DACH refinancing wave: who needs to refinance in 2026 and 2027

The European refinancing wave has been written about for three years now, usually with the same dramatic arc: a wall of maturities, a changed interest rate environment and banks pulling back.

The picture in summer 2026 is more nuanced – and, for lenders and advisors, actually more interesting.

The market has worked through a considerable part of the wave, but mostly by pushing maturities out rather than by genuine restructuring. According to PitchBook LCD data, the volume of European leveraged loans maturing in 2027 had fallen to €3.7bn as at 30 June 2026, down from around €9bn at the end of 2025. Over the same period, the 2028 maturities shrank from €70.2bn to €44.7bn. At the same time, the 2031 block grew from €88.1bn to €98.7bn.

In other words, the maturity profile has moved further out. The risk has not.

In parallel, defaulted volume in the Morningstar European Leveraged Loan Index rose from €839m in the first quarter of 2025 to €5.7bn in May 2026, the highest level in twelve years. The volume of CCC-rated loans almost tripled, from €6.7bn in January 2024 to €18.95bn in June 2026.

For Germany’s unrated Mittelstand – the owner-managed, mid-sized companies that never even appear in these indices – the same mechanics apply, just without the same visibility. And that is precisely where the opportunity lies for lenders who search systematically.

What lies behind the wave

The mechanics are unspectacular. Corporate loans in the DACH mid-market typically have terms of five to seven years. Loans taken out in 2019, 2020 or 2021 at historically low interest rates are now falling due.

The 2021 vintage is particularly affected. The European law firms and advisors that follow the market all point to this vintage: high valuations, high leverage, favourable terms, often bullet structures. Bird & Bird puts the volume maturing in Europe by 2028 at €86.2bn, most of it from this vintage.

The issue is not the maturity itself. Refinancings are business as usual. The issue is that, in many cases, the old structure no longer fits today’s situation.

A company that took out bullet financing in 2021 and has since made two acquisitions, built a new plant or changed its shareholder structure does not need an extension in 2026. It needs a new capital structure.

And this is exactly where the house bank – the company’s long-standing main relationship bank – often pulls out.

Three forces converging in 2026

1. Bullet structures from the low-interest era

Much of the financing arranged between 2019 and 2021 was structured as bullet loans or with minimal ongoing amortisation. At maturity, the full amount therefore falls due, not a residual balance that has already been paid down.

Companies that have brought investments forward in the meantime are not just refinancing their old debt; they also have to finance additional requirements. For a complete overview of how bullet structures work and the private debt instruments available for them, see our guide to direct lending for the Mittelstand.

2. CRR III makes unrated corporate loans more expensive

Regulation (EU) 2024/1623 – commonly known as CRR III and, in market jargon, as Basel IV – has applied in the EU since 1 January 2025.

The element that matters for the Mittelstand is the output floor under Article 92(3) and Article 465(1) of CRR III. Banks that use internal risk models can no longer set their risk-weighted assets as far below the standardised approach as they like. The floor was introduced at 50% in 2025 and is rising gradually to 72.5% by 2030.

Why this matters for the Mittelstand: for companies without an external rating, the standardised approach generally prescribes a risk weight of 100%, regardless of their actual creditworthiness. The vast majority of German mid-sized companies have no external rating. Banks pass on the higher capital costs, either through the interest rate or through the lending decision.

Two caveats worth knowing.

First, there is a transitional arrangement. For loans to unrated companies and SMEs with a sufficiently low probability of default, institutions may apply a risk weight reduced by 35% until at least the end of 2032. This so-called hybrid approach considerably dampens the effect in the initial phase.

Second, the Deutsche Bundesbank explicitly considers the burden on the Mittelstand to be limited. Its 2024 Basel III monitoring puts the additional capital requirement for German institutions at 3.3% initially and at more than 10% from 2030. The Bundesbank expects the full effect to be felt only from 2030 onwards.

Anyone claiming today that Basel IV has already choked off mid-market lending is therefore overstating the case. What is true is this: the trend is clear, the impact is being phased in gradually, and experience shows that banks price in foreseeable regulation in advance, not after the fact.

3. The ECB has ended its rate-cutting cycle

This is the most recent development – and the one least reflected in market commentary so far.

After eight cuts up to June 2025, the ECB raised rates again for the first time in June 2026. Since 17 June 2026, the main refinancing rate has stood at 2.40% and the deposit facility rate at 2.25%. Three-month EURIBOR has risen from around 2.03% at the start of the year to about 2.46% in early August. The market is currently pricing in no further cuts.

For companies facing a refinancing, this means the window in which they could wait for better terms has closed. Anyone with a maturity in 2027 should not bank on rates turning down again.

