What is a good MOIC for a private equity deal? The median private equity deal returns 3.0x invested capital. Top-quartile deals return 7.0x and bottom-quartile deals return 1.9x, according to Gain’s Private Equity Value Creation Report 2026, an analysis of 15,502 private equity investments globally. A deal returning above 3.5x sits in the top half of the top half. A deal returning below 1.9x sits in the bottom quarter of the market.

Why the usual answer is a target rather than an outcome

Ask what a good MOIC is and the common reply is somewhere between 2.0x and 3.0x. That range is not wrong, but it is an underwriting convention rather than a measurement. It describes what deals are expected to return at the point they are approved, and expectations at approval are not a distribution of results.

There is a second problem underneath it, which is that two different numbers are being used interchangeably. Deal-level MOIC is gross. It measures what a single investment returned before fund fees, expenses and carried interest. Fund-level MOIC is net, reported to limited partners as total value to paid-in capital, and it sits materially lower for the same underlying performance, because the fees have come out and because the fund contains the losses as well as the winners.

A 3.0x deal and a 3.0x fund are not the same achievement. Most published answers to this question blend the two, which is how a range built on net fund convention ends up being quoted against gross deal outcomes. Every figure in this article is deal-level and gross, calculated as exit equity value divided by entry equity value.

What private equity deals actually return

MEDIAN MOIC BY DEAL PERFORMANCE QUARTILE

Source: Gain, The Private Equity Value Creation Report 2026.

The distribution is heavily skewed. The gap between the third quartile and the top quartile, 3.5x to 7.0x, is larger than the entire range from bottom to third. Private equity returns are not a bell curve with a meaningful average in the middle, which is the main reason a single answer to this question is unsatisfying.

One caveat matters and should be read before the tables that follow. Gain notes an upward bias in its MOIC figures, because its dataset relies on publicly available deal sources and the best-performing deals are reported more frequently. The comparisons below are reliable, since the bias applies across every group in the same direction. The absolute levels should be treated as the optimistic end of the truth.

A good MOIC depends on how long it took

MOIC AND LOSS RATE BY HOLDING PERIOD

Source: Gain, The Private Equity Value Creation Report 2026, chapter 6.

A 2.9x over seven years and a 2.3x over two are not comparable, and the shorter one is the better deal. Gain puts the arithmetic plainly: doubling capital in two years produces a 41% internal rate of return, while tripling it in eight produces 15%. The multiple went up and the return went down.

Long holds also produce the widest spread of outcomes in the dataset. Beyond seven years an asset posts the highest top-quartile MOIC at 5.8x, the lowest bottom quartile at 1.4x, and the highest share of investments returning less than the capital invested at 13%. Assets are held that long either because they are compounding or because they cannot be sold, and the two are not distinguishable from the holding period alone. That bimodality is one of the mechanisms behind closing the MOIC gap.

A good MOIC depends on the sector and the market

MEDIAN MOIC BY SECTOR, AND SHARE OF DEALS RETURNING BELOW 1.0X

Source: Gain, The Private Equity Value Creation Report 2026, chapter 4. Regional figures in chapter 5. TMT figures also published in Gain’s TMT Private Equity Report.

A 2.6x in Industrials is a better result than a 2.6x in TMT, measured against what the sector typically produces. Region moves the number too. Median MOIC runs from 2.2x in DACH to 3.3x in the Nordics, with the UK and Ireland at 2.7x and a top quartile of 4.3x. So a UK deal returning 4.3x is a top-quartile UK outcome and a mid-table Nordic one.

What actually separates a good MOIC from a poor one

Neither sector nor hold length nor entry price explains as much as one variable does.

MOIC AND LOSS RATE BY REVENUE GROWTH DURING THE HOLD

Source: Gain, The Private Equity Value Creation Report 2026, chapter 1.

The bottom row is the one to sit with. Among investments where revenue went backwards, 26% returned less than the capital invested. Above 10% growth, that falls to between 1% and 2%. Growth is not the upside case in a modern buyout. It is what stands between a deal and a loss, and top-quartile deals post a median revenue CAGR of 20.4% against a market median close to 10%.

Which makes the number a result rather than a target

A MOIC is produced at exit and read backwards. By the time it exists, every decision that determined it has already been taken. The useful question during a hold is not what multiple to aim for. It is whether the growth currently being produced is the kind that will still be there when a buyer looks at it.

Those are not the same thing, and the profit and loss account cannot tell them apart. Two portfolio companies can post identical growth where the first is compounding on customers who were already there and the second is acquiring replacements slightly faster than it loses them. The second works until customer acquisition gets more expensive, at which point the growth does not slow, it reverses. That distinction is the substance of revenue quality, and it is visible in transaction data and almost nowhere else.

I have spent twenty years working on customer bases in ecommerce, subscription, retail and financial services, and the businesses that turned out to be compounding were rarely the ones with the best headline growth rate. They were the ones where the customers from three years ago were still there and still buying more. That is an empirical question with an answer sitting in data most portfolio companies already hold.

At entry, a health check establishes the baseline in days rather than the months a full commercial diligence process consumes. During the hold, a customer base diagnostic shows movement between value tiers several quarters before it reaches a revenue line, which is the only thing that makes intervention possible rather than retrospective. The full approach is set out in Keystone IQ’s Revenue Quality Architecture™.

So, what is a good MOIC?

Above 3.0x beats the median deal. Above 3.5x puts you in the top quarter of the market. Below 1.9x puts you in the bottom quarter. Adjust for hold length first, then sector, then region, and treat the whole distribution as the optimistic end of the truth.

And then set it aside, because the number arrives too late to be managed. What can be managed is the composition of the customer base producing the growth that produces the multiple, and unlike the MOIC, that is legible from the second year of a hold onwards.

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