Private Equity Secondaries Hit $226-240B in 2025: What the Discount-to-NAV Data Really Shows

TL;DR: The private equity secondary market hit a record $226 billion to $240 billion in 2025, up 41% to 48% year over year, depending on whether you trust Evercore's or Jefferies' count. Roughly half of that volume now runs through GP-led continuation vehicles, deals where a fund manager sells a prized asset from an old fund into a brand-new vehicle it also controls. Pricing on buyout stakes has climbed to 87% to 94% of net asset value. Venture stakes still trade around 78% of NAV. If you own a semi-liquid interval fund or an evergreen private markets vehicle marked at NAV, that 15-to-20-point gap is the number you should be staring at right now.

According to the Jefferies 2025 Global Secondary Market Review, total secondary market transaction volume reached roughly $240 billion in 2025, up 48% from 2024 and the first time the market has cleared $200 billion in a single year. Evercore's count lands a bit lower, at $226 billion, which still works out to a 41% jump. I don't care which bank's number you pick. Both point to the same story: LPs are stuck holding illiquid fund stakes, distributions from GPs have slowed to a crawl, and the only way a lot of pension funds, endowments, and family offices are getting cash back is by selling their positions at a discount on the secondary market.

Why This Isn't a Sign of a Healthy Market

Here's the contrarian read, and it's the one most trade press coverage skips. A record secondary market isn't a vote of confidence in private equity. It's a symptom of a market where the exit machinery, IPOs, M&A sales, dividend recaps, has been gummed up for three straight years. When GPs can't sell portfolio companies at prices they like, they don't sell. LPs who committed capital in 2018 through 2021 vintage funds are still waiting for the DPI (distributions to paid-in capital, meaning actual cash back, not paper gains) that was supposed to show up by now. Some of them need the cash. Others just want out. So they go to the secondary market and sell their fund stakes to a buyer like Ardian, Lexington Partners, Coller Capital, or Goldman Sachs Asset Management, usually at a discount to what the GP says the stake is worth on paper.

That last part matters more than the headline volume number. A functioning secondary market with tight, single-digit discounts to NAV would tell you the private markets are basically healthy and NAV marks are trustworthy. What we actually have is a bifurcated market: buyout discounts tightening toward NAV while venture discounts stay wide, and an explosion of GP-led deals where the seller and a key part of the buyer group are, in effect, the same manager. That's not the same thing as a healthy, arm's-length price discovery mechanism. It's a market where sponsors are increasingly grading their own homework.

The Pricing Data, By Strategy

Different data providers slice this differently, and the gap between them is itself informative. Here's what the two most-cited 2025 reports show for LP-led secondary pricing (the sale of an LP's existing fund stake, as opposed to a GP-led continuation deal):

Strategy	Pricing as % of NAV (Jefferies, H1 2025)	Discount to NAV (Campbell Lutyens, FY2025)	YoY Direction
Buyout	90-94%	12.2% discount (up from 10.9% in 2024)	Jefferies: tightening. Campbell Lutyens: widening
Venture/Growth	78%	Improved ~640 bps on AI-driven valuation gains	Improving, but still widest discount of any strategy
All strategies blended	Not separately reported	13.6% average discount (widened modestly)	Modest widening

Notice the contradiction. Jefferies reports buyout pricing improving to 90% to 94% of NAV in H1 2025, up from 89% in 2024. Campbell Lutyens, covering the full year, shows the buyout discount actually growing to 12.2% (meaning buyers pay 87.8% of NAV) from 10.9% the year before. Both can be true. Pricing can improve in the first half on trophy assets and then soften across the full year as more average-quality stakes hit the market. The point for you isn't which bank wins the argument. It's that even the tightest, most bullish reading of buyout pricing puts real-world transaction prices 6 to 13 points below what GPs are marking those same assets at on their quarterly statements. Venture and growth stakes are trading 22 points below NAV even on the more favorable count. That's the discount a real buyer, with real due diligence and real capital at risk, is willing to pay. Not what a GP's valuation committee wrote down in a spreadsheet.

