Big corporate M&A is booming—and banks are earning megasize fees.
In 2025, six acquisitions of U.S. public companies included sell-side fees of at least $100 million for a single bank, according to Deal Point Data. The previous year, only one deal did, though so far this year two have. Historically, just 16 deals ever generated a fee of at least $100 million for individual banks advising U.S. targets, the firm said. Morgan Stanley’s $120 million for advising Monsanto on its sale to Bayer, announced in 2016, was the first, according to Deal Point.
Among the banks earning top dollar in the recent past were Centerview Partners, Perella Weinberg Partners, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Allen & Co. is set to earn $100 million for serving as financial adviser to Warner Bros. Discovery, after Paramount Skydance won a bidding war for the company against Netflix.
A driving factor pushing up fees: The deals are bigger. Advisory fees are calculated off the value of the deal, and largely paid upon completion, meaning blockbuster deals can result in blockbuster paydays. During earnings calls this month, bankers said M&A pipelines remain strong.
Globally, corporate deals above $10 billion had their best quarter ever in the first three months of 2026, as the Trump administration takes a more lax approach to antitrust issues and tariff-related uncertainty wanes.
But factors other than size also influence fees: deal structure, regulatory complexity and strong demand for top-tier bankers with a record of closing major transactions, according to M&A lawyers and researchers. Bankers’ expertise in the pressures and advantages of buyers in a given sector factors into their pricing power.
Smartsheet, which was taken private last year by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners, chose Qatalyst Partners as its adviser because the bank had a “surgical” understanding of possible buyers, according to Pete Godbole, Smartsheet’s former finance chief.
In the years before the transaction, Qatalyst served as a sounding board to the company, and built up credibility and understanding of the business and its story, Godbole said.
“We were trying to hire a team that had mastered our narrative—and mastered our narrative relative to getting a multibillion-dollar premium,” he said.
The Smartsheet transaction, valued at about $8.4 billion, produced an estimated $88 million fee for Qatalyst. The bank declined to comment.
The size of deals overall has dashed higher. During the first quarter, the average U.S. deal size jumped 30% from a year earlier, to $725 million, according to Dealogic. The average reached an all-time peak of $1.02 billion during the fourth quarter of 2025.
And sell-side fees have been rising across deal sizes. In 2025, the median sell-side fee on acquisitions of U.S. public-company targets valued at more than $100 million was 1.48% of the deal’s enterprise value, according to Deal Point. That’s up from 1.17% in 2019, before the pandemic and the run-up in inflation. The median fee disclosed on deals valued above $5 billion rose 0.08 percentage point over the same period, to 0.49%.
Indeed, advisory fees have been on the rise for decades, after legal cases in the late 1980s gave target-company boards more control in dealmaking, according to Tingting Liu, a finance professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Advisory fees in the early 1980s—using inflation-adjusted figures as of 2020—averaged around $10 million for acquisitions of companies in the S&P 1500, according to research conducted by Liu. Fees, including those shared by multiple banks, began rising sharply in the late 1990s onward, reaching over $20 million in 2010 and around $35 million a decade later.
As boards gained more negotiating power, banks, which previously focused primarily on valuations, pushed into the richer business of connecting buyers and sellers.
“They have this information network,” Liu said.