Global mergers and acquisitions volume crossed $4.8 trillion in 2025, surging 41 percent from 2024 for the second-largest year on record, according to data provider Dealogic as reported by Reuters. Despite a 6 percent decline in deal count to 38,395, overall deal value was driven higher by a record number of mega-deals valued at $10 billion or more. In total, 70 megadeals closed in 2025. A small group of investment banks advised on the majority of that value. This page ranks the busiest M&A banks by announced deal value and by deal count for 2025, shares what it's like to work across the table from bulge bracket, elite boutique and middle-market firms and breaks down how much these banks charge for M&A advisory.
I was an M&A advisor for ten years before starting DealRoom. I have sat at the banker's table and across from it many times. This blog is for the deal teams that hire these banks or compete against them in a process. If you are here researching banking careers, we cover working at these banks near the end of this post.
The most active M&A advisors by 2025 deal value
Goldman Sachs tops Mergermarket's full-year 2025 league tables with $1.66 trillion in announced deal value, equating to 36.4% of a market which Mergermarket values at $5.1 trillion. JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley round out the top three. All three advisors have advised on over $1 trillion worth of deals. Centerview Partners and Wells Fargo moved into the global top 10, replacing UBS (11th) and Deutsche Bank (13th).
The numbers look a little different from LSEG’s version of the same table, which tells the same story from a different angle. Goldman advised on $1.48 trillion of the 2025 deal value, or about 32% of the total. The firm also earned an estimated $4.6 billion in M&A fees, more than any other bank. LSEG’s league table counted 68 deals worth $10 billion or more valued at roughly $1.5 trillion combined. That’s more than double from 2024 and the most in LSEG’s history dating back to 1980. Goldman advised on 38 of those deals.
The companies leading the marquee mandates illustrate where value was parked. Goldman oversaw the sell side of Electronic Arts buyout ($56.6 billion), the largest leveraged buyout ever. JPMorgan holds the sell-side mandate for Warner Bros Discovery in the approaching $100 billion showdown between Netflix and Paramount Skydance. Morgan Stanley sat on the buy side of Union Pacific's planned $85 billion Norfolk Southern acquisition and Kimberly-Clark's $51.4 billion bid for Kenvue. Transactions of this magnitude dwarf entire mid-market sectors. Check out our running list of the largest M&A deals here.
The most active M&A advisors by deal count
Value rankings reward whoever touches the biggest deals. Count rankings reward whoever closes the most. They create a different leaderboard. Houlihan Lokey ranks first globally on both counts in GlobalData's Financial Deals Database with 318 announced mandates in 2025, the only advisor to exceed 300. Morgan Stanley ranks second with 295. However, by GlobalData's value metric Morgan Stanley topped the list with $872.7 billion. Methodology heavily impacts these rankings.
Go smaller still on the size continuum and you find another shake-up in the leaderboard ranks. According to Mergermarket's count methodology, which includes more small transactions, PwC topped the league in 2025 with 660 deals. KPMG placed second with 525 deals, Goldman Sachs placed third with 515 and Deloitte placed fourth with 478. If your deal is valued at less than $100 million, statistically speaking, the person sitting across the table from you is more likely to be from a Big Four deal team than an investment banker.
Why league tables disagree
Mergermarket, LSEG, Dealogic and GlobalData each have proprietary guidelines around eligibility of deals, attribution of multiple advisors and when deal value counts (announcement value vs. closing value). That's why you'll see Goldman worth $1.66 trillion on one leaderboard and $690.2 billion on another for the same year. Approach league tables as bankers would: useful for directional trends, but not an audited fact. The firms that appear across all four providers are the ones to take notice of.
Bulge bracket, elite boutique or middle market: what each is like across the table
Bulge bracket banks
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citi and now Wells Fargo all combine advisory with a balance sheet. They can advise the deal, finance it and hedge it all in one engagement. That's why they win most megadeal mandates. If you’re facing one as a counterparty, you’re up against a deep bench, standardized process discipline and a team that is likely running ten other live deals. Expect polish. Do not expect the senior banker who pitched the deal to be at every working session.
