Inex One estimates there are about 36,000 CDDs run globally each year. We can attribute ~14,500 of those to the leading CDD-focused consulting firms. Here's how we got there.
Let's start with the behemoth Bain & Company. Their website has an all-time count (as per FY2025) of 22,000+ CDDs. Using waybackmachine, we saw that number update since March 2022 - letting us back out a CDD count over the years. Averaging the CDDs they added in 2024 and 2025 gets us to 2,312 CDDs/year.
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BCG's PE leaders wrote in a Sep-2021 report that they do 800+ CDDs each year. Lacking more recent data, we scale it with BCG's overall revenues (which grew from $11 Bn to $14.4 Bn since 2021), for a current estimate of 1,050 CDDs/year.
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McKinsey publishes no clues to their CDD count, but asking around got us to an estimate of 870 CDDs/year. It might feel surprising to see big ol' blue at the bottom of a MBB league table, but that's the data we've got! And McKinsey probably has an outsized share of PE work downstream of the CDD.
For the other firms, we use a combination of methods. Some firms like OW, LEK and CIL share the number outright (thank you!):
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Firms like Roland Berger and OC&C publish the number of completed transactions each year. We scale that by 4x, to account for deals where their client didn't end up transacting.
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For firms that don't share data as the above, we used we used a combination of 1-1 chats and LinkedIn benchmarks.
It's common to add a blurb on LinkedIn about what you do at work (I did it, too!). Some blurbs include the words "commercial due diligence". We assume that consultants doing CDDs are equally likely to add it to their blurb, regardless of where the work. This lets us infer a company's CDD count by benchmarking the number of CDD-blurbed consultants with comparable firms, where we know the CDD count.
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And as always, there's some team analysis to untangle FDDs/ODDs from CDDs. Our estimates are our best effort - and we'd love your feedback.
Inex One is the marketplace for expert networks, aggregating more than 40 leading firms. Inex One is trusted by more than 700 client firms globally across private equity, strategy consulting and corporate strategy.
