Family Offices Are Going Direct: What the 2026 Data Means for Accredited Investors

According to the UBS Global Family Office Report 2026, direct allocations now make up more than 40% of the typical family office's private-equity sleeve, and that share has been climbing for a decade. If you follow venture and private equity even casually, you've probably noticed the phrase "direct deal" showing up more often in family office coverage than "fund commitment." That's not a branding shift. It's real capital moving in a real direction, and it tells you something about how the wealthiest private investors in the world think about fees, control, and access.

What "Direct Deal Investing" Actually Means

A family office is a private wealth management operation set up by one very wealthy family (or a small handful of related families) to manage their money, taxes, and often their business interests. It's not a bank or a fund open to outside clients. A direct deal is when that family office invests its own capital straight into a company or a piece of real estate, cutting out the private equity or venture fund middleman entirely. A co-investment sits in between: the family office invests alongside a fund manager into a specific deal, usually at reduced or no additional fees beyond what it already pays the fund.

The appeal is straightforward. A traditional private equity fund charges roughly 2% of assets under management annually plus 20% of the profits above a certain return threshold, the industry's long-standing "2-and-20" model. Every dollar that goes through a fund structure gets shaved by that fee drag before it compounds. A family office that can source, diligence, and execute deals on its own keeps more of the upside and decides for itself when to buy and when to sell. For a family sitting on $2.7 billion in average net worth, which is the average reported across the 307 family offices UBS surveyed across more than 30 markets for its 2026 report, that fee math adds up fast over a 20-year holding period. North America already accounts for 53% of these family offices' 2025 portfolio allocations, per that same UBS data, so this is very much a story playing out in US and Canadian dealmaking as much as anywhere else.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

The scale of the move is not subtle. According to the IFC Review's coverage of S&P Global Market Intelligence data, global family office direct and co-investment deal value hit $12.9 billion across 158 transactions in 2025, up 123.3% year over year and the highest level recorded since at least 2021. That is not incremental growth. That is family offices doubling down on a strategy they were already pursuing. The Citi Private Bank 2025 Global Family Office Report backs up the same direction, even if its topline participation number tells a slightly more cautious story. Here's where it gets more interesting, and where I think a lot of the breathless "family offices are going direct" coverage misses the real story: not every family office is participating, and the ones that are participate less broadly than they used to.

Metric	2024	2025	Source
Family offices engaged in direct investing	77%	70%	Citi Private Bank
Global direct/co-investment deal value	~$5.8B (est.)	$12.9B (+123.3% YoY)	S&.P Global Market Intelligence
Family offices expecting 6+ direct deals next year	54%	64% (+10 pts)	BNY Investment Insights
US offices citing understaffing as a key barrier	~24%	44% (+83% YoY)	BNY Investment Insights
Direct allocations as share of PE sleeve	—	>.40% (avg. active program 37%)	UBS / Citi via UAE Advisor Guide

Per CNBC's reporting on the Citi Private Bank survey, 70% of family offices engaged in direct investments in 2025, down from 77% the year before, even as 40% of respondents said they had increased their direct exposure year over year despite tariff-driven trade war volatility. Read those two numbers together and you get a clear picture: participation is narrowing while intensity is rising. Fewer family offices are doing direct deals, but the ones still in the game are writing bigger checks into fewer, more carefully chosen companies, with the average single direct check now running around $19 million according to data cited by the UAE Advisor Guide's summary of UBS and Citi findings. That's a consolidation story, not a democratization story, and it matters for how you interpret the trend.

Why Family Offices Are Pulling Back on Fund Fees but Not Rigor

I want to be careful here because it's tempting to read "family offices are going direct" as "family offices are becoming amateur venture capitalists." That's not what the data shows. The BNY 2025 Investment Insights report found that 64% of family offices expect to complete six or more direct investments in the coming year, a jump of 10 percentage points year over year. Researchers at Campden Wealth, who partner with UBS and other private banks on much of the annual family office survey data cited throughout this piece, have tracked this staffing-versus-ambition gap for several years running, and 2025 is the sharpest version of it yet. At the same time, 44% of US family offices now cite understaffing as a key barrier to their direct investing programs, up 83% year over year. That's the tension in one sentence: appetite is growing faster than internal capacity. Family offices are responding by building out dedicated investment teams, hiring former private equity operators, and leaning more heavily on co-investment structures where a fund manager still does the heavy sourcing and diligence work but the family office keeps a bigger slice of the economics. Some are also using independent sponsors, essentially deal-by-deal operators who find and structure transactions before lining up capital, rather than committing to blind-pool funds years in advance. The honest takeaway, and one I don't see stated often enough in coverage of this trend, is that the family offices doing this well are not doing less diligence than a fund would. They're often doing more, because they have no fund manager between them and the mistake. They are simply choosing to build or rent that diligence capability directly instead of paying a fund 2% a year to house it permanently.