Elite boutiques
Centerview, Evercore, Lazard, Moelis and PJT don't do lending. They don't do underwriting. They sell advice only. There are fewer conflicts to navigate. Evercore had record M&A and IPO advisory fees of $3.3 billion in 2025, a 34% jump year-over-year. Evercore ranked third globally among public companies for advisory revenues. Rival Lazard reported record adjusted financial advisory revenue of $1.83 billion. Centerview climbed into the top 10 globally last year on 52.3% volume growth. Across the street, when you get a boutique mandate, the named senior partner is typically working the deal. The bench is thinner so work can take longer if the firm is stretched.
Middle-market specialists
Houlihan Lokey, Rothschild, Jefferies, Lincoln, Baird, William Blair and the Big Four deal teams thrive in the $50 million to $1 billion range where most deals occur. Houlihan Lokey advised on 318 mandates, which made it the most active advisor globally by volume. Mergermarket ranked Houlihan Lokey number one by deal count for both private equity buyouts (68) and private equity exits (95). As a corporate buyer transacting with a PE fund in 2026, there is a non-zero chance Houlihan Lokey is running your process. These firms have tighter, more standardized processes than their megadeal brethren. The data room will open quicker and the timeline letter can prove it.
How M&A advisory fees actually work
Fee structures are negotiated on a deal-by-deal basis, but the framework remains the same: a work fee (retainer) and a success fee paid at closing. The latest available public survey is The Firmex and Axial M&A Fee Guide, which surveyed mid-market advisors. The most frequent package consists of a one-time work fee of over $15,000 applied towards a success fee that decreases with larger deal values.
Source: Firmex and Axial M&A Fee Guide, survey of mid-market M&A advisors. The same guide notes many advisors still quote the Lehman formula or a variant: a descending percentage scale (for example 5% of the first million, 4% of the second) as deal size rises.
Percentages compress above the mid-market. Megadeal advisory fees are negotiated and frequently come in well below 1% of deal value. Consider the 20/25 tallies: Goldman's roughly $4.6 billion in M&A fees were earned on $1.48 trillion of value advised on LSEG's calculations, or an effective rate of approximately 0.3%. Sell-side fees are also higher than buy-side fees for an equivalent deal size due to the fact that the bank leads the process.
When to hire a bank and when to run it in-house
We write software for internal deal teams, so we observe this decision being made every week. The truth is it depends on where you sit in the deal and how frequently you transact. In our State of M&A report, we characterized the current cycle as “transact to transform,” meaning companies are buying the capabilities they can’t build quickly enough. Teams doing that type of programmatic M&A typically run corporate development internally and hire banks selectively.
Hire a bank when:
- You want to sell. A banker-run auction creates competitive tension a solo seller can't manufacture, and the fee usually pays for itself in price. This is the strongest case for a mandate.
- The deal will involve financing or require a fairness opinion. Most balance-sheet banks bundle both. Boards with shareholder litigation risk want the opinion regardless.
- Transaction volume is low. A team doing one deal every three years should rent process expertise instead of building it.
Run it in-house when:
- You are a programmatic acquirer and have an existing pipeline. Repeat buyers understand their targets, their multiples and their integration costs far better than any banker putting a CIM in front of them.
- The target is proprietary. If you found the deal and exclusivity is genuine, a sell-side bank coming in to help only competes with you.
- Deal size is below banker economics. Minimum success fees mean a $15 million deal often cannot support a quality banker. Corp dev and outside counsel will do.
We wrote about this trend in our State of M&A report. We highlighted that approximately $1.1 trillion of the $4 trillion of private equity dry powder was deployed in buyout funds against the clock. That money arrived in 2025: buyouts totaled $1.1 trillion, Reuters reported, an increase of 51 percent from the prior year. More PE activity equals more banker-driven processes. Deal-minded buyers who curate their own deal pipeline enter these processes ahead of the curve and are armed with better information than buyers who begin at the teaser.
The banker-run sell-side process from the buyer's seat
If a Houlihan Lokey or Jefferies is running the sale, the process itself will be the product. Knowing the choreography keeps you from being played by it. Here is the typical process:
- Teaser and NDA. You receive a one-page anonymous company profile. Execution of the NDA provides access to the CIM. You are added to a buyers list that the banker ranks by strategic fit and financial capacity to close.
- Process letter and IOI. The banker schedules a non-binding indications of interest (IOI) date. Opening bids will typically anchor to the CIM adjusted EBITDA. Bid the range the data supports, not the range implied by the process letter.
