2025 was the secondary market’s biggest year on record: roughly $240B of total volume, up 48% year over year. LP-led deals, where investors sell their own fund positions, were about $125B of it.1 But the headline that matters to a seller isn’t volume. It’s price, and price in this market is set by two things most first-time sellers have never been shown: strategy and vintage.
What a dollar of NAV sold for
Jefferies’ Global Secondary Market Review, the industry’s standard reference, puts full-year 2025 LP-led pricing at an average of 87% of net asset value, down about 200 basis points from the prior year. Underneath that average, the spread by strategy is wide:1,2
| Strategy | 2025 avg. price, % of NAV |
|---|---|
| Buyout | 92% |
| Private credit | 91% (an all-time high) |
| Venture / growth | 78% |
| Real estate | 70% |
| All LP-led average | 87% |
Vintage moves price more than strategy
The single biggest driver isn’t what the fund buys. It’s how old the fund is. Funds under five years old cleared around 95% of NAV in 2025; funds past year ten cleared around 73%.1 The logic is mechanical: a young fund’s NAV will mostly be returned through future exits at the buyer’s underwritten return, while a tail-end fund’s NAV depends on a handful of remaining companies the GP has already held longer than planned.
Why buyers can hold the line on price
Dedicated secondary dry powder ended 2025 at about $327B: a large number, but less than two years of deal volume at the current run rate.1,3 When buyers do not have to stretch to deploy, they underwrite to their hurdle, typically around 1.5–1.9x MOIC or mid-teens-to-25% net IRR,4,5 and let price fall out of that math rather than negotiate up to a seller’s expectations. Two more 2025 features matter for a seller reading quotes: about 23% of LP deals used deferred purchase price structures, which lift the headline number in exchange for payment over time,1 and every quote is struck against a reference-date NAV, so a stale reference date, not a change of heart, is the classic reason a bid gets re-cut late in a process.
The caveat that applies to you
These averages are weighted toward large, competitively-banked processes. Small single-fund positions that never reach a competitive process clear wider. That is why an honest indication for a small stake is a range tied to strategy, vintage, and the fund’s actual reference-date NAV, not a point estimate quoted off a league-table average. That is exactly how our desk builds one, and it’s free to ask: get an indicative range.
Sources
- Jefferies, Global Secondary Market Review, FY 2025
- Secondaries Investor, “LP-led pricing for credit secondaries reaches all-time high”
- PitchBook via Yahoo Finance, “The secondary market’s capitalization conundrum”
- CAIA / Capital Dynamics, “The Valuation of Secondaries”
- Commonfund, “What factors influence pricing in the LP-led secondaries market”