Private Credit: Q4 2025 Middle Market Borrower Surveillance Compendium: Stability at the Median, Stress at the Margins
A review of the 3,649 middle market (MM) corporate credit assessments completed in 2025 shows mixed signals. Slowing growth is negatively impacting some companies’ credit quality, but overall, our portfolio remains stable. The growing divergence in performance is driven by challenged subsectors that we believe will contribute to the rising, yet contained, default rate in 2026 (see Private Credit: Q3 2025 Middle Market Borrower Surveillance Compendium: Defaults Will Rise).
In this quarterly report, we present key trends shaping the credit quality of the 2,416 unique global MM-sponsored borrowers assessed in 2025, which account for over $1 trillion of private direct lending debt. We also provide data on the 465 surveillance assessments and 332 new assessments conducted in Q4 2025. Finally, we introduce several new…
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