- Management meetings and data room. A curated group of bidders move forward. The data room opens up in phases. Every question you ask in the data room reveals your thesis to the sell side. Be strategic about the order in which you request information.
- LOI and exclusivity. Execution of final bids with markup of purchase agreement. The banker’s role during exclusivity is maintaining the credibility of the second bidder until the deal signs.
There are two real-world countermeasures. Number one: Operate on your own schedule: A well-oiled buy-side M&A process with pre-developed diligence request lists will prevent your process from being pushed by the banker's timeline (and risk thresholds). Number two: View the CIM as an advocacy document, not a disclosure document. Our due diligence guide discusses the request list that helps you bridge from the banker's numbers to reality. For a broader discussion of the advisor universe, check out our M&A advisory guide on how mandates are scoped and executed.
Working at these banks (the short version)
This page was previously a bank employer ranking. Here is the condensed version for those of you who are still looking into banking as a career. The tradeoffs correspond with the tiers listed above. Bulge bracket analysts get the most deal flow and the widest variety of exits; however, they also work the longest hours. Elite boutiques pay the highest salaries at the junior level and have smaller teams, so you get exposed to more faster. Middle-market firms tend to have more manageable hours and earlier client interaction. League-table position can be used as a loose gauge for deal flow. A bank doing 318 deals per year will move its juniors along quicker than one doing 40. If you're just starting out, check out our guide to the best courses for investment banking.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the top investment banks by M&A activity?
In terms of announced deal value, Goldman Sachs was the most active bank in 2025, advising $1.66 trillion of M&A according to Mergermarket. This represented a 36.4% share of the market. When ranked by number of deals, Houlihan Lokey was the top advisor by a significant margin. They advised on 318 announced mandates according to GlobalData, the only advisory firm to advise on more than 300 deals.
Who were the advisors on the largest M&A transactions of 2025?
Goldman Sachs led the sell side in the $56.6 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, the largest LBO in history. JPMorgan advises Warner Bros Discovery in its approximately $100 billion battle with Netflix over Paramount Skydance. Morgan Stanley counseled Union Pacific on its anticipated $85 billion takeover of Norfolk Southern and Kimberly-Clark on its $51.4 billion spinoff of Kenvue.
How are fees paid for M&A advisory work?
Mid-market fees range from reported success fees of 4% to 5.9% on $5 million to $10 million transactions, 2% to 3.9% on $20 million to $50 million transactions and 1% to 1.9% on $100 million to $150 million transactions. Typically there is also a work fee in excess of $15,000 due at closing. Fees for megadeals are negotiated on a deal-by-deal basis and are typically well under 1% of the value of the transaction.
What distinguishes a bulge bracket bank from an elite boutique?
Elite boutiques like Centerview & Evercore provide advice only. Bulge brackets like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan pair M&A advice with lending, underwriting and hedging off their own balance sheet. Sellside conflicts are reduced at boutiques, but there's no financing capability.
Should I have an investment bank to buy or sell a company?
Typically, sellers will want a banker-run process. Competitive tension increases price more than the fee. Many buyers with an internal corporate development function and an existing pipeline can forgo an advisor, particularly on proprietary deals or where the transaction size is too small to support banker economics.
What is an M&A league table?
An M&A league table lists investment banks by value or number of announced deals for a certain period of time. The league tables are published by data providers like Mergermarket, LSEG, Dealogic and GlobalData. Each league table has unique qualification and deal crediting criteria so rankings will differ between providers for the same year.
Methodology
Deal value rankings are based on league tables published by ION Analytics in January 2026 from Mergermarket's full-year 2025 data. Deal count rankings are based on GlobalData's Financial Deals Database, as reported by Private Banker International in January 2026. LSEG data is from league tables reported by Finimize. Bank revenue data is from Evercore's and Lazard's earnings releases for the fourth quarter 2025. Market totals are based on Dealogic data as reported by Reuters in December 2025. Fee benchmarks are from a survey of mid-market advisors conducted for the Firmex and Axial M&A Fee Guide. Tier classifications (bulge bracket, elite boutique, middle market) are defined by our editors and reflect standard industry groupings, not tiers defined or assigned by the providers themselves. We report only statistics the sources chose to publish; we do not estimate figures where they were withheld, such as when a provider did not disclose revenue earned from a deal.
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