Private Equity Secondary Market: 10 Funds for Individuals, 2026

What the secondary market is, and who is selling in 2026

A secondary is the purchase of an existing private equity position from someone who already holds it. It comes in two forms. In an LP-led deal a limited partner sells its interests in one or more existing funds, usually a portfolio of them, and the buyer takes over the stakes at a price quoted as a percentage of the funds' reported NAV. In a GP-led deal the fund manager moves one or more assets out of an old fund into a new vehicle, a continuation vehicle, and the existing investors choose to sell or to roll over. AMG Pantheon's July 2026 prospectus describes the two the same way. Jefferies adds that single-asset continuation vehicles made up 68% of all continuation vehicles in the first half of 2026.

The two sources count differently (Jefferies covers the half year and its own deals plus public ones, PJT the first quarter), so the 53% and 55% are not the same measurement. Both say the same thing: more than half the volume is now led by the managers of the funds being sold, not by LPs clearing their books.

What buyers paid, by strategy

Jefferies publishes the price of LP portfolios as a percentage of NAV. These are institutional deals; the report says its data are based on transactions executed by its own Secondary Advisory team and public, non-Jefferies transactions, and it does not say what a small LP interest fetches.

For a seller the table is the reference point: an average LP portfolio cleared at about 13% below reported NAV in the first half of 2026 (our arithmetic: 100% less 87%), and a venture or real estate portfolio at a much wider discount. For a buyer through a registered fund it is a different calculation, which the next section sets out.

Why a registered fund does not pass the discount to you

Funds that buy secondaries aim to buy below NAV and then carry the position at fair value. The shares you buy are priced at the fund's NAV, and a tender offer repurchases them at NAV on the valuation date. Coller's August 2026 offer, for instance, repurchases shares “at their net asset value as of the Valuation Date”. So whatever a fund earned by buying below NAV shows up as a gain inside the fund after the purchase, and a new investor pays for it (our reading).

The filings give two public traces of how large that gain is:

• Funds' own statements. Franklin Lexington says asset appreciation now makes up over half of its return since inception and that it expects purchase discount to be approximately 20-35% of gross portfolio gain over time. Hamilton Lane Private Assets says that of its secondary investments 84% rose in value and 70% of those gains came from asset appreciation as opposed to closing discount (annual reports for the year to March 31, 2026).
• Day-one marks. The annual reports list each holding's acquisition date, cost and fair value. For lines that three secondaries-only funds acquired on March 31, 2026, the fair value at that date was above what the fund had paid (our arithmetic from the schedules; the script and every line counted are saved with this page).

Read the table with care. Cost is what the fund has paid net of distributions received, and fair value is the adviser's estimate from the latest NAVs of the underlying funds, so the gap is part purchase discount and part the roll-forward of the underlying NAVs to the quarter end. It is also the value at the fund's own mark, not a price anyone has paid since. We did not run the same count for the other seven funds because their schedules mix secondaries with direct and co-investment lines at cost, which would blur the result.

The ten funds: size, leverage and what is inside

We found the funds with EDGAR full-text search for secondaries language in 2026 annual reports and prospectuses, which returned at least 80 different filers, and took the registered funds that hold secondaries at scale and have a tender record on EDGAR. Net assets and liabilities are from the Form N-PORT for June 30, 2026. Portfolio mix is from the annual reports at March 31, 2026, and the bases differ by fund (net assets or total investments), as the headers say.

Three points stand out.

Leverage is a differentiator. Ares carries liabilities of 30.1% of net assets, which is why it shows 120.14% of net assets in secondaries, and its fee table includes 1.42% a year of interest on borrowed funds. The other nine are at 1.4% to 9.8%.

New funds hold cash while they deploy. Hamilton Lane Private Secondary Fund had 27.4% of net assets in short-term investments at March 31, 2026, and Carlyle AlpInvest's new secondaries fund 38.6% in cash equivalents (69.1% invested). A fee on net assets is charged on the cash as well.

