Family Office Direct Investing Analysis: Deal Sizes, Buyer Share, and Hold Periods

For most of two decades, family offices were private equity’s quiet money: hard to count, easy to caricature, and large enough that everyone caricatured anyway. The stock versions ran opposite ways, tourists who would flee at the first hard vintage, or patient whales who never sold anything. The numbers that now exist support neither story. They describe something more useful: a buyer class that boomed, pulled back, and settled in for good.

Seventy percent of family offices worldwide are engaged in direct investing, 77 percent in North America.² On closed lower middle market transactions, the average family office deal carried $12.4 million of enterprise value in 2025, larger than private equity funds at $9.5 million and independent sponsors at $8.9 million on the same platform.¹ And the boom-era peak is visibly behind: direct private equity fell from 13 percent of the average family office portfolio in 2021 to 8 percent in 2025, on UBS’s own series.⁵

The 2021 boom ended, and the buyer class it created did not. This report covers what family offices actually close, who they close it alongside, and how much of their portfolios sits behind the activity.

Current market context: Survey data in this article runs through 2025 fielding, with the UBS series fielded in the first quarter of 2026. Transaction data runs through the first half of 2025. The two most consequential refreshes land in late September or October (RBC and Campden Wealth for North America, PwC for deal counts) and late May (UBS).

Contents

1. Family offices buy bigger than private equity funds in the lower middle market
2. Where family office equity goes in independent sponsor deals
3. Participation held while allocation settled back from the 2021 peak
4. The check-size question public data cannot answer
5. Hold periods: what is measured and what is only capacity
6. Minority stakes, club deals, and who takes control
7. How many family offices exist, and why the counts disagree
8. What this data tells investors
9. Family office direct investing FAQ
10. Methodology and caveats
11. Sources and references

Family Office Direct Investing Statistics at a Glance

Full citations appear in Sources and References; source types and limitations are detailed in the methodology section.

Metric note: Three different measurements appear in this article, and they move independently. More family offices hold direct investments than at the start of the decade, the average office allocates a smaller share of its portfolio to them, and recorded deal counts have fallen; all three are true at once because none of them is measuring the same object. Every figure below is labeled with the measurement it belongs to.

Family Offices Buy Bigger Than Private Equity Funds in the Lower Middle Market

The average family office acquisition in the lower middle market is larger than the average private equity fund acquisition. Axial, a deal platform that records closed lower middle market transactions in the $2.5 million to $250 million enterprise value range, put the 2025 average family office deal at $12.4 million of total enterprise value, against $9.5 million for private equity funds and $8.9 million for independent sponsors. Only holding companies bought larger, at $17.4 million.¹

Most sellers assume the institutional buyer writes the biggest check. In this size band it does not.

The family office average runs roughly 31 percent above the private equity fund average ($12.40 million against $9.47 million; CapitalPad Research calculation from Axial’s published figures). Because both figures come from the same platform, definition, and year, the comparison is internally consistent even though the absolute levels are platform-specific.

Family offices are not gaining ground in this market. Their share of closed transactions on Axial averaged 15 percent across 2021 to 2025, described by Axial as consistent rather than rising, alongside holding companies at 10 percent. What did move was the institutional share: private equity funds and independent sponsors together fell from 61 percent of closed deals in 2021 to 45 percent in 2025, with individual investors at 13 percent and search funds at 14 percent in 2025.¹ The lower middle market buyer pool fragmented; family offices held their position inside it.

PwC’s wider family office deal data shows the same size drift. PwC, which tracks transactions for more than 20,000 family offices, found 59 percent of family office deals under $25 million in the first half of 2025, down from 70 percent in the second half of 2015.¹¹ Deal sizes have drifted upward across the decade.

What the deal-count data actually records

The popular image of the family office as a buyer of operating companies describes a small slice of what the transaction data captures. Across PwC’s universe in the first half of 2025, real estate accounted for 39 percent of family office deal volume and venture capital 31 percent. Private equity was 19 percent. Control M&A, the acquisition of an operating company outright, was 3 percent.¹¹

These deal counts include far more than company acquisitions. A publisher reporting family office deal volume is counting property purchases, startup rounds, fund commitments and debt alongside company acquisitions. PwC’s own framing puts family offices at roughly 5 percent of overall M&A deal value.¹¹ Operating-company acquisitions are a small share of what broader family office deal counts include, which is why the narrow Axial data carries more weight for a lower middle market reader than the aggregate counts do.

