Private Equity Statistics (2026)

Private equity has grown from a niche into one of the largest pools of capital in finance. Preqin put global private equity assets under management at about $8.6 trillion at the end of 2024, and forecasts the figure reaching roughly $11.8 trillion by 2030 (see the table below).

Definitions vary, which is why headline numbers differ so much across sources. Bain tracks buyout dry powder alone at $1.3 trillion, while Preqin's broader AUM count folds in growth equity and other strategies. The wider alternatives universe, including private credit and infrastructure, is forecast to hit $32 trillion by 2030.

Dry powder is committed capital that funds have raised but not yet invested, and it has piled up. Preqin pegs all-private-equity dry powder at about $3.7 trillion at the start of 2026, roughly double the 2019 level, while PitchBook counts $4.63 trillion across all closed-end private capital (see the chart below).

The build-up reflects a slow deployment pace as much as heavy fundraising. McKinsey notes that about 40% of available dry powder has been sitting unspent for two years or more, well above the long-run norm, as managers waited for cheaper financing and clearer valuations before committing.

Buyout activity has been a rollercoaster. Global buyout deal value hit a peak of $975 billion in 2021, then fell to $719 billion in 2022 and a low of about $442 billion in 2023, the worst year since 2016, before recovering to $628 billion in 2024 and $904 billion in 2025 (see the chart below).

The 2025 total was a 44% jump and the second-highest ever, near the 2021 record. Deal count told a different story, though: only 3,018 buyouts closed, down 6%, because the value was carried by a handful of very large transactions rather than a broad-based pickup.

Look under the hood and the recovery was top-heavy. Just 13 megadeals of $10 billion or more accounted for $274 billion, roughly 30% of all buyout value, and 11 of those were in the US. The average disclosed deal size hit an all-time record of about $1.175 billion (see the table below).

The headline transaction was the $56.6 billion take-private of Electronic Arts, the largest buyout in history, followed by Aligned Data Centers at $40 billion and Air Lease at $27.5 billion. Below the mega tier, mid-market activity stayed comparatively subdued, producing a distinctly K-shaped market.

Growth was concentrated by sector as well as by size. Retail buyout value rose 197% year over year, healthcare climbed 115%, and consumer products gained 96%, according to Bain's 2026 report (see the table below). Healthcare buyouts alone set a record at about $190 billion of deal value.

Technology and data infrastructure remained central to the biggest checks, with data-center and AI-adjacent assets, like the $40 billion Aligned Data Centers deal, drawing enormous capital. Sector-level percentages here are via an aggregator summary of the Bain report and should be read as directional.

Exits are how private equity returns cash to investors, and they finally revived. Global exit value rose 47% to $717 billion in 2025, the second-highest on record, helped by a corporate M&A boom. Seven mega-exits of $10 billion-plus made up $155 billion, or 22%, of the total.

The channels shifted too. Sales to strategic corporate buyers grew 66% globally, secondary sales to other sponsors rose, and GP-led continuation vehicles, where a manager sells an asset to a new fund it also runs, jumped 62%. Even so, exit count slipped 2% to 1,570, so the value gain again leaned on size.

Despite the exit rebound, cash back to investors stayed thin. Distributions to limited partners held at just 14% of net asset value in 2025, essentially flat, and have run below 15% for four consecutive years, an industry record for a slow stretch.

The backlog is the reason. Bain counts about 32,000 unsold portfolio companies worth roughly $3.8 trillion still sitting in funds, and typical holding periods have stretched to about seven years, up from five to six in the 2010-2021 era. Until that inventory clears, investors keep waiting on liquidity.

New commitments have not kept pace with the deal rebound. Private capital broadly raised about $1.3 trillion in 2025, roughly even with 2024, but buyout fundraising fell 16% to $395 billion and the number of buyout funds closing dropped 23%, a fourth straight annual decline (see the table below).

The squeeze reflects the liquidity logjam: because investors have received so little cash back, they have less to recommit to new funds. McKinsey found about 70% of limited partners still plan to maintain or raise their private equity allocations, but many are being choosier about which managers get the money.

The industry is highly concentrated at the top. In the 2026 PEI 300 ranking, which measures capital raised over five years, KKR led with $140.4 billion, followed by EQT at $134.4 billion and Blackstone at $111.8 billion (see the table below). The full top 300 raised $3.55 trillion combined.

Measured by total assets rather than fundraising, the mega-managers are even larger and increasingly diversified beyond buyouts. Blackstone oversees more than $1 trillion in AUM across strategies and Apollo is closing in on the same mark, with private credit now a big share of their growth (firm AUM figures via company disclosures and aggregators).

Private equity's pitch is higher returns than public markets, and over long horizons it has broadly delivered, though the edge has narrowed. Bain's 2026 report shows US buyout funds returning about 15% annually over the past 10 years, just behind the S&P 500's roughly 16% over the same window (see the chart below).

Cambridge Associates, whose US buyout and growth benchmark tracks 1,700 funds worth $1.6 trillion as of June 2025, puts pooled net-of-fee IRRs in the mid-teens over 10- and 25-year periods. The consistency of outperformance is stronger the longer the horizon, but recent public-market strength has closed much of the historical gap.

The math of a good deal has gotten much harder. Bain frames it as '12 is the new 5': a typical buyout in 2015 needed only about 5% annual EBITDA growth to hit a 2.5x return over five years, because cheap debt and rising valuation multiples did much of the work.

Today, with borrowing costs around 8-9% and multiple expansion largely gone, the same 2.5x target requires roughly 10-12% annual earnings growth. That shift is pushing firms toward hands-on operational improvement, so-called operational alpha, rather than relying on leverage and financial engineering.

Beyond finance, private equity is a large employer and investor in the real economy. The American Investment Council reports the industry backed more than 21,000 US businesses in 2025 and directly employed 13.3 million workers, up from 12 million in 2022, with 85% of investments going to companies with fewer than 500 employees (see the table below).

By the AIC's estimate, private-equity-backed businesses generated about $2 trillion of GDP, roughly 7% of the US total, up from $1.7 trillion in 2020, and paid average compensation of about $85,000 in wages and benefits in 2024. These are industry-body figures and read as advocacy-flavored, but they capture the scale of the footprint.

For decades private equity was walled off from ordinary retirement savers over concerns about fees, liquidity, and valuation. That is changing: an August 2025 executive order directed regulators to open defined-contribution plans, like 401(k)s, to alternative assets, and firms are now building products with small private-market sleeves.

The retail channel is already growing fast, with US retail capital flowing into alternative structures reaching $204 billion in 2025, more than double the $92 billion of 2023 (McKinsey). Public pensions offer a preview: their private-capital exposure now tops 13%, up from under 5% in 2000, and proposed 401(k) caps cluster around 15%.

Private equity has historically returned mid-teens percentages annually, but the access, fees, and lock-ups have kept most individual investors out, and the recent edge over a low-cost S&P 500 index fund has been thin. As these products reach 401(k)s, the key questions are cost, liquidity, and how large a slice makes sense.

If you can already build a diversified, low-fee stock portfolio in a public brokerage account, that remains the simplest foundation. Treat any private-market allocation as a small, long-horizon complement rather than a core holding, and weigh the higher fees and multi-year lock-ups against the historical, and shrinking, return premium.