The PE Secondaries Market Just Hit $240 Billion: What the Data Actually Shows

The global private equity secondary market hit $240 billion in transaction volume in 2025, up 48 percent year over year and the largest total ever recorded, according to the Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review. Roughly half of that volume ran through GP-led continuation vehicles, deals where a fund manager sells a prized company out of an old fund and into a new one it also controls. Jefferies expects first-half 2026 volume to clear $100 billion on backlog alone. This is no longer a side pocket for distressed sellers. It is becoming the plumbing of how private equity delivers liquidity.

The headline number and why it stopped being a rounding error

I have covered a lot of "record year" press releases in private markets. Most of them are marketing. This one is not. Multiple independent research desks, Jefferies, Lazard, and Campbell Lutyens, all published year-end 2025 secondary market reports within months of each other, and they landed within about 6 percent of one another on total volume. That kind of convergence across competing investment banks is rare, and it tells me the number is real: somewhere between $225 billion and $240 billion in global secondary market transaction volume in 2025.

Jefferies put the figure at $240 billion, up 48 percent from 2024's $162 billion. Lazard's count came in at $233 billion, up 53 percent from a revised 2024 base of $152 billion. Campbell Lutyens reported $225 billion, up 45 percent. All three agree on the shape of the story even where they disagree on the decimal point: 2025 was the first year the secondary market cleared $200 billion, and growth accelerated rather than slowed as the year went on. Jefferies noted that $137 billion of its full-year total, well over half, happened in the second half alone.

What is driving it. Three forces, and none of them are new this year, they are just compounding. First, the denominator effect hangover: institutional investors who got over-allocated to private equity when public markets wobbled in 2022 are still working down that exposure, and some of that rebalancing is only completing now. Second, a low-distribution environment. GPs have been sitting on unrealized gains because the IPO window and traditional M&A exits have been unreliable, so LPs are not getting cash back from their existing commitments at the pace they used to, and they are selling stakes on the secondary market to generate liquidity themselves instead of waiting. Third, GPs have discovered that continuation vehicles let them keep their best companies longer instead of being forced to sell at the end of a ten-year fund life, and that has turned secondaries from a liquidity mechanism for LPs into an active portfolio management tool for GPs too.

Metric	Figure	Source
Total 2025 secondary market volume	$240 billion (+48% YoY)	Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review
Total 2025 secondary market volume (independent estimate)	$233 billion (+53% YoY)	Lazard 2025 Secondary Market Report
LP-led volume, 2025	$125 billion (52% of total)	Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review
GP-led / continuation vehicle volume, 2025	$115 billion (48% of total, +53% YoY)	Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review
Dedicated secondary buyer capital, year-end 2025	$327 billion (+14% YoY)	Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review
Average buyout pricing vs. NAV, 2025	92% of NAV (down 200 bps from 2024)	Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review
Average LP-led discount to NAV, 2025	13.6% to 13.9% discount	Campbell Lutyens 2025 Secondaries Market Flash Report
Projected H1 2026 volume	Above $100 billion (backlog-based)	Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review

LP-led versus GP-led: the market is now split almost down the middle

Ten years ago, "secondaries" meant one thing: a limited partner needed cash, so it sold its stake in an existing fund to another investor at whatever price the market would bear, usually a discount. That is still happening, and at record scale. Jefferies puts LP-led volume at $125 billion in 2025, up 44 percent, or 52 percent of the total market. Twenty-seven individual LP portfolio sales exceeded $1 billion, and the single largest LP transaction of the year topped $5 billion.

What has changed the character of the market is the other half. GP-led volume, dominated by continuation vehicles, reached $115 billion in Jefferies' count, up 53 percent year over year, nearly matching LP-led activity for the first time in the market's history. A continuation vehicle works like this: a private equity firm running an aging fund identifies one or two portfolio companies it believes still have significant upside. Instead of selling those companies to a strategic buyer or another PE firm at the fund's contractual end date, the GP creates a brand-new fund, uses new investor capital, often alongside existing investors who choose to "roll" their stakes, to buy the assets out of the old fund, and keeps managing them, often for another five to seven years.