Where Family Office Equity Goes in Independent Sponsor Deals

Family offices are the largest single source of equity for independent sponsor transactions in the United States. Citrin Cooperman’s 2025 Independent Sponsor Report, drawing on more than 170 professionals active in the sector, found family offices cited as a capital source by 62 percent of independent sponsor respondents, ahead of high-net-worth individuals at 55 percent, SBIC funds at 53 percent, and mezzanine and mequity funds at 45 percent.³

Independent sponsors, who work without a committed fund and assemble the equity for each acquisition separately, have to raise equity deal by deal. The survey shows where that equity comes from.

The lead investor question is single-select, each respondent naming one answer, so it reads as a share of respondents rather than a frequency of mention. Family offices took the top slot there as well, cited by 22 percent of respondents, ahead of SBIC funds at 18 percent, mequity funds at 13 percent, and buyout and one-stop funds at 11 percent each. Fifteen percent of respondents had no lead investor at all.³

A second survey reaches the same conclusion from a different sample. Axial’s 2025 Independent Sponsor Report, based on 83 independent sponsors, found family offices used as equity partners by 85 percent of them, with high-net-worth individuals at 81.3 percent.⁴ The 62 percent and the 85 percent are not the same measurement: different populations, different question wording, different survey design. The two surveys are not directly comparable, but both put family offices at the top.

Repeat funding relationships are common. Fifty-nine percent of Citrin Cooperman’s respondents said they often use repeat funding relationships,³ which is consistent with a market where the sponsor’s capital problem is solved once and then reused rather than re-run from scratch on every transaction.

Evaluating one transaction gives an investor visibility into the specific company, sponsor, purchase price and financing structure that a fund commitment does not, and it concentrates the outcome in a single business rather than spreading it across a portfolio.

Participation Held While Allocation Settled Back From the 2021 Peak

Direct investing is standard practice among North American family offices and has been for years. Almost 90 percent of them own private equity investments, and roughly 80 percent hold direct investments as well as funds, according to the 2025 North America Family Office Report from RBC and Campden Wealth, which surveyed 141 North American family offices between April and August 2025.⁷ Citi Wealth’s 2025 survey puts North American engagement in direct investing at 77 percent, the highest of any region, against 70 percent globally and 57 percent in Latin America.² The global figure has eased across three waves of the same survey, from four-fifths of family offices engaging in direct investments in 2023 to “over three-fourths” in 2024 and 70 percent in 2025.^{21, 22}

Direct allocations are below the 2021 peak. UBS’s Global Family Office Report tracks strategic asset allocation across 307 single family offices in more than 30 markets. Direct private equity ran at 9 percent of the average portfolio in 2019, peaked at 13 percent in 2021, and stood at 8 percent in 2025. Private equity funds and funds of funds moved the other way, from 7 percent in 2019 to 10 percent in 2025.⁵ UBS reported: “direct private equity allocations decreased to 9% from 13%.”⁶

Directs led funds by five percentage points at the 2021 peak. By 2025 funds led directs by two, the widest margin in favor of funds across the seven years UBS reports. The retreat measured here is not from private equity. It is from doing private equity without a manager.

The North American picture, which matters more for a United States reader, tracks the same direction on a shorter series. Directs account for 33 percent of the average North American family office’s private markets portfolio in the 2025 edition, split 17 percent under active management and 16 percent held passively, against 48 percent through funds. The 17 percent is a share of the private markets sleeve; RBC’s separate 9 percent figure is a share of the total portfolio, a different denominator, and the two should not be compared directly.⁷ Tracked across the four most recent editions (CapitalPad Research analysis of RBC and Campden Wealth data):

Co-investments inside that sleeve moved 5 percent, 12 percent, then back to 8 percent across the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions.^{7, 8} At the total-portfolio level, the 2025 North American figures are 9 percent in direct private equity against 11 percent in private equity funds, with private markets including private credit at 29 percent of the average portfolio, down a point year over year.⁷

Transaction counts fell furthest of all. PwC recorded family office deal volume below 7,200 in the first half of 2025, the lowest half-year total of the decade, down 23.2 percent from the second half of 2024. The decade peak was 17,460 deals and $1,054.5 billion invested in the second half of 2021.¹¹ The earlier edition of the same study described the collapse in operating-company deals directly: the number of direct and M&A investments by family offices fell from an all-time high in early 2022 to its third-lowest level of the decade by the second half of 2023, “plunging by 53% in just 18 months.”¹²