The Access Gap for Individual Accredited Investors

Here's where this trend runs headfirst into a question I get constantly from accredited individual investors: can I get in on this? Can I access the same kind of proprietary, fee-light direct deal flow that a $2.7 billion family office gets? The honest answer is: partially, and with real tradeoffs you need to understand before you write a check. A wave of investment clubs, syndicates, and online platforms has emerged specifically to give accredited individuals pooled access to direct deals and co-investments that would otherwise require family-office-scale capital and staff. Long Angle is one of the better-known examples in this space, structured as a vetted community of high-net-worth operators and executives who pool diligence and deal access, and AIN has covered that platform in a prior review, so I won't re-tread that ground here. The broader category, though, deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The structural problem individual investors face is almost identical to the one family offices are wrestling with, just without the resources to solve it. BNY's own survey data shows that even a $2.7 billion family office with a dedicated team can feel understaffed relative to its direct-deal ambitions. An individual accredited investor evaluating a syndicate deal on a two-week timeline, usually alongside a full-time job, is not going to out-diligence that same deal better than a family office investment committee would. You are, in most cases, relying on the platform's or lead investor's diligence rather than conducting your own from scratch, and that changes the risk calculus meaningfully. There's also a concentration problem that gets underdiscussed. Family offices spreading $12.9 billion across 158 deals globally are, by definition, diversifying across geography, sector, and stage even as they consolidate toward fewer, larger positions. An individual investor allocating capital through a club or syndicate typically writes far fewer checks, into far fewer companies, with far less ability to average down risk across a real portfolio. If one of your three or four direct positions goes to zero, which happens regularly in early-stage and growth-stage private investing, the damage to your personal balance sheet is proportionally much larger than it would be for a family office spreading similar dollar exposure across 20 or 30 positions. None of this means clubs and syndicates are worthless. They genuinely do open a door that used to be closed entirely to individuals. But I'd rather you walk through that door with clear eyes about what you're getting: partial access to deal flow, partial diligence delegation, and a concentration risk profile that looks nothing like what a real family office carries even when the check sizes look superficially similar.

What This Means If You're Building an Allocation Strategy

If you're an accredited investor thinking about adding direct or co-investment exposure to your portfolio in 2026, the family office data gives you a useful checklist, not a blueprint to copy directly. Ask these questions before committing capital to any direct deal, club, or syndicate:

• Who actually performed the diligence, and can you see the underlying materials, not just a summary memo?
• How many total positions will this platform or club hold across the year, and how does that compare to your total direct allocation?
• What's the minimum check size, and does it represent a concentration risk relative to your net worth that a $2.7 billion family office would never accept for a single position?
• Does the sponsor or lead investor have carried interest or fee exposure that could bias which deals get presented to you?
• What's the realistic timeline to liquidity, given that direct deals typically lack the exit optionality of a diversified fund?

Family offices are moving toward direct deals because they have the staff, the balance sheet, and the multi-decade time horizon to absorb the higher variance that comes with concentrated, self-sourced positions. That combination is rare even among people who technically qualify as accredited investors. I'm not telling you to avoid direct deals. I am telling you that the family office data itself, particularly the rising understaffing complaints from BNY's survey, is a warning sign about diligence capacity that applies with even more force to individuals operating without a dedicated investment team.

FAQ: Family Office Direct Investing

What's the difference between a direct deal and a co-investment?
A direct deal is a family office investing its own capital straight into a company with no fund manager involved. A co-investment means the family office invests alongside a private equity or venture fund into a specific deal, typically at reduced fees compared to a standard fund commitment.

Why are family offices moving away from traditional PE funds?
Mainly fee drag and control. The standard 2-and-20 fee structure eats into long-term compounding, and direct deals let family offices choose exactly which companies to back rather than accepting whatever a blind-pool fund selects on their behalf.

Can an individual accredited investor really replicate a family office's direct deal access?
Only partially. Platforms and investment clubs can provide deal flow and pooled diligence, but individuals typically hold far fewer positions than a family office does, which raises concentration risk even when check sizes look comparable.

Is family office direct investing actually growing or shrinking?
Both, depending on the metric. Citi Private Bank found the share of family offices doing any direct investing fell from 77% to 70% year over year, while S&.P Global Market Intelligence found total direct/co-investment deal value jumped 123% to $12.9 billion. Fewer participants are writing bigger, more selective checks.

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.