How a GP-Led Continuation Vehicle Actually Works

The other big structural shift in 2025 is the GP-led continuation vehicle, and if you're not familiar with the mechanics, here's the plain-English version. A GP-led continuation vehicle (CV) is a new fund a private equity manager creates to buy one or more assets out of an existing, older fund it also manages. The GP essentially sells the asset to itself, using new capital from secondary buyers (Ardian, Lexington, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and similar firms are the usual check-writers) plus, frequently, rolled-over commitment from some of the original LPs who want to stay in the deal. The old fund's LPs get a choice: cash out at the deal price, or roll their stake into the new vehicle and stay exposed to the asset. Evercore's 2025 report puts GP-led volume at $106 billion to $116 billion for the year, up 51% year over year and now close to half of all secondary market activity. That's an enormous shift from a decade ago, when GP-leds were a niche, faintly controversial corner of the market. Today they're mainstream, and the reason is straightforward: a CV lets a GP hold on to a winning asset past the fund's contractual life, collect a fresh round of fees on a new vehicle, and give exiting LPs liquidity, all without a competitive, open-market sale process. The GP picks which asset goes into the CV. Usually it's the best-performing company in the fund, the one management doesn't want to sell into an uncertain M&A or IPO market at a discount. That selection bias is exactly why CV pricing tends to run closer to NAV than plain LP-led secondary sales: the assets going into these deals were cherry-picked to look good.

I want to be direct about the conflict here, because most coverage soft-pedals it. In a GP-led CV, the same manager sits on both sides of the negotiating table in every meaningful sense. It sets the reference NAV the deal prices off of. It picks the asset. It often has an affiliate or a relationship with the lead secondary buyer. Fairness opinions and third-party advisors (PJT Park Hill and Lazard both run large practices advising on these deals) exist specifically because regulators and LPs worry about exactly this. The SEC's private fund adviser rulemaking has pushed for more disclosure and, in some cases, independent fairness opinions on GP-led deals for this reason. That doesn't eliminate the conflict. It just puts a process around it.

The Vista/Cloud Software Group Deal, By The Numbers

The single clearest data point on how CV pricing actually gets set in the real world came from Vista Equity Partners in June 2025. Vista closed a $5.6 billion single-asset continuation vehicle built around Cloud Software Group, the company formed from Vista's 2022 take-private and merger of Citrix and TIBCO. Vista disclosed that the deal priced at a 5% discount to the company's Q1 2024 reference-date NAV. That's a remarkably small discount by secondary market standards, and it's one of the very few instances where a firm has actually put a specific discount number on the public record for a CV. Run the arithmetic: a 5% discount on a $5.6 billion deal means the reference NAV Vista was working off implied something in the neighborhood of $5.9 billion for the asset, with buyers paying roughly $5.6 billion for that same exposure. Compare that to the blended LP-led discount of 13.6% that Campbell Lutyens reported for the year as a whole. Vista's deal priced roughly 8.6 points tighter than the market average for ordinary LP stake sales. That gap is the cherry-picking effect in action: Cloud Software Group was, by most accounts, one of the strongest performers in Vista's portfolio, and the deal was structured and marketed to buyers as exactly that kind of asset. It's not a representative data point for the whole market. It's a best-case data point, and it still traded at a discount to NAV.

Dry Powder: There's More Capital Chasing This Than There Are Deals

Part of why buyout pricing has tightened even as portfolio company exits remain slow is simple supply and demand among secondary buyers themselves. Estimates for dedicated secondary dry powder (capital raised specifically for secondary purchases, sitting uncalled) range from $215 billion to $302 billion heading into 2026, depending on which provider you ask (William Blair's 2026 PCA report is on the higher end of that range). That's an enormous stockpile relative to the roughly $230 billion, give or take, that actually traded in 2025. When you have that much capital committed to a strategy and a finite number of quality assets to deploy it into, buyers compete harder for the best stakes and bid pricing up toward NAV on those deals specifically. It doesn't mean the average asset is worth more. It means the competition for the good stuff has intensified while the bad stuff, smaller buyout stakes, tail-end venture positions, funds with murky reporting, still trades at a real discount because nobody's fighting over it.