Deployment Pace: The Behavior Is Measured, the Motive Is Not

Family offices have been sitting on cash and saying they intend to deploy it for two consecutive survey waves. Goldman Sachs found family offices holding 12 percent of portfolios in cash in 2023, with 35 percent planning to reduce cash balances. Two years later, cash was 12 percent again, with 34 percent planning to reduce it.^{19, 20} The average was level across both waves even though roughly a third of respondents in each said they planned to reduce cash. The waves drew different respondent pools, so read it as repeated posture rather than tracked follow-through.

Source: Goldman Sachs, Family Office Investment Insights, 2023 and 2025.^{19, 20} Global samples with the Americas at 47 to 57 percent. Goldman’s underlying report is not publicly retrievable; both figures come from its own press releases, which carry no page numbers.

Sixty-six percent of family office direct investors told Citi in 2023 they were seeking opportunistic deals based on attractive valuations, while 38 percent had paused new activity on economic uncertainty.²¹ Dentons found 70 percent taking a wait-and-see approach for lower valuations in 2022.¹⁶ And PwC’s deal counts, already covered above, are at a decade low.

Deal activity has slowed, and the public data does not clearly show why. At least three explanations fit the same evidence. Family offices may be waiting for better valuations: capital without a fund clock can decline to transact at prices it does not like. They may be constrained by staffing: 44 percent of United States offices cite understaffing as a direct-investing bottleneck, and a slow program run by a three-person team looks identical from the outside to a disciplined one.¹⁸ Or they may have less to recycle: a family office waiting on realizations from existing private positions is deploying against an industry-wide backlog of 32,000 unsold portfolio companies worth $3.8 trillion.¹⁴

Two data points suggest family offices are not simply sitting out. Sixty-four percent of family offices told BNY Wealth they anticipate making six or more direct investments in the coming year. That measures intent rather than completed investments, but it points to continued appetite.¹⁸ And a record 60 percent of UBS respondents indicated they were planning allocation changes in the next twelve months, the highest share in that report’s history.⁵ Repositioning activity and pacing discipline are not the same thing, and the public data does not distinguish between them.

The Check-Size Question Public Data Cannot Answer

No current source publishes what a United States family office actually invests in an operating-company acquisition. The question is among the most common a sponsor or seller asks, and the honest answer is that three adjacent measures exist and none of them is the one being asked for.

Axial’s $12.4 million figure is the total enterprise value of the acquired company, so it includes any acquisition debt and any equity contributed by other participants in the deal.¹ PwC’s size bands measure transaction value across the disclosed-value subset of a universe that includes venture rounds and property, so the 59 percent under $25 million tells you about deal scale rather than about a family office’s equity commitment.¹¹ Dentons’ direct investing survey did report an average direct investment of $19 million, which is the closest thing to a real answer in the literature, but it is a global mean across 188 respondents fielded in October 2022, pulled upward by billion-dollar offices, and no later edition of that survey exists.¹⁶

What can be said with confidence: family office acquisitions in the lower middle market cluster at enterprise values above those of private equity fund acquisitions on the same platform, and most family office transactions of any kind fall below $25 million. What cannot be said: the size of the check, in the United States, in the current year, for a control or minority position in an operating company. That figure would require either a paid transaction database with a family office buyer-type breakout, which none of the major providers publishes, or a survey question no publisher currently asks.

Hold Periods: What Is Measured and What Is Only Capacity

The most-repeated claim about family office direct investing is that these buyers hold for ten to thirty years, or indefinitely. No published research supports it. No public source quantifies indefinite, evergreen, or permanent-capital horizons for family office direct investments. Private equity hold periods are well documented; no public dataset measures realized family office hold periods at exit at all.

What exists is one self-reported distribution. The 2024 Wharton Family Office Survey, as reported by Knowledge@Wharton, found family offices held 30 percent of direct investments for three to five years and 55 percent for six to ten years, while 15 percent of families held investments beyond ten years.¹³ By comparison, Bain’s buyout baseline: holding periods at exit now “hover at around seven years, up from an average of five to six years from 2010 to 2021.”^{14, 15}

Sources: Knowledge@Wharton on the 2024 Wharton Family Office Survey; Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026.^{13, 14} Presented as a table rather than a chart because the two measures are structurally different: one is a self-reported distribution across positions held, the other an average across positions sold. A side-by-side chart would imply a like-for-like benchmark that does not exist.