“Secondaries fund” is a loose label. AMG Pantheon's Master Fund made 49 secondary, 16 co-investment and 13 primary commitments in the year to March 31, 2026 and holds more in co-investments (35.7%) than most of this list. Hamilton Lane Private Assets is 45.5% direct. Franklin Lexington's own letter splits its portfolio 55% LP-led secondaries, 34% GP-led and 11% co-investments.

What they cost and who can buy

The total expense figure includes the fund's share of the underlying funds' own expenses (acquired fund fees) but, as Coller's prospectus says of its own table, not the performance-based fees or carried interest of the underlying funds. Every fund except StepStone shows a 2.00% early repurchase fee on shares sold within a year. The six funds with incentive fees say in their prospectuses that they sell only to “qualified clients” within the meaning of Rule 205-3; the four without one (AMG Pantheon, StepStone, Coller, Pomona) do not state that test in the text we read, and a broker or adviser selling them can still apply its own suitability rules (our reading). Sales loads of up to 3.00% to 3.50% apply to some classes.

What the tender record says about getting out

Each fund repurchases shares only through tender offers, usually quarterly, sized at about 5% of net assets and priced at a later NAV. A fund's offer is a cap: if holders tender more, the fund can buy less and prorate. The final amendments to Schedule TO-I report what holders actually tendered. The table shows tenders as a share of the amount offered, for offers priced at four valuation dates, where the filing gives a dollar or unit offer.

For the other four funds the filings give a different picture:

• Carlyle AlpInvest Private Markets Fund reports shares tendered and payments net of a 5% holdback, with no dollar offer. For June 30, 2026 it paid $45.2M for 2.71 million shares, about 18.0% of 5% of its $5.03B net assets (our arithmetic), and accepted all tendered shares in each of the four offers.
• StepStone Private Markets offers up to 5% of shares with no dollar cap stated. Holders tendered $158.0M (valued December 15, 2025), $203.5M (March 16, 2026), $135.6M (June 16, 2026) and $146.4M (September 15, 2026). The June figure is about 43% of 5% of June 30 net assets (our arithmetic, rough).
• Coller files no final amendment. Its annual report lists $0.81M, $0.36M, $1.56M and $4.42M tendered for June 30, September 30, December 31, 2025 and March 31, 2026, $7.16M in all, and the fund says repurchases “remained well below the 5% threshold”. The last figure is 0.31% of net assets of $1.43B (our arithmetic).
• Carlyle AlpInvest Private Markets Secondaries Fund has filed no Schedule TO-I as of October 10, 2026. Its prospectus says the adviser intends to commence a quarterly repurchase program of up to 5% of net asset value, at the board's discretion.

Two things deserve a flag.

Pomona is past its stated offer size. Its Schedule TO-I filings of December 19, 2025, March 20 and June 22, 2026 each said “up to 5%” of net assets. In the final amendments, the amount it bought was adjusted upward to match what was tendered: $104.9M for March 31, 2026 and $124.4M for June 30, 2026, which is 7.1% of net assets of $1,748.8M at March 31, 2026 (our arithmetic). The September 22, 2026 filing offers up to 3%. Three percent of June 30 net assets is about $50.0M, 40% of what holders tendered last time (our arithmetic; the offer is priced at December 31, 2026, so this is an illustration, not a forecast). The result of the offer filed June 22 and priced at September 30, 2026 is not on EDGAR as of October 10. Pomona's filings also contain a repurchase threshold: if neither a full-repurchase quarter nor repurchases of at least 12% of shares occurred in the last four quarters, or more than 50% of shares are tendered in an offer, the board will call a shareholder meeting to vote on liquidating the fund.

“Final” results are sometimes restated. Hamilton Lane Private Assets filed on September 15, 2026 results that totalled $57.2M for June 30, then on October 8 an amendment correcting what it called an “administrative error”: $77.5M (our sums). Ares filed three “Final Amendments” for its March 31 offer, moving the total paid from $127.8M to $128.2M to $130.1M (our sums), and AMG Pantheon revised two of its four results. If you rely on a tender result, use the latest amendment and check the date.