Lazard's data shows continuation funds made up roughly 86 percent of all GP-led volume in 2025, with single-asset continuation vehicles, where the GP is essentially building a new fund around one trophy company, representing about 53 percent of total GP-led dollars on their count. That is a meaningful shift from a decade ago when continuation vehicles were viewed as a rescue tool for underperforming funds. Now they are frequently used on the best-performing assets in a portfolio, the ones a GP does not want to give up.

Pricing: buyers are not getting the same discount they used to

Here is the number that matters most if you are thinking about buying into a secondaries fund rather than just reading about the market: what price are buyers actually paying relative to the reported net asset value, or NAV, of the underlying fund stakes? NAV is simply the GP's own estimate of what the portfolio is worth on paper. A secondary buyer paying below NAV is, in theory, getting a discount to that valuation.

According to Jefferies, average buyout pricing across the market was 92 percent of NAV in 2025, a 200-basis-point decline from 2024, driven partly by an older mix of vintages coming to market (average vintage year 2016, versus 2018 the year before). Venture and growth stakes, by contrast, improved to 78 percent of NAV as GP marks became more credible. Credit held steady at 91 percent, and real estate slipped to 70 percent. Campbell Lutyens' broader LP-led discount figure, which blends fund quality and vintage across the whole market rather than isolating top performers, came in wider: an average 13.6 percent discount to NAV for 2025, up modestly from 13.3 percent in 2024, with middle-market and small-cap fund stakes trading at deeper double-digit discounts.

The takeaway for an accredited investor: pricing is bifurcating hard by asset quality. Top-quartile buyout funds and single-asset continuation vehicles with strong operating momentum are trading close to par, sometimes above NAV, because buyer demand for proven winners is intense. Tail-end funds, older vintages, and lower middle-market stakes are trading at real discounts because buyers are not confident in the marks and want to be paid for that uncertainty. A secondaries fund manager's skill is largely about which side of that split they are buying on.

The conflict at the center of every GP-led deal

I want to be direct about the risk here because too much of the trade press treats continuation vehicles as a clever liquidity innovation and skips the part that should worry an investor. In a GP-led continuation vehicle, the general partner sits on both sides of the trade. It represents the selling fund's existing LPs, whose interest is in getting the highest possible price for the asset being sold. At the same time, it is forming and will manage the buying vehicle, where a lower purchase price means more room for that vehicle to generate returns, and where the GP often crystallizes and locks in carried interest from the old fund at the transaction price it itself helped set.

The CFA Institute's 2026 research report on continuation fund conflicts frames this plainly: the GP acts as the sellers' agent and will become the buyers' agent once the vehicle exists, and it controls the process that sets the price in between. That is not a hypothetical concern. It is baked into the structure of every single deal. The report's authors are careful to say a conflict of interest does not automatically make a transaction unethical, but they are equally clear that price discovery in these deals is "neither objective nor fully independent" because the GP directs the bidding process, selects the winning bidder, and negotiates the final terms.

The regulatory backstop here is thinner than it used to be. In June 2024, the Fifth Circuit vacated the SEC's Private Fund Advisers Rule, which would have mandated an independent fairness opinion for every adviser-led secondary transaction. That mandatory requirement is gone. According to a Mayer Brown analysis published in July 2026, GPs are still bound by the Investment Advisers Act's general fiduciary duty, which cannot be waived by contract, but there is no longer a bright-line rule dictating exactly what process satisfies it. Most sophisticated sponsors still commission independent fairness opinions voluntarily, from firms like Houlihan Lokey or Kroll, and run a competitive bid process among secondary buyers to establish a market-tested price rather than relying on a single appraiser's judgment. But "still doing it voluntarily" and "required to do it" are different things, and a diligent investor should ask which one applies to any fund manager running continuation vehicles.

For an LP inside the selling fund, there is a practical safeguard worth understanding: the election. When a GP launches a continuation vehicle, existing investors are typically given a choice, sell their stake for cash at the negotiated price, or roll their interest into the new vehicle and stay invested alongside the GP on the new terms. That optionality is the market's answer to the conflict: if you do not trust the price, you do not have to take it. But it only works if the disclosure around fees, expense allocation, and the bidding process is genuinely complete, which is exactly the area regulators and industry bodies like ILPA (the Institutional Limited Partners Association) keep pushing GPs to improve.

