for “risk-adjusted opportunities.”