Infrastructure Secondaries Hit Their Stride: A Once-Niche Corner of the Market Could Reach $30 Billion in 2026

In just a few years, the infrastructure secondary market has been transformed.

Five years ago, it was a sliver of the broader secondaries business — a tool sponsors primarily used to manage liquidity for challenged assets and/or funds. Now investors are increasingly seeking trophy assets in the secondary market and through continuation vehicles (CV), which is just one reason why Jefferies expects global transaction volume to reach $30 billion, up from roughly $20 billion in 2025.

That is a 50 percent increase over 12 months in a market that barely existed at scale a decade ago. Pace, price, and buyer base have all shifted.

In April, the Jefferies Private Capital Advisory (PCA) team surveyed the most active infrastructure secondary investors, revealing new insights into their subsector preferences, required returns, and preferred transaction structures.

First, a note on scale: The secondary market closed 2025 with roughly $240 billion in volume, and the GP-led segment reached an all-time high of $115 billion — up 53 percent year over year. Continuation vehicles now account for 14 percent of all sponsor-backed exits worldwide.

Infrastructure is one of, if not the, fastest-growing segments in that picture. Dedicated infrastructure secondary strategies are targeting up to $20 billion in new fundraising over the next year. However, capital formation outpaces deal supply, with investors clamoring for more deal flow in the infrastructure space.

Seventy-eight percent of the top 100 GPs by AUM have completed at least one CV. The average market CV rose from $450 million in 2023 to $650 million in 2025; the largest single-asset CVs last year approached $6 billion.

The result is a market with roughly $327 billion in available dedicated secondary capital — and a sponsor community that has stopped treating continuation vehicles as a workaround and has begun viewing them as a portfolio-management tool.

Two findings stood out in our April survey.

First, the cost of capital has come down meaningfully in infrastructure secondaries. Many sponsors still assume that a CV with infrastructure assets will be priced at a steep discount because secondary buyers demand buyout-style returns of 20 percent or more. That has not been the prevailing dynamic for some time.

In our survey, the target net return for infrastructure secondaries now sits squarely in the mid-teens. Twenty-three percent of respondents target net returns of just 10 to 13 percent. Another 36 percent target 12 to 15 percent. The cohort demanding 20 percent or more is the smallest among all segments.

This is the natural consequence of specialization. Generalist secondary funds used to price infrastructure assets relative to buyout-fund returns. Today, dedicated infrastructure secondary strategies compete for deals with direct infrastructure buyers — not buyout secondaries — and the valuation and implied discount for sponsors and LPs look very different as a result.

Second, buyers have become considerably more willing to commit unfunded growth capital alongside the funded purchase price. The general market standard funded-to-unfunded ratio in GP-led secondaries has been roughly three-to-one.

In our survey, 52 percent of respondents preferred transactions in which the funded portion represents less than 60 percent of the total capitalization — meaning more than 40 percent of their capital can be reserved for follow-on growth, implying a near one-to-one funded-to-unfunded ratio. Another 24 percent were comfortable with 60 to 80 percent funded.

When respondents were asked to rank seven infrastructure subsectors in order of their interest in them, power & utilities ranked first on the blended score, with digital infrastructure a close second. Digital received more outright top-rank votes, but power & utilities was more consistently in the top two.

Within digital infrastructure, data centers dominate. Within power & utilities, gas-fired generation and transmission & distribution are roughly tied. This convergence is not coincidental: the most active investment thesis in the market today — power generation built to serve AI data center demand — sits squarely at the intersection of those two sectors.

Transportation, logistics, and aviation ranked third, with airports leading the pack. Midstream and energy ranked fourth, with target returns notably higher for natural gas-linked assets, reflecting renewed appetite for LNG export capacity, processing, and storage. Clean power ranked sixth, with solar the clear winner among renewables and wind well behind.

With approximately $30 billion of capital queued for deployment at competitive cost — and explicitly targeted toward the assets sponsors are most inclined to retain — the conclusion is approaching consensus: Capital is being forced to existing, proven assets by AI-driven electricity demand, LNG export expansion, aging transmission infrastructure, and constrained turbine supply, while demand is being met by an increasingly abundant pool of cheaper, more flexible, and sector-specialized funding.