The two sit closer together than commonly assumed. The modal family office direct hold falls in a six to ten year band against a buyout hold at exit that has stretched to around seven. The family office advantage shows up in the absence of a fund clock, not in a longer measured hold. A fund has to return capital on a schedule its limited partners agreed to; a family balance sheet does not, and that difference is real whether or not it produces a longer average.

There is also evidence cutting against the patient-capital picture from inside the family office data itself. Forty-two percent of Dentons respondents named lack of control over exit as a top direct-investing challenge, behind operational risk at 45 percent and deal-flow quality at 43 percent.¹⁶ Holding-period flexibility, in other words, does not mean indifference to exit timing. Separately, 66 percent of family offices told UBS they still believe illiquidity boosts long-term returns.⁶ Long-horizon conviction is well evidenced; a long measured horizon is not.

Minority Stakes, Club Deals, and Who Takes Control

Most family office direct investments are minority positions taken alongside other investors. Roughly 70 percent of family office direct private investments are syndicated, per the 2024 Wharton survey.¹³ PwC’s parallel measure, the share of family office investments it classifies as club deals, rose from 58 percent in the second half of 2015 to a peak of 75 percent in the first half of 2023 and remains the dominant structure.¹¹ PwC uses “club deal” for any collaborative investment made alongside other investors, which is a broader category than an LP co-investment right inside a fund relationship.

Minority stakes are more common than control, and where control occurs is telling. Dentons found 42 percent of North American family office direct investments carried a controlling position, and 44 percent in Europe. Within the sample, control propensity rose with balance-sheet scale: 44 percent of direct investments made by offices above $1 billion in AUM were controlling positions, against 30 percent for offices below that threshold.¹⁶

Source: Dentons Family Office Direct Investing Survey, 188 respondents across 32 countries, 44 percent United States, fielded October 2022.¹⁶ These are shares of direct investments, not shares of family offices. No later edition of this survey exists, so this is the most recent control-versus-minority measurement available and it is close to four years old.

Control propensity appears tied to balance-sheet scale. A $400 million office and a $4 billion office are both family offices; the larger one is more likely to buy companies outright, though the relationship is a gradient rather than a rule.

Why Direct Investing Concentrates in Larger Offices

Family offices show substantial operating economies of scale, and the cost curve is steep. Operating costs run 98 basis points of AUM for North American family offices below $500 million, against 42 basis points for those above $1 billion.⁹ A smaller office pays more than twice as much, proportionally, to run itself, which bears directly on what it can afford to staff.

Seventy-one percent of United States family offices employ between one and five investment professionals, 22 percent employ six to twenty, and 7 percent employ more than twenty.¹⁷ Those teams are responsible for an entire portfolio, with direct deals competing for attention against everything else on the desk. Forty-four percent of United States offices told BNY Wealth that understaffing is a bottleneck for their direct investing programmes, an 83 percent increase year over year.¹⁸ The North American offices RBC and Campden Wealth surveyed maintain an average of 12 concurrent open direct positions, but the majority hold fewer than five.¹⁰

Four independent sources point in the same direction: in-house control investing appears to concentrate above a certain balance-sheet size, and the control and allocation gradients visible in the survey data are associated with scale rather than stated preference. The synthesis is CapitalPad’s, drawn from the operating cost ratios, the team-size distribution, the understaffing rate and the control-by-size split each come from a different publisher.

Compensation increasingly resembles private equity even though most investment teams remain small. Forty-nine percent of United States family office investment professionals receive carried interest and 60 percent receive some additional incentive.¹⁷ Yet nearly half of the families tracked in the 2024 Wharton survey made direct private investments “without staffing up with private equity professionals.”¹³ Two consecutive Wharton waves report the same finding.

Source: Heidrick & Struggles, 2025 Family Offices Compensation Survey, 106 family office investors across the United States and Europe.¹⁷ The two figures use different denominators and are shown separately rather than combined: team size is measured at the office level, carried interest at the respondent level. The United States sub-sample size is not separately disclosed.

The result is a buyer type that pays like private equity and is staffed like a family business. That is a coherent position for an investor writing a handful of checks a year into transactions someone else sources and leads, and it explains why the syndicated, sponsor-led structures in the previous sections are the ones family offices actually use.

