Here is a number worth sitting with. The people advising on takeover deals for British-listed companies have taken more than £1bn in fees this year, and the figures out yet are already incomplete. The Guardian’s business desk crunched the London Stock Exchange’s own deal tallies and official filings to reach it.
What is driving the fees is the deal volume itself. Mergers and acquisitions involving UK-listed companies have surged 175% in 2026, to $132.9bn, roughly £100bn. Foreign buyers, mostly American, mostly funded by private equity, have been collecting British businesses like some people collect plates.
We read the fee pages so you do not have to, and three details stand out.
One: the money is concentrated. JP Morgan’s bankers have advised on fourteen UK takeover deals worth $89.4bn combined, more than any other bank. The single richest job is EQT’s £10.6bn purchase of lab testing group Intertek, which should clear £370m in fees by itself. Goldman is advising the target. Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are advising the buyer. Everybody, in other words, wins.
Two: the lawyers now out-earn some of the bankers. Partners at Linklaters averaged £2.5m in the year to April, Clifford Chance £2.3m, A&O Shearman £2.2m. Record numbers at all three.
Three: the totals understate the year. They only count completed, published deals. Apollo’s £5.7bn approach for easyJet and other pending or rejected bids are not in there yet.
The timing is the awkward part, and there is no way to say it delicately. All this lands while a cost of living crisis is still the default British experience, while the banking sector spends its autumn lobbying Chancellor John Healey against touching bank taxes in the 28 October budget. Jamie Dimon has warned the government more than once. UK Finance echoed the line this week. Banks already pay 28% corporation tax, higher than the standard 25%, plus a balance sheet surcharge. The bonus cap, that old two-times-salary limit, was scrapped at the end of 2023, and some banks now let top performers take home up to twenty-five times base pay.
Should any of this worry you if you do not work in the Square Mile? A fair answer is: mildly, and in two directions. A market that keeps getting bought out is a shrinking market for listings, which is the quiet worry inside the City itself this year. And the fee numbers make a very good graph for anyone who thinks the recovery story and the pay story have stopped touching each other.
More deals are expected to close before Christmas. The £1bn will be a bigger number by January. Probably worth re-reading this piece then.