Top Healthcare Investment Banks: 10 Firms to Know
Updated: 6 days ago
Healthcare M&A is running its best stretch since before Covid, with biotech deal value hitting $106 billion by early June 2026, and a specific set of banks is eating the fees. The driver is brutal and public: large pharma faces a patent cliff with roughly $170 billion of revenue at risk by 2030, and only about 4 percent of global drug sales will still be patent-protected by then, down from 12 percent in 2022. Big pharma has to buy pipelines, and every acquisition needs bankers on both sides.
As a former McKinsey consultant who now runs WSG, healthcare is the sector I most often steer science-minded finance candidates toward, because the group rewards subject-matter interest faster than any other coverage area. These are the ten firms that matter, with deal receipts.
Coverage-specific rankings only tell half the story, so it is worth seeing what actually separates the major banks from each other, covered here, plus how a similar sector list plays out for real estate, covered here.
Which bank is best for healthcare investment banking?
It depends on what you want:
Centerview: Best for large-cap biopharma and marquee M&A
Goldman Sachs: Best overall platform, relationships, and large deals
Jefferies: High deal volume and broad healthcare exposure
Leerink Partners: Best for pure healthcare specialization, especially biotech
Evercore: Elite large-cap healthcare M&A and strategic advisory
Houlihan Lokey: Deal-count leader in the middle market
William Blair: Strong middle-market healthcare franchise
Bottom line: Centerview for mega-deals, Jefferies for reps, Leerink for healthcare specialization, Goldman for platform, and Houlihan for middle-market volume.
What does a healthcare banker actually cover?
Four distinct lanes: biopharma (drug companies, the M&A engine), medtech (devices and diagnostics), healthcare services (hospitals, physician groups, payors), and healthcare IT. Banks weigh these differently, which is half of what separates the firms below.
The 10 firms
Centerview sat sell-side on three of 2025's biggest biopharma deals, a run no other advisor matched.
Website: centerviewpartners.com/careers
Lane: large-cap biopharma M&A, advisory only
Verified credits: advised Intra-Cellular Therapies on its $14.6 billion sale to Johnson & Johnson, Verona Pharma on its $10 billion sale to Merck, and SpringWorks on its $3.9 billion sale to Merck KGaA, all announced 2025
Entry: generalist analyst recruiting on a short list of campuses, healthcare staffing earned inside
Scale note: the firm's healthcare team is the franchise, built by the founders' banker-to-boardroom relationships over two decades
Best for: Someone who wants mega-cap biopharma M&A, prestige, and high-end strategic advisory
When a biotech board runs a sale, Centerview is the default call. The strongest healthcare sell-side résumé in banking currently lives at Centerview.
Bottom line: If your goal is to build the strongest possible large-cap healthcare M&A résumé, Centerview is arguably the #1 seat to target.
Goldman advised on both of late 2025's headline biotech auctions, Metsera's contested $10 billion sale to Pfizer and Avidity's $12 billion sale to Novartis.
Website: goldmansachs.com/careers/students
Lane: full-spectrum, strongest at the large-cap top
League data: #3 globally in 2025 healthcare deal count with 41 deals per LSEG
Entry: Investment Banking Summer Analyst with healthcare group placement
Best for: Someone who wants scale, big deals, and broad healthcare exposure
The Metsera fight, Pfizer outbidding Novo Nordisk in public, was 2025's best banking theater, and Goldman ran the sell side with Guggenheim and BofA alongside.
Bottom line: Goldman is arguably the best all-around healthcare platform you get the mega-deal credentials of an elite boutique with the breadth, relationships, and resources of a bulge bracket.
3. J.P. Morgan
J.P. Morgan owns the industry's calendar: its January healthcare conference sets the year's deal conversations in motion.
Website: careers.jpmorgan.com
Lane: full-spectrum coverage plus the sector's marquee conference
Verified credit: exclusive advisor to Merck KGaA on its $3.9 billion SpringWorks acquisition, announced April 2025
Entry: Investment Banking Summer Analyst, healthcare placement
The conference matters for analysts too: healthcare teams spend the fall preparing the materials the whole industry reads in January.
Morgan Stanley keeps showing up on the buyer's side of the decade's pipeline grabs.
Website: morganstanley.com/careers
Lane: large-cap biopharma and medtech, buy-side strength
Verified credits: advised Merck on the $10 billion Verona acquisition alongside Citi, and Genmab on its $8 billion Merus purchase with PJT, both 2025
Entry: Investment Banking Summer Analyst
Buy-side mandates train a different muscle: valuation discipline under an auction clock, and the board math of walking away.
5. Jefferies
Jefferies built the busiest healthcare franchise on the street by volume, #4 globally by 2025 deal count with the biggest banker bench in the sector.
Website: jefferies.com/careers
Lane: full-spectrum with mid-cap sell-side dominance and a huge ECM business
Verified credits: co-advised Intra-Cellular on the $14.6 billion J&J sale and sole-advised Merus on the $8 billion Genmab deal
Entry: Investment Banking Summer Analyst, healthcare-heavy staffing odds
More healthcare deals means more reps per analyst year. For a student optimizing learning curve over logo prestige, Jefferies is the volume play.
Leerink is the only bank on this list that does healthcare and nothing else, and it took the largest share of 2025 biopharma stock offerings of any bank.
