M&A Fees Over the Years: A Fee Guide Companion

This M&A Fee Guide Companion looks back at M&A fee survey data collected from 2016 to 2020 to examine what’s changed over time, what’s stayed the same, and insights to be drawn from M&A advisors answering the most salient questions about fees.

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M&A Advisory Fees Over the Past Four Years

In 2016, Firmex published the first and only global study of M&A advisory fees in the middle market. Four years on, the M&A Fee Guide is now an indispensable resource for M&A practitioners and business owners looking for an authoritative source on sell-side transaction fees and how they’re charged. This M&A Fee Guide Companion distills some key findings gained from collecting four years’ worth of survey data around sell-side M&A transaction fees.

In reading M&A Fees Over the Years: A Fee Guide Companion, M&A practitioners and business owners alike will discover trends on what M&A advisors say about the average number of deals done in a year,  minimum transaction values, how success fees are structured, and expected success fee percentages based on deal value. 

Trends and Highlights from the M&A Fee Guide Companion

  • Most mid-market M&A firms do a relatively small number of deals in a year, with the trend toward more firms engaging in fewer deals. 
  • Mid-market deals account for a majority of M&A activity, where the percentage of respondents reporting minimum transaction values of $5 million or less has increased over time.
  • In the past four years, most respondents said that they use a simple percentage or scaled percentage, while the Lehman method or variant was the least used.
  • Fees have been broadly dispersed for any given deal size over the past four years. At higher deal values, expectations of receiving fees over 8% have declined over time.

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