How Many Family Offices Exist, and Why the Counts Disagree

Deloitte estimates 8,030 single family offices worldwide in 2024, up from 6,130 in 2019, with 3,180 in North America and a projection of 10,720 by 2030.²³ Those counts are modeled by Wealth-X and Altrata from wealth data rather than surveyed, and the 2030 figure is a projection.

Source: Deloitte Private, Defining the Family Office Landscape 2024, executive summary.²³ Counts are modeled by Wealth-X and Altrata rather than surveyed by Deloitte.

Other counts run far higher, and the gap is definitional rather than empirical. PwC’s deal database tracks more than 20,000 family offices, including 7,160 in the United States alone, which is more than double Deloitte’s estimate for all of North America.¹¹ FINTRX reports 4,503.²⁴ These are three different objects: a modeled population of single family offices, a transaction-database universe that includes multi-family offices and other deal-active vehicles, and a vendor’s contactable coverage. Blending them into one series produces a number that describes nothing.

The asset figures carry their own trap. Deloitte puts family office assets under management at $3.1 trillion, rising 73 percent to $5.4 trillion by 2030, while the total wealth of the families served is $5.5 trillion, rising to $9.5 trillion.²³ Both lines grow 73 percent, which is why the $9.5 trillion figure is so frequently reported as family office AUM. It is family wealth, including operating businesses. The AUM projection is $5.4 trillion.

What This Data Tells Investors

Family offices have crossed from anecdote into benchmark. Until recently, a sponsor or seller assessing a family office counterparty had reputation and conversation to work with. There is now a closed-deal share, an average deal size against comparable buyer types, a control propensity by balance-sheet band, a syndication rate, and a capital-source ranking in the one channel where family office money is dominant. None of these is a perfect measurement, and each carries a denominator that has to be stated. Together they are enough to price expectations.

The most useful finding for a lower middle market participant is the least intuitive one. Family offices close larger deals on average than private equity funds do in this size band. A seller assuming the fund bid will be the bigger one, or a sponsor assuming family office capital is the small-check option, is working from a picture the data does not support. The caveat matters: this is one platform, and enterprise value is not an equity check.

Falling direct allocations do not undercut any of that. It measures something else: how much of an individual family’s portfolio sits in positions the family selected itself, which fell from 13 percent to 8 percent globally between 2021 and 2025 while fund allocations rose past it. A family office can do fewer direct deals as a share of its own book and still be the most frequent equity partner an independent sponsor meets, because there are more family offices than there were and because the sponsor channel is small relative to the capital in it. Anyone using the allocation series to argue that family offices are leaving the market is reading a portfolio statistic as a market statistic.

Two of the questions readers most want answered have no credible public answer, and that is itself worth knowing. There is no current United States equity check size for family office operating-company deals, and there is no dataset measuring realized family office hold periods at exit. Claims of ten-to-thirty-year or permanent holds circulate widely and rest on nothing measured. The flexibility is real: capital without a fund clock can hold longer when holding is the right answer. The specific hold-period claims are not: no public data measures them, and a diligence process that assumes a family office partner will hold indefinitely is assuming something no one has demonstrated.

For an investor evaluating a specific transaction, the practical translation is that the family office label predicts less than the balance sheet behind it. Control propensity, deal size, staffing depth and pace all track scale, and the syndicated club structure that dominates the data means the family office in a given deal is frequently one participant among several rather than the party setting terms. The relevant diligence question is which office, at what size, with what team, and in what position in the stack.

For accredited investors and family offices approaching this market as capital rather than counterparty, CapitalPad is a private equity co-investment group that lets accredited investors and family offices invest, deal by deal, in lower middle market acquisitions. CapitalPad provides family offices with direct deal flow in lower middle market private equity, sourced from independent sponsors. CapitalPad investors review each deal on its own merits rather than committing capital to a blind-pool fund.²⁵

Family Office Direct Investing FAQ

How many family offices invest directly?

Seventy-seven percent of North American family offices reported engagement in direct investing in 2025, the highest share of any region, against 70 percent globally, per Citi Wealth’s Global Family Office Report. Roughly 80 percent of North American family offices hold direct investments alongside funds, per RBC and Campden Wealth.^{2, 7}

How big are family office direct investments?