Website: leerink.com/careers
Lane: healthcare only: biopharma, medtech, services, ECM plus M&A
Verified credits: sole advisor on GSK's IDRx acquisition and Novartis's Tourmaline Bio purchase, both 2025
History: formerly SVB Leerink; management bought the firm back in 2023 after SVB's collapse
Entry: a dedicated ten-week Summer Analyst program; sophomores apply around December for the following summer
Every staffing at Leerink is healthcare staffing, which makes it the fastest sector education in banking.
7. Evercore
Evercore ran the most structurally complex healthcare deal of the cycle, the $17.5 billion Reverse Morris Trust merging BD's biosciences unit with Waters.
Website: evercore.com/careers
Lane: large-cap medtech, corporate separations, biopharma advisory
Verified credit: advised BD alongside Citi on the Waters transaction, announced July 2025 and closed February 2026 at $18.8 billion of total value
Entry: Investment Banking Summer Analyst, generalist with healthcare staffing
Separations and RMTs are the technical deep end of advisory work. Analysts who touch one learn structuring most bankers never see.
Houlihan Lokey closed more healthcare deals than any bank on earth in 2025, 45 by LSEG's count.
Website: hl.com/careers
Lane: middle-market healthcare across 17+ subsectors, services and medtech heavy
League data: #1 global healthcare M&A deal count for 2025, ahead of Rothschild & Co at 43 and Goldman at 41
Entry: Summer Financial Analyst with healthcare group seats across multiple US offices
Sub-$1 billion deals close faster and staff leaner, so junior bankers run bigger slices of each one.
Guggenheim keeps earning co-advisor seats on the sector's biggest contested sales, including Metsera's $10 billion auction.
Website: guggenheimsecurities.com/careers
Lane: biopharma M&A specialist strength inside a full-service boutique
Entry: generalist Summer Analyst plus freshman and sophomore access programs, Day on the Job and FOCUS
Fit: early-year students who want a healthcare-credible boutique with structured on-ramps
The early-access programs are the quiet edge: healthcare interest demonstrated as a freshman compound by junior-year recruiting.
10. Piper Sandler
Piper Sandler owns the medtech middle market, including the sole-advisor seat on Paragon 28's $1.2 billion sale to Zimmer Biomet.
Website: pipersandler.com/careers
Lane: medtech and healthcare middle-market M&A, plus a strong services practice
Verified credit: exclusive advisor to Paragon 28, announced January 2025
Entry: Summer Analyst hiring across its Minneapolis headquarters and coastal offices
Device deals blend clinical evidence with commercial math, a niche where pre-med-adjacent candidates suddenly find their coursework relevant.
The 2026 market you'd be joining
The tape keeps confirming the thesis. The tape keeps confirming the thesis. H1 2026 has already produced $130 billion of biopharma M&A across 42 deals, putting the market on pace for one of its strongest years since the pandemic; average deal size has risen to $3.1 billion, up from $2.7 billion in 2025. Sun Pharma's $11.75 billion acquisition of Organon is one of the year's headline transactions, while Deloitte recorded $26.7 billion of announced life-sciences deal value in March alone.
Structurally, the wave has years left. Patent cliffs resolve slowly, obesity and neuroscience pipelines keep repricing, and the buyers hold cash. For a sophomore, that means the group you'd join in Summer 2028 is hiring into demand rather than hope, which is not true of every coverage group right now.
Healthcare banking is the rare group where the macro argument for joining is checkable in public deal data rather than taken on faith.
What about the banks not on this list?
Citi has the strongest claim to a seat: it advised the buyers on the Intra-Cellular, Metsera, and Verona deals and co-led BD's Waters transaction, and a case exists that it belongs above several firms here; it missed the cut only because its healthcare identity sits inside a broad bulge bracket platform rather than defining it. Bank of America co-advised Metsera and brings balance-sheet firepower to every large deal. Lazard advised Mallinckrodt on its $6.7 billion combination with Endo. TD Cowen runs one of the sector's oldest conferences and a biotech ECM engine, William Blair dominates healthcare IT and services sell-sides in the middle market, and Cantor Fitzgerald prints biotech equity all day. Any of these six is a real healthcare career.
Say this, don't say that
Why healthcare banking?
Don't say: "Healthcare combines my interest in science with finance."
Say: "I followed the Metsera auction last fall. Watching Pfizer outbid Novo for an obesity pipeline made the patent-cliff math real for me, and I want to be on teams that price those decisions."
Which recent deal interested you?
Don't say: "There's been a lot of interesting M&A activity in biopharma."
Say: "The BD and Waters Reverse Morris Trust. A $17.5 billion separation structured for tax efficiency taught me more rereading the press release than any textbook chapter has."
How to pick your lane and get in
Match the firm to your profile. Science majors who love the molecules: Leerink, Centerview, Jefferies. Generalists who want mega-deal brands: : Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley. Students targeting reps and responsibility: Houlihan, Piper Sandler. Freshmen and sophomores: Guggenheim's access programs, then everyone's Summer Analyst cycle when it opens for 2027 hiring this fall.
Comp runs street-standard across the list: the specialists pay the same first-year packages as the bulge brackets, so the real trade is staffing mix and exit path, not salary. Healthcare analysts exit into healthcare PE, biotech VC, and corporate development at the acquirers themselves, and the sector-specific knowledge compounds in a way generalist M&A hours don't.
Then do the one thing that separates healthcare candidates: know a drug. Pick one 2025 deal, read why the buyer paid, and be able to say whether the patent cliff logic held. A candidate who can explain why Pfizer wanted Metsera's obesity pipeline at $10 billion sounds like a future healthcare banker. Everyone else sounds like they picked a group name off a list.
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