How to Invest in Private Equity in 2026: The 18 Evergreen Funds Individuals Can Buy, Read From Their SEC Filings

The four ways in

Most “how to invest in private equity” advice stops at “you need to be rich” or “buy a PE ETF”. The filings show more choice than that, and more fine print. In 2026 an individual can:

1. Buy listed private equity. Shares of the managers (Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, EQT, 3i and others) or an ETF that holds them. Anyone can buy, at any time. You own the firms' fee streams and balance sheets, not their funds.
2. Buy a registered fund with no wealth test. SEC-registered closed-end funds whose prospectus sets no accredited-investor or qualified-client requirement. Minimums are $2,500 to $10,000. Four of them have reported a portfolio; one is new.
3. Buy a registered fund limited to qualified clients. These are tender-offer funds that charge an incentive fee, so the adviser rules limit them to “qualified clients” under Rule 205-3. Minimums are mostly $25,000 to $50,000.
4. Buy a private offering for accredited investors. These are perpetual, non-1940-Act vehicles from Blackstone, KKR, TPG, EQT and Brookfield. They file 10-Ks, 10-Qs and monthly NAV 8-Ks, but they are sold under Regulation D. Under SEC Rule 501(a), an individual is accredited with net worth (alone or jointly with a spouse or spousal equivalent) that “exceeds $1,000,000” excluding the main home, or with income above $200,000 ($300,000 joint) in each of the last two years.

Traditional ten-year closed-end buyout funds also reach individuals through feeder vehicles, usually at $100,000 and up. Apollo's AAA, below, is one example. They do not file the periodic reports this page is built from.

Every evergreen private equity fund we found, by size

Sizes are net assets from Form N-PORT at June 30, 2026 for the registered funds. For the private offerings they are transactional NAV from the August 31, 2026 NAV 8-K, except Brookfield, whose figure is GAAP net assets at June 30, 2026 from its 10-Q.

The combined $93.03B is our sum of the 17 funds with a reported size. It mixes June 30 and August 31 figures and leaves out AAA and the T. Rowe fund. For BXPE, “minimum: not stated” means what it says: neither the 10-K nor the 10-Q gives one, and the Form D entry is $0, which is a form field rather than the real minimum in the offering documents. Blackstone's 8-K of October 1, 2026 says its new unit series “will be subject to certain minimum and maximum investment thresholds” without giving the amounts. KKR's July 2026 8-K says the same about its new Class I series. Two funds' terms come from registration-statement amendments rather than a final prospectus: Partners Group's from its Form N-2/A of December 29, 2025, the latest on EDGAR, whose share classes may differ from the ones finally offered, and T. Rowe Price Goldman Sachs's from its Form N-2/A of June 26, 2026. For the full redemption history of the largest fund, see our BXPE redemptions page.

Who can actually buy what

Most “private equity for retail” coverage skips the eligibility line. It decides which half of the table above is open to you.

The four open funds take different routes to the same thing. AMG Pantheon's Class 1 units “will be publicly offered at current NAV per unit”, and StepStone says it “intends to offer Shares without limiting the number of investors”. None of the four prospectuses we saved contains an accredited-investor or qualified-client requirement. One more practical point: some of these funds are sold only through brokers and advisers who apply their own suitability rules, so “no wealth test in the prospectus” does not mean every platform will sell you the fund.

Why the qualified-client line? A registered fund that pays its adviser a share of profits (an incentive fee) can, under the Advisers Act, take money only from qualified clients. That is why the funds with a 10% to 12.5% incentive fee carry that restriction and the open funds have no fund-level incentive fee. More than half of the money in the registered funds sits behind that line. Our list of every interval fund ranks the private equity and venture interval funds by size, including the venture funds this page leaves out.

What it costs

“None at fund level” does not mean no performance fees. These are mostly funds of funds and secondaries buyers, so the carried interest of the underlying private equity funds is paid inside the portfolio and shows up in “acquired fund fees”. The fee tables put the all-in annual cost at 3.13% for AMG Pantheon Class 1 (0.70% management, 0.75% distribution, 0.87% other expenses, 0.81% acquired fund fees) and 3.57% for SPRIM Class S. Ares Private Markets shows 6.83% for Class A after waivers, a figure that includes its incentive fee and interest. Distribution fees add up too: 0.85% a year on Class S of BXPE, Brookfield, Franklin Lexington and SPRIM.

Getting out: the exit is a quarterly queue

None of these funds lets you sell on demand. The private offerings run a quarterly redemption plan, the tender-offer funds decide each quarter whether to make an offer, and the interval funds must make one on a fixed schedule.