What this adds up to: on the record, a holder who tendered at any of these funds in the last four quarters was paid in full, and the ten funds' own demand is rising but still well under their caps, except at Pomona. The regime can change when it fills. Jefferies reports that in 2026 several managers of evergreen funds activated standard 5% NAV gating mechanisms to manage outflows. Longer tender histories for four of the funds are on our pages for AMG Pantheon, Ares, Hamilton Lane Private Assets and StepStone Private Markets. Our page on how every evergreen fund paid its requests shows a prorated case, and our tender-offer fund explainer covers the mechanics.

A premise to correct: Blackstone BXPE

BXPE comes up in secondaries lists because Blackstone runs a large secondaries business, Strategic Partners. It is not a registered fund and it is not a secondaries vehicle. Its 10-K says units are sold to investors that are both accredited investors and qualified purchasers, and that it invests primarily in privately negotiated investments. In its conflicts section the 10-K lists Strategic Partners among the Blackstone businesses that receive priority for their own type of deal, secondaries among them (our reading). Our BXPE redemptions page covers it, and our guide to every evergreen private equity fund compares the whole group. Venture-focused secondaries funds exist too and are not in this census.

What a reader can do with this

If you are looking to buy exposure ($100,000 to $500,000).

• Decide what you are buying. If you want secondaries, take the seven funds that are mostly secondaries. If you want a broad private equity portfolio that includes secondaries, the three at about half are that, with roughly 36% to 46% in co-investments or direct holdings.
• Price the full cost, not the management fee. At the six funds with incentive fees the gap between the management fee and the all-in figure runs from about 2.0 to 5.2 percentage points, lowest class to highest (our arithmetic from the table). A new fund with cash is charged on the cash.
• Check the class and the load. The institutional class needs $1 million at Franklin Lexington, Coller, Ares and StepStone (Class Y at Hamilton Lane Private Secondary); at Carlyle AlpInvest, Hamilton Lane Private Assets and Pomona, Class I opens at $25,000. A load of up to 3.00% to 3.50% on some classes is a cost you pay once, on top of the annual figure.
• Read the tender history of the fund you pick. Look for the share of the offer tendered in the last two quarters and for any restated result. At 60% of the offer, AMG Pantheon and Ares have less room than Hamilton Lane.

If you hold a stake you want to sell.

• An LP interest in a private fund sells in the market Jefferies describes, at an average of 87% of NAV in the first half of 2026 and a lot less in venture and real estate. Whether a small interest gets those prices is not in the report.
• Shares of one of these ten funds cannot be sold in a market. They go back to the fund in a tender at NAV, less a 2.00% fee inside the first year, up to the cap, with a 5% holdback until the audit at Carlyle AlpInvest and similar holdbacks at some others. On the record above, that has meant being paid in full. If the cap starts binding, as the Pomona filing suggests it could, the fund could buy only part of each request, paid at a later NAV.

An advisor can help you compare a registered secondaries fund with the alternatives for your own tax position and time horizon.

FAQ

Sources, all read on October 10, 2026: Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review, July 2026 (jefferies.com PDF); for the ten funds, the annual reports (Form N-CSR) for the year to March 31, 2026 (Franklin Lexington 0001133228-26-008785, Coller 0001104659-26-070882, Pomona 0001398344-26-010628, Hamilton Lane Private Secondary 0001213900-26-066808, Carlyle AlpInvest Secondaries 0002058263-26-000005, Carlyle AlpInvest Private Markets 0001899610-26-000006, Ares 0001104659-26-070470, StepStone 0001213900-26-066828, AMG Pantheon 0001193125-26-264017, Hamilton Lane Private Assets 0001213900-26-066804), the Form N-PORT filings for June 30, 2026 (August 27 to 31, 2026), the July 2026 prospectuses (Form 486BPOS and N-2), the final amendments to Schedule TO-I and the Schedule TO-I offers cited, Blackstone Private Equity Strategies Fund's 10-K (0001193125-26-106084), and an EDGAR filing list and full-text-search output run on October 10, 2026. The day-one cost-to-fair-value census, shares of offers, sums, ratios and the Pomona 3% illustration are our arithmetic; scripts are saved with the data. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.