No public source reports a current United States equity check size for family office acquisitions of operating companies. The closest measures: family office deals averaged $12.4 million of total enterprise value on Axial in 2025, and 59 percent of the broader family office deal universe was under $25 million in the first half of 2025, per PwC.^{1, 11}

Do family offices invest more than private equity funds in the lower middle market?

Per deal, on the same platform, yes: $12.4 million against $9.5 million average closed-deal enterprise value in 2025, roughly 31 percent larger. By share of transactions, no: family offices have held about 15 percent of closed deals on Axial for five years while private equity funds and independent sponsors together lost share.¹

How long do family offices hold their direct investments?

Fifty-five percent of family office direct investments were held six to ten years and 30 percent for three to five years, per the 2024 Wharton Family Office Survey, with 15 percent of families holding beyond ten years. No public dataset measures realized family office hold periods at exit, and claims of ten-to-thirty-year or permanent holds are not supported by any published research.¹³

Do family offices hold longer than private equity firms?

The gap is narrower than the reputation suggests. Buyout holding periods at exit now run around seven years, up from an average of five to six across 2010 to 2021, against a family office mode of six to ten years. The structural difference is the absence of a fund clock rather than a materially longer average.^{13, 14}

Are family offices increasing their direct investing?

Participation and forward intent are high while allocation share and transaction counts have fallen. Direct private equity dropped from 13 percent of the average portfolio in 2021 to 8 percent in 2025 (UBS, global sample), and family office deal volume hit a decade low below 7,200 in the first half of 2025 (PwC). More offices participate than at the start of the decade; the average office allocates less.^{5, 11}

Do family offices take control or minority positions?

Minority and club structures dominate. Roughly 70 percent of family office direct private investments are syndicated, and 42 percent of North American family office direct investments carried a controlling position in the most recent measurement, fielded in October 2022. Control propensity rises with balance-sheet scale.^{13, 16}

Do family offices invest with independent sponsors?

Family offices are the sector’s largest single source of equity. They were cited as a capital source by 62 percent of independent sponsor respondents and named the most likely lead investor by 22 percent, per Citrin Cooperman’s 2025 report. A separate survey of 83 independent sponsors put family office usage at 85 percent.^{3, 4}

How many family offices are there?

An estimated 8,030 single family offices existed worldwide in 2024, 3,180 of them in North America, projected to reach 10,720 by 2030, per Deloitte. Higher counts circulate because other providers measure different objects: PwC’s deal database tracks more than 20,000 family offices including multi-family offices, and FINTRX reports 4,503 contactable firms.^{23, 11, 24}

Methodology and Caveats

CapitalPad Research analyzed family office survey data, transaction-database studies, and lower middle market deal-platform data to assemble the figures above. Every statistic is attributed to the publisher that produced it, with its sample, geography, fielding period and denominator stated wherever those differ from what a reader would assume. Two derived figures are labeled as CapitalPad Research analysis with their inputs shown: the four-edition series of directs as a share of the North American private markets sleeve, and the comparison of family office to private equity fund average deal size.

Publisher independence

Every flagship family office survey cited here is published by a firm that sells services to family offices: banks, wealth managers, accounting firms, a law firm and a deal platform. Samples are drawn from client and prospect bases, participation is voluntary, and allocation figures are self-reported and unaudited. Response bases also shift materially between editions. The North American sample in the RBC and Campden Wealth series moved from 179 to 144 to 183 to 141 across four editions, which means an apparent year-over-year trend can be a change in who answered rather than a change in behavior. This does not make the data unusable; it makes single-year moves weaker evidence than multi-year direction.

Source Quality Guide

Denominator conflicts

• Several comparisons that look natural are not available.
• UBS’s sample is global with the United States at 12 percent of respondents, so no UBS figure in this article is United States data.
• BNY Wealth surveys only offices above $250 million in AUM, so its 7 percent cash allocation does not contradict Citi’s 12 percent; the gap is a sampling artifact.
• PwC’s 2024 and 2025 editions track universes of 11,000-plus and 20,000-plus family offices respectively, so deal counts are never compared across editions.
• Axial’s independent sponsor report and its buyer-trends analysis use different windows and are reported separately rather than side by side.
• Citrin Cooperman’s 62 percent is multi-select and its 22 percent is single-select, so the two are not interchangeable, and neither is averaged with Axial’s 85 percent, which comes from a different population and a differently worded question.
• Dentons’ control percentages are shares of direct investments rather than shares of offices.
• RBC and Campden Wealth’s private markets figures are shares of the private markets sleeve, not of the total portfolio, so a 17 percent direct-active figure and a 9 percent direct private equity figure describe different denominators.

