Private-Equity Firm Signs Deal to Buy Enhabit

The leaders of home health and hospice company Enhabit Inc. have agreed to sell the company to a private equity firm for roughly $700 million. Word of the deal for Dallas-based Enhabit comes nearly two years after its board ended a strategic review of the company’s future and decided to remain independent.

The agreement between Enhabit and Kinderhook Industries LLC calls for the New York-based investment firm to pay $13.80 in cash for Enhabit’s shares while also taking on the company’s debt, which totaled about $440 million as of Sept. 30. Shareholders need to approve the proposed sale, which both parties expect to complete by the middle of the year.

Enhabit was born nearly four years ago as a spinoff from Encompass Health Corp. The company has a footprint spanning 34 states and comprising 249 home health locations and 117 hospice locations but hasn’t grown much in recent years. Through the first nine months of last year, it recorded a net profit of about $34 million on revenues of $790 million.

Those numbers were an improvement from the same period in 2024, when President and CEO Barb Jacobsmeyer and her team needed to book a $108 million charge to write down the value of Enhabit’s home health division. (In late 2024, the company booked another impairment charge of nearly $54 million.) But the better performance wasn’t enough to lift Enhabit’s shares (Ticker: EHAB), which spent most of 2025 under $10 after having been valued at $25 when Encompass set up Enhabit as an independent company.

“Under Kinderhook’s ownership, Enhabit will benefit from additional resources and expertise that will support long-term investments in our people, clinical excellence and innovation without the short-term pressures of the public markets,” Jacobsmeyer said in a statement. “We look forward to working together to expand access to our critical home health and hospice services for families and their communities.”

Chris Michalik, a managing director at Kinderhook, called Enhabit “exactly the kind of organization we seek to support—and the kind of team we are excited to partner with” and added that Kinderhook’s strategy will give Enhabit’s leaders long-term capital and practical support to “focus on what they do best.”

The Enhabit leadership team will soon undergo a major change: As part of a plan announced last August, Jacobsmeyer is preparing to step down from her roles in July or when her successor is hired. Jacobsmeyer, 60, was the executive vice president of operations at Encompass before moving into the Enhabit CEO seat in mid-2021.