What this means if you are evaluating a secondaries fund

Here is my read for an accredited investor looking at a secondaries-focused fund as a way to add private equity exposure. The pitch is legitimate: you are buying into pools of companies that are already operating, already have a multi-year track record inside the fund, and are frequently priced at a discount to a third party's own stated valuation. Compare that to a primary commitment to a new buyout fund, where you commit capital blind, wait years for it to be called and deployed, and then wait several more years past that before you see a distribution. A secondaries fund buying LP stakes in seasoned funds, or well-structured continuation vehicle interests, can meaningfully shorten that J-curve, the period early in a fund's life when returns are negative because fees are being paid before gains materialize.

That said, three risks deserve equal billing with the upside. First, pricing complexity: the "discount to NAV" you read about is a discount to the GP's own mark, not to some independently verified market price, so the discount can be smaller than it looks if the underlying NAV was generous to begin with. Second, the conflict-of-interest exposure in GP-led deals described above is structural, not incidental, and it does not go away because a fairness opinion was obtained. Third, concentration: single-asset continuation vehicles, now roughly half of GP-led dollar volume by Lazard's count, mean you may be buying exposure to one company's fortunes dressed up in fund structure, not the diversification that made private equity funds attractive to begin with.

None of that makes secondaries a bad idea. It makes them a category that rewards manager selection as much as, or more than, the underlying asset class does. A secondaries specialist with the underwriting discipline to distinguish a genuinely undervalued LP stake from a stale one, and the process rigor to push back on a GP's continuation vehicle pricing rather than rubber-stamp it, is doing real work that justifies a fee. One that is simply riding record fundraising and calling it strategy is not. Ask any manager pitching you a secondaries fund how many GP-led deals they walked away from last year, not just how many they did. The answer tells you more than the marketing deck.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between LP-led and GP-led secondaries?

In an LP-led secondary, an existing investor in a private equity fund sells its stake, its right to future distributions and remaining obligation to fund capital calls, to another investor, usually because it needs liquidity or wants to rebalance its portfolio. In a GP-led secondary, the fund manager itself initiates the transaction, typically by moving one or more portfolio companies into a new continuation vehicle it also manages. Jefferies reported LP-led volume of $125 billion and GP-led volume of $115 billion in 2025, meaning the two are now nearly equal in size.

Why would a private equity firm want to sell its own best company to itself?

It is not selling to itself in a simple sense, it is moving the asset into a new fund with new (and sometimes rolling) investors so it can keep managing that company beyond the original fund's contractual life, typically ten to twelve years. GPs use continuation vehicles when they believe an asset still has significant value to create but the fund clock has run out, letting them avoid a forced sale at what might be a suboptimal time while still giving the original fund's investors the option to cash out.

Is a discount to NAV in a secondaries deal a guaranteed bargain?

No. NAV is the general partner's own estimate of fair value, not an independently verified market price, so a stated discount reflects a gap to that internal estimate rather than to some objective benchmark. Jefferies reported average buyout pricing at 92 percent of NAV in 2025 and Campbell Lutyens reported average LP-led discounts around 13.6 to 13.9 percent, but pricing varies enormously by fund quality, vintage, and strategy, and a discount on a weak fund's inflated NAV can be worse value than paying closer to par for a strong one.

How big of a role do continuation vehicles play in today's market, and is that a concern?

Continuation vehicles now represent roughly 48 percent of total secondary market volume and, per Lazard, about 86 percent of all GP-led dollar volume in 2025. That scale is a legitimate concern because the general partner sits on both sides of every one of these deals, representing the sellers while also forming and profiting from the buying vehicle. Independent fairness opinions and competitive bidding processes are common industry practice, but following the 2024 court vacatur of the SEC's Private Fund Advisers Rule, none of that process discipline is currently mandated by a specific federal rule, so it is worth confirming what safeguards a given manager actually uses.

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.