Data cutoffs, estimates and what is not measured

• Transaction data runs through the first half of 2025 and survey data through 2025 fielding, except the UBS allocation series (fielded January to March 2026) and the Bain buyout baseline (published February 2026).
• The Dentons control data was fielded in October 2022 and no later edition exists, making it the oldest major datapoint used in this article.
• Deloitte’s population counts are modeled rather than surveyed, and its 2030 figures are projections.
• Goldman Sachs’s underlying report is not publicly retrievable, so its figures come from the firm’s own press releases without page references.
• The Wharton survey’s full report is private and its sample size is not disclosed in any public document.
• The only published check-size figure is a 2020 proprietary survey of stated targets ($10 million to $75 million across more than 70 United States and Canadian offices); it is six years old with unpublished methodology, and this article does not use it as a benchmark.²⁶

Several things readers reasonably look for do not exist in public research as of August 2026: a current United States equity check size for family office operating-company acquisitions; realized family office hold periods at exit; any quantification of indefinite, evergreen or permanent-capital horizons; target ownership percentages for family office stakes; and clean sector-preference data for family office control deals as distinct from venture and property. One gap remains: every source measuring the family office and independent sponsor relationship measures it from the sponsor side, so the share of family offices that back independent sponsors is not answered by any publisher. Neither PwC nor the other transaction sources state whether their underlying providers capture announced or completed activity, which is flagged here as an unknown rather than resolved.

Cite this research: CapitalPad Research, “Family Office Direct Investing Statistics: Deal Sizes, Buyer Share, and Hold Periods.” Reviewed August 2026. https://capitalpad.com/family-office-direct-investing-statistics/

Sources and References

1. Axial, “Who’s Buying in the Lower Middle Market in 2026? Key Buyer Trends from Axial Data” (February 17, 2026). Source
2. Citi Wealth, “2025 Global Family Office Report” press release (September 16, 2025). Source
3. Citrin Cooperman, “Uncharted No More: Capital Sources in the Independent Sponsor Sector,” 2025 Independent Sponsor Report (December 12, 2025). Source
4. Axial, “Axial’s 2025 Independent Sponsor Report” (October 23, 2025). Source
5. UBS, “Global Family Office Report 2026.” Source
6. UBS, “Global Family Office Report 2023” media release (May 31, 2023). Source
7. RBC and Campden Wealth, “The North America Family Office Report 2025.” Source
8. RBC and Campden Wealth, “The North America Family Office Report 2024.” Source
9. RBC and Campden Wealth, “The North America Family Office Report 2024,” operating cost section. Source
10. Campden Wealth, “The North America Family Office Report 2023.” Source
11. PwC, “Global Family Office Deals Study 2025.” Source
12. PwC, “Global Family Office Deals Study 2024.” Source
13. Knowledge@Wharton, “What’s Behind the Secret Walls of Family Offices?”, reporting the 2024 Wharton Family Office Survey (Wharton Global Family Alliance). Source
14. Bain & Company, “Global Private Equity Report 2026” press release (February 23, 2026). Source
15. Bain & Company, “Welcome to a New Era,” Global Private Equity Report 2026 (February 22, 2026). Source
16. Dentons, “Family Office Direct Investing Survey: Direct Investing and Its Challenges” (published January 2023; fielded October 2022). Source
17. Heidrick & Struggles, “2025 Family Offices Compensation Survey.” Source
18. BNY Wealth, “2025 Investment Insights for Single Family Offices.” Source
19. Goldman Sachs, “2025 Family Office Investment Insights” press release. Source
20. Goldman Sachs, “2023 Family Office Investment Insights” press release (May 8, 2023). Source
21. Citi Private Bank, “Global Family Office Survey Insights 2023.” Source
22. Citi Private Bank, “Global Family Office 2024 Survey Insights.” Source
23. Deloitte Private, “Defining the Family Office Landscape 2024,” executive summary. Source
24. FINTRX, “Q1 2026 Family Office Report” (May 12, 2026). Source
25. CapitalPad public investor and sponsor materials. Source
26. Zachary Scott, “Myths and Realities of Family Offices,” proprietary survey of more than 70 United States and Canadian family offices (circa 2020). Source