SEC counts 208 IPOs in the first half, but SPACs drove the rise and operating-company listings fell 21%

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday that 208 companies went public in the U.S. in the first half of 2026, raising more than $137 billion, up from 180 IPOs and just over $27 billion a year earlier. In its release, the agency described a 16% increase in the number of deals and a gain of nearly 400% in proceeds, and its chief economist credited "the continued strengthening of U.S. capital formation."

Follow-on offerings by companies already listed also grew: 557 deals raised more than $111 billion, against 505 deals and nearly $84 billion in the first half of 2025.

The number the headline leaves out

The SEC's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis publishes the quarterly breakdown behind those totals in its IPO statistics table, and it tells a different story about the count. Adding up the first two quarters of each year:

In other words, the entire increase in the number of IPOs came from special purpose acquisition companies, shells that raise cash to buy a private business later. Listings by actual operating companies went down. SPACs made up about 57% of all first-half IPOs.

The money tells the opposite story. Operating companies raised about $114.8 billion in the first half, up from about $15.8 billion a year earlier, while SPACs raised about $20.8 billion. And the proceeds were concentrated in time and in size: the second quarter alone accounted for $115.7 billion, about 84% of the half-year total. In that quarter, the average operating-company IPO raised $2.01 billion while the median raised $279.5 million, a gap that means a small number of very large offerings did most of the lifting. The SEC table does not name the deals.

The first-half haul is already about double the $70.3 billion the SEC counted for all of 2025.

Where the small listings went

The quieter shift is at the bottom of the market. The median operating-company IPO raised $10 million in the first quarter of 2025 and $14.6 million in the second. In the first two quarters of 2026, the median was $200 million and $279.5 million. Non-U.S. issuers, which accounted for many of the smallest listings, fell from 76 first-half deals in 2025 to 30 this year.

For a founder or a smaller company weighing a listing, that is the useful read: the window that opened in 2026 has been wide for large, well-known issuers and for SPAC sponsors, not for the micro-cap listings that made up much of the count a year ago. For traders, the pipeline of SPACs matters too, since each of those 118 shells now has to find a target and bring it to a shareholder vote over the next couple of years.

The SEC's statistics are updated quarterly, so third-quarter figures, covering a period in which the 10-year Treasury yield climbed past 5%, will show whether the pace held.

Sources: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission press release 2026-93; SEC Division of Economic and Risk Analysis IPO statistics. First-half figures are the sum of the SEC's quarterly data; percentages are our calculations. This is market information, not investment advice.