Most funds met every request in the latest round, and several used only a small part of their offer: Hamilton Lane holders used 19.7% of theirs (our arithmetic; details on our Hamilton Lane tender page). The exception is the largest registered fund. Partners Group's holders tendered $914,840,756.21. The fund accepted $758,352,671.80, “representing 5% of the Fund's aggregate net asset value”, on a pro rata basis, and the payment “was made in the form of promissory notes”. Holders got 82.9% of what they asked for, and $156.5M stayed in the fund (our arithmetic). A 5% cap is a cap: it does not grow when more people want out.

The listed route: buying the managers instead of the funds

If the point is to own “private equity” with daily liquidity, the listed route is the only one that gives it. Invesco Global Listed Private Equity ETF (PSP) tracks an index of “listed private equity companies”, 66 constituents as of June 30, 2026. Its Form N-PORT for July 31, 2026 shows $232.3M of net assets. The largest positions were 3i Group (6.24%), Blackstone (5.05%), EQT AB (4.96%), KKR (4.95%) and TPG (4.83%). The summary prospectus puts total annual expenses at 1.75%, of which 1.09% is acquired fund fees, the costs of the investment companies it holds.

The trade-off is plain in the holdings. You get the managers' fee income and their share prices, which move with the stock market, not the appraised NAV of their buyout funds. For the venture and pre-IPO version of this question, see Fundrise Innovation Fund and the other access vehicles.

Apollo's AAA: the big one you cannot buy directly

Apollo Aligned Alternatives is often named alongside BXPE and K-PEC, but in the US it is not a public-reporting vehicle. None of the US AAA entities or CAIS feeders files a 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K or N-2; the only filings are Form D notices and exemptive applications. The Form D/A of June 29, 2026 for Apollo Aligned Alternatives (A), L.P. reports $13,536,693,070 sold to 35 investors, and AAA (C) reports $6.71B sold to 61 investors. Those counts probably include feeder vehicles counted as single investors. The CAIS feeders for individuals, which filed in December 2022 and have not amended since, each show a $100,000 minimum.

What a reader can do with this

• Start from the eligibility column, not the brand. If you are not accredited, your options are the listed route and the four open registered funds (plus the new T. Rowe Price fund). If you are accredited but not a qualified client, the registered funds that charge incentive fees are closed to you. BXPE, T-POP and Brookfield also need qualified-purchaser status.
• Count the full cost. Add the management fee, the performance or incentive fee, the distribution fee for your share class and the acquired fund fees. The registered funds' fee tables quoted above put the sum at 2.72% (SPRIM Class I) to 6.83% (Ares Class A) a year, before any upfront load.
• Price the exit before the entry. Assume you can get out at most 3% to 5% of the fund a quarter. Expect to pay 2% to 5% if you leave early. And expect proration when a lot of holders head for the door at once, as Partners Group's did in mid-2026.
• Check the latest tender result before adding money. The SC TO-I/A, or the 10-Q's redemptions table for the private offerings, shows whether the last round was paid in full, prorated or paid in notes.

FAQ

Sources: SEC EDGAR filings retrieved October 5, 2026. Private offerings: BXPE (CIK 1930054) Form 10-K 0001193125-26-106084, Form 10-Q 0001930054-26-000016, NAV 8-Ks 0001930054-26-000026 and -000029, Form D/A; K-PEC (CIK 1957845) 10-K, 10-Q 0001957845-26-000071, 8-K 0001957845-26-000085 (Exhibit 99.1), Form D/A; EQT Private Equity Co (CIK 2032020) 10-K 0001193125-26-134920, 10-Q 0001193125-26-351936, 8-K 0001193125-26-399361, Form D; T-POP (CIK 2050260) 10-K, 10-Q 0002050260-26-000042, 8-K 0002050260-26-000054, Form D/A; Brookfield Private Equity Fund (CIK 2074065) 10-K, 10-Q 0001628280-26-056751, 8-K 0001104659-26-112221, Form D/A. Registered funds: the June 30, 2026 Form N-PORT, the current prospectus (486BPOS, N-2 or N-2/A) and the latest Schedule TO-I/A or N-23C-3 notice of each fund, with accession numbers in the dataset. Apollo Aligned Alternatives: Form D filings of CIKs 1917048, 1917042, 1957809, 1950241, 1950242 and 1950292. PSP: Form N-PORT 0001209466-26-001315 and summary prospectus 0001193125-26-372140. Accredited-investor tests: 17 CFR 230.501(a), eCFR. Totals, shares of totals and proration percentages are our arithmetic, in sources/our_arithmetic_pe.py. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.