Bain Global Private Equity Report

The industry's standard annual scorecard for buyouts: deal value, exits, fundraising, distributions and returns, plus essays on where the industry is heading. If you read one PE report a year, read this one.

Bain's Global Private Equity Report is the reference document the industry quotes all year. The 2026 edition, Powering Forward in a New Era, found that global buyout deal value rose 44 percent to $904 billion in 2025 and exit value rose 47 percent to $717 billion, but a handful of deals above $10 billion drove much of the gain. Buyout fundraising fell 16 percent, and distributions as a share of net asset value stayed near 14 percent, below the historical average for a fourth straight year.

The report combines deal and fund data with Bain's view from its due diligence and portfolio work. The essays go further than the numbers: the 2026 edition argues that higher borrowing costs, rising expenses and fee pressure have made generic buyout strategies harder to run, and that firms need a clearly defined edge. A companion GP outlook, based on a Bain and StepStone survey of 103 investment and investor relations professionals, covers what deal teams expect for the year.

Read the overview chapter for the numbers, then the essays. The full PDF can be downloaded without registration, and older editions make good reading on how the cycle has turned.

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