Lincoln Private Market Index

A quarterly index of enterprise values for US and European private equity-backed companies, built from Lincoln's valuation work and advised by Chicago Booth's Steve Kaplan. It is one of the few public reads on private marks.

Private equity marks are hard to check from outside. Lincoln International values a large share of private equity-backed companies each quarter for fund managers and lenders, and it turns that data into the Lincoln Private Market Index. The index tracks changes in the enterprise value of privately held US and European companies, mostly owned by private equity firms, and compares them with the S&P 500.

The Q2 2026 edition, the 35th, covered about 1,800 companies drawn from a population of more than 7,400, with median EBITDA of roughly $50 million to $60 million. Private company enterprise values rose 1.9 percent in the quarter against 14.8 percent for the S&P 500, earnings growth more than offset a small decline in multiples, and 64 percent of companies grew EBITDA year over year. University of Chicago economist Steven Kaplan advises on the index and comments in each edition.

Use it to check whether private valuations are tracking fundamentals or lagging public markets, which matters for NAV-based lending, secondaries pricing and LP reporting. The operating data on revenue and EBITDA growth is a useful complement to Golub's middle market index.

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