Habitat loss due to Anthropogenic impacts and stressors drive degradation of kelp forests globally. Increasing sea temperatures, fishery exploitation, alternating nutrient cycles, and changes to trophic structure can create a shift in kelp forest dynamics. However, kelp forest restoration can be costly; and being able to estimate and then measure benefits of kelp forest restoration is a priority to unlock investment into their restoration. While there have been recent advances in measurement and monitoring methods of kelp forest restoration, environmental markets require developing indicators of ecosystem condition that are cheap and easy to measure. State and transition models (STMs) have been used primarily in terrestrial environments to describe and categorise community changes over time. They represent the alternate states, their drivers, and simple thresholds that define change between one ecosystem state and another. Thus, STMs offer an improved understanding of an ecosystem’s behaviour and development of a framework for natural capital accounting, aiding projects to better estimate their biodiversity value and provision of ecosystem services at each ‘state’. Applying STMs into kelp restoration accounting allows companies and government to invest in restoration efforts and understand their returns, from ecosystem services, such as fisheries, water filtration, coastal protection, and carbon sequestration.