DCF Valuation
El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO) DCF Valuation — Is LOCO overvalued?
The estimated DCF fair value of one El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO) share is $9.59. Compared to the current market price of $16.99, the stock is overvalued by 43.6%.
DCF fair value
$9.59
Market price
$16.99
Upside / downside
−43.6%
Prefer the inverse question? See what growth rate the market is pricing into LOCO →
El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO) DCF valuation FAQ
What is the DCF fair value of El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO)?
The discounted-cash-flow model estimates the intrinsic fair value of one El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO) share at $9.59, based on a 10-year projection of its cash flows converging to Damodaran industry averages.
Is El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO) overvalued or undervalued?
Against the current market price of $16.99, the DCF fair value of $9.59 implies LOCO is overvalued by 43.6%.
How is the LOCO DCF value calculated?
It is a 10-year discounted-cash-flow estimate built from El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc's reported fundamentals, with terminal assumptions anchored to Damodaran NYU industry datasets. The market price refreshes daily; the DCF fair value updates when El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc files a new quarterly or annual report.
How this LOCO valuation is built
The model projects ten years of El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc's free cash flow to the firm and discounts each year at its own cost of capital. Rather than assuming today's growth and margins persist forever, a moat-scoring step — weighing El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc's ROIC-versus-WACC spread, gross-margin trend, and reinvestment efficiency — decides how many years the business holds its edge before its economics mean-revert toward the Damodaran NYU benchmarks for its industry.
WACC is rebuilt each year from an unlevered-then-relevered beta and the company's evolving capital structure; terminal value uses the Gordon growth model with a reinvestment rate tied to the return earned on new capital (goodwill stripped out to reflect operating efficiency). Every assumption — growth, margins, tax, leverage, convergence timing — is editable, and running the full interactive model adds a 10,000-draw Monte Carlo simulation and WACC-versus-terminal-growth sensitivity heatmaps.
The market price refreshes daily; the DCF fair value updates when El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc files a new quarterly or annual report. For educational/informational purposes only — not investment advice. Last updated 2026-08-06.