There’s little debate that M&A activity has fluctuated considerably over the last five years, largely owing to the wide-ranging effects of COVID-19 and a series of federal interest rate hikes. The fate of future deals, however, is an open question.
For researchers at Boston-based consulting firm Bain, there’s apparently plenty of reason for optimism in the remainder of 2025, at least. In a midyear M&A report released late last week, Bain officials reported a 4% year-over-year increase in the number of such deals between Jan. 1 and May 31, 2025.
The deals themselves were getting bigger, too: Per Bain’s research, the value of M&A transactions ticked up 14% in the first half of the year. Bain officials focused their report on deals worth $30 million or higher. In total, there were 2,815 such deals between January and May this year compared to 2,707 in the same period of 2024.
The report also called out several big-ticket deals set to drive up overall M&A values, such as Salesforce’s yet-to-close $8 billion plan to buy data management firm Informatica and Siemens’ recently completed $5 billion purchase of life sciences software maker Dotmatics.
As Bain officials see it, the data show that dealmakers are “not allowing tariffs (and the changed economic world order they represent) to derail M&A activity.”
“One sign is that while deal value and volume dropped when the tariff era began in April, deal value bounced back in May,” Bain officials wrote in the report. “That means the impact of the U.S. tariff announcements have been more muted than other recent shocks.”
Bain’s report pointed back to a drop in the value of M&A deals at the outset of COVID-19 in March 2020 and another dip amid federal interest rate hikes in 2022 and 2023.
“What surprised us most is how resilient dealmakers are,” said Suzanne Kumar, executive vice president of Bain’s M&A and divestitures practice, in an interview with CFO.com. “What we’re seeing now is a set of executives and companies that are pretty battle-tested.”
Of course, there have been conflicting messages about the future of M&A activity for the rest of the year. In a similar midyear survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, for instance, a third of business leaders in May said they were pausing or revisiting M&A deals due to uncertainty around tariffs.
Like the Bain report, PwC’s study also found a modest year-over-year increase in deals done over the first half of 2025. But it’s not yet clear whether that’s an indicator of protracted M&A activity in the year ahead or a temporary blip. Andrew Apfelberg, a partner at Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker who works on business transactions, said that for many middle-market dealmakers, “everything stopped” after President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, worldwide tariff regime on April 2.
“All the deals stopped – good deals, bad deals, deals on the one-yard line and deals that were just kicking off,” he said. “Everything stopped because you just didn’t know how to underwrite the target company anymore.”
But when many of those April tariffs were scaled back in May, M&A activity resumed. “Not every deal survived,” Apfelberg noted, “but most of them did.” As a result, Apfelberg said he’s uncertain about the notion of a huge uptick in deals for the rest of the year.
Still, he conceded that, for better or worse, some sellers might see reason to act with more urgency going forward. “In the middle market, at least, sellers are now perhaps a little bit more motivated than before, partly because of fear of what could be around the corner,” he said. “They might be thinking, ‘If I don’t sell now, I may need to hold on for another few years.’”
For her part, Bain’s Kumar maintained that, even in uncertain economic times, many businesses see M&A as a strategic imperative.
“The activity we’re seeing suggests that experienced acquirers continue to see M&A as an important part of their toolkit,” she said. “They’re not putting it aside due to tariff actions or short-term noise.”
Kumar also pointed out that M&A activity is cyclical. She described the past few years as a “cyclical low” compared to the past three decades. “M&A value as a percentage of GDP over the last few years is low compared to where it’s been over the past 20 or 30 years,” she noted. There have been points over the last three decades where M&A value has been as high as 10% of GDP, though it’s generally averaged about 5%. Over the last couple of years, it’s been just about 3%, Kumar said.
In addition, Bain’s research broke out deals as either “strategic” or “nonstrategic.” The former term refers to any deals by corporate buyers, including any private equity exits, while the latter covers things like venture capital investments or special purpose acquisition transactions. The report found some subtle differences between the two segments: The value of non-strategic deals grew 23%, while strategic deal value increased by just 11%.