What This Means If You Own an Interval Fund or Evergreen Vehicle

This is the part that should actually change how you think about your own portfolio, not just how you read the trade press. Semi-liquid interval funds and evergreen private markets vehicles, the kind marketed to individual investors and RIAs as a way to access private equity and private credit without a 10-year lockup, are required to mark their private holdings at fair value, typically based on the same NAV methodology the underlying GPs use. That NAV is a model output, built from comparable-company multiples, discounted cash flows, and manager judgment. It is not a market-clearing price. The secondary market is the closest thing private markets have to an actual market-clearing price, and in 2025 that price was running anywhere from 6% below NAV on the best buyout assets to 22% below NAV on venture stakes. If your interval fund holds a mix of buyout and venture exposure and marks everything at NAV, the redemption price you'd get on any given quarter's redemption window is being calculated using valuations that a real buyer, with real capital and real diligence, would discount by double digits. Firms like Hamilton Lane and Mercer, both of which track secondary pricing to help LPs benchmark their own portfolios, exist in part because institutional investors learned this lesson the hard way: NAV is what the manager says the asset is worth. Price is what someone will actually pay for it. Those two numbers converge only when there's a liquid, competitive market forcing them together, and interval funds mostly don't have that. Redemptions in interval funds are typically capped at 5% of NAV per quarter specifically because the sponsor knows that if everyone tried to redeem at once, there wouldn't be enough cash to pay out at the marked NAV. That gating mechanism is a tell.

What Could Go Wrong With This Analysis

I'll push back on my own framing here, because you should know the limits of this data before you act on it. First, discount-to-NAV figures from Jefferies, Evercore, and Campbell Lutyens are built from deals that actually closed and got reported to these banks' deal-tracking teams. There's real selection bias: assets trading at a very wide discount sometimes don't get marketed at all, which could mean the true average discount across all illiquid holdings is even wider than reported. Second, tightening buyout pricing in H1 2025 per Jefferies could genuinely reflect improving fundamentals, not just cherry-picking. AI infrastructure and software valuations ran up meaningfully in 2025, a real tailwind for some buyout and venture portfolios. Third, Vista's Cloud Software Group deal, priced at a 5% discount, tells you what one exceptional asset traded at. It is not proof the broader continuation vehicle market prices anywhere near that tight. Most CVs don't disclose specific discount figures at all, itself a transparency problem regulators have flagged.

What To Actually Do With This

If you hold, or are considering, a semi-liquid interval fund or evergreen private markets vehicle, ask the sponsor three specific questions before your next allocation decision. First, what percentage of the fund's holdings are buyout versus venture/growth, since the discount gap between those strategies is now 15 to 20 points and growing. Second, ask for the fund's most recent secondary market transaction, if any, where a position was sold, and what discount to the prior marked NAV that sale represented. If the sponsor has never sold a position on the secondary market, that's useful information too. Third, check the redemption gate history: how often has the fund actually hit its quarterly redemption cap, and what does that tell you about the gap between marked NAV and what the fund could actually raise in cash if it needed to sell into the real market Jefferies, Evercore, and Campbell Lutyens are describing. The record $226 billion to $240 billion secondary market in 2025 didn't happen because private equity got more liquid. It happened because a lot of institutional money finally admitted the NAV on their statements wasn't cash in hand, and went looking for a real price. You should ask the same question about your own private markets exposure before the fund does it for you.

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.

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.

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• PE Secondaries: How Accredited Investors Buy Private Equity at a Discount

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.

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.