HSR Merger Filings Valued at $1 Billion or More per Year

## What this measures

The number of adjusted HSR transactions in the fiscal year valued at $1 billion or more, from Exhibit A, Table I of the annual report.

## Why it matters

Billion-dollar deals carry most of the money in M&A and most of the antitrust risk. Their count is a read on corporate confidence and the availability of large-scale financing.

## How to read it

Higher means more large deals. Read with the share (hsr.us.share_1b_plus.annual) to separate a shift toward bigger deals from a rise in all deals.

## What it does not say

Counts depend on the filing thresholds: on 1 February 2001 the size-of-transaction threshold rose from $15 million to $50 million, which removed many small deals, and since 2005 the thresholds have been adjusted every year for growth in gross national product. Reports are published about a year after the fiscal year ends. A filing is not a completed deal: some are abandoned, and some reported transactions are exempt or found not to be reportable. Size bands are in nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation, and the smallest band is cut off by the threshold, which rises every year.

## How it's built

Palanor reads each annual report's tables from the published PDF: Appendix A (ten fiscal years of transactions reported, second requests and early termination), Appendix B Table 1 (transactions reported by month) and Exhibit A Table I (the report year's transactions by size). Every fiscal year appears in up to ten reports; the value is taken from the newest report that covers it, because reports restate earlier years. Across the reports from fiscal 1999 to 2025, values for the same year agree, apart from a handful of small restatements. Fiscal years run October to September and are dated at their last day. A weekly job checks the FTC page for a new report. Sizes come from Exhibit A, Table I (acquisitions by size of transaction), which counts the year's "adjusted" transactions: those in which a second request could have been issued. The fiscal 2019 report's size table is printed in a font whose text cannot be read, so fiscal 2019 has no value.

## Source

Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division, Hart-Scott-Rodino Annual Reports to Congress (ftc.gov/policy/reports/annual-competition-reports), Appendix A, Appendix B and Exhibit A. Public domain: "Most material on the FTC's website is considered work of the United States Government, meaning that the material is in the public domain and is not subject to copyright restrictions (17 U.S.C. 105)" (FTC website policy). Source: United States Federal Trade Commission, www.ftc.gov.