Which companies are affected

Owner-managed mid-sized companies with expiring syndicated or house bank loans. The most interesting segment for sponsorless origination. These companies often have a banking relationship going back decades and are now running up against its limits: the house bank hesitates to increase the facility, the volume exceeds what the regional banking structure is willing to provide, or the flexibility required cannot be accommodated in a standard loan. For them, private debt is often the obvious but unfamiliar alternative.

Companies in transition. Family businesses in ongoing or upcoming succession processes. According to KfW’s succession monitoring, around 109,000 small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany will be seeking a successor each year until the end of 2029. If the refinancing of existing debt coincides with a change of shareholders, an MBO or an external handover, the resulting complexity regularly goes beyond what the bank’s standard lending framework can handle.

Borrowers with deteriorating creditworthiness. The uncomfortable part. A company that financed at 5.0x leverage in 2021 and now stands at 6.5x because EBITDA has fallen will not refinance on comparable terms. For special situations and opportunistic strategies, this is a growing field; for traditional senior lenders, it is an exclusion criterion.

How to spot refinancing needs

The practical question for lenders and advisors is: how do I identify companies that will need to refinance in the next twelve to eighteen months, before the process becomes competitive?

No single signal is enough on its own. In combination, they provide a reliable picture.

Maturity structure from the annual financial statements. Companies subject to disclosure requirements report their liabilities by remaining term in the notes. If you systematically analyse balance sheets above a certain size category, you can identify companies whose long-term liabilities will move into the short-term bucket in 2026 or 2027. This is the most precise entry point available. The caveat: commercial register (Handelsregister) data typically lags the financial year by 12–18 months, and a considerable part of the Mittelstand is not subject to disclosure requirements at all.

Capital structure and leverage headroom. The ratio of net financial debt to EBITDA shows how much headroom realistically exists. The classic target zone for direct lenders lies between 2.0x and 4.5x. Below 2.0x, the likelihood of an acute need is low; above 4.5x, things become difficult outside special situations.

Investment patterns relative to operating cash flow. Companies that have run capex well above operating cash flow for two to three years already carry the financing need on their balance sheet. This signal often precedes the company actually going to market by one to two years.

Shareholder structure and age profile. Owner-managed companies whose shareholders are past their mid-fifties and that have no apparent successor within the family are highly likely to be facing a handover process. If their bank financing is expiring at the same time, a comprehensive restructuring is likely.

The art lies in the combination. If you filter only by maturities, you miss the companies that are not subject to disclosure requirements. If you filter only by industry, you get noise. A usable longlist emerges when several types of signal are evaluated at the same time.

What this means for direct lenders and debt advisors

For direct lenders, the attractive refinancings in the sponsorless segment do not arrive via bankers’ teasers. They come from direct outreach. If you approach a company with expiring financing six to nine months before maturity, you are in a one-to-one conversation rather than competing as one of five bidders.

Market convention helps here: borrowers usually address maturities at least 18 months in advance to avoid rating pressure. Anything maturing by mid-2028 is therefore a legitimate reason to start a conversation right now.

For debt advisory boutiques, the same logic applies in reverse. A mandate that has already gone out to tender is won on price. A company whose refinancing falls due in nine months and that has not yet started a process is won on expertise.

Both face the same practical question: how do you scale identification without the research effort eating up your margin?

The traditional answers have well-known limits. Networks and intermediaries reliably deliver the same slice of the market and cannot be scaled. Search engines and LinkedIn only show you a company once it is actively communicating itself – and by then the process has usually already started. Traditional company databases provide raw data, but no filtering by financial profile and maturity situation, let alone a combination of the two.

From signal to outreach

ProxDeal is built as an AI-powered origination platform for the DACH mid-market. Its database covers more than 7 million DACH companies and more than 992 million data signals: 592 million for Germany, 180 million for Austria and 220 million for Switzerland.

For the refinancing use case, this means in concrete terms:

Natural-language search. You describe the target profile in free text rather than piecing it together from industry codes. A hypothesis such as “manufacturing companies in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, €30–80m revenue, EBITDA margin above 10%, owner-managed, managing director in office for more than 15 years” is translated directly into a longlist by the AI analysts. WZ codes (the German industry classification, based on NACE) can be used in addition, but they are not the starting point. That is the decisive difference from list providers, whose search begins with the code list and ends there too.

Combinable financial and structural filters. Revenue size, equity ratio, debt ratio, earnings trend, shareholder structure, holding structures, year of incorporation and region down to postcode level.

Decision-maker contacts instead of switchboards. For initial outreach by letter, email or phone, this is the difference between getting a reply and disappearing into the post room.

Longlist with over 100 parameters, exportable to Excel. An investment thesis or sector focus becomes a prioritised outreach list in 5 minutes.

We cover the most common mistakes and what a robust target profile looks like in detail in Identifying private debt investment targets.

Conclusion

The 2026–2028 refinancing wave is real, but it is not an event with a fixed deadline. Through amend-and-extend, the market has pushed a considerable share of the short-term maturities further out. That has not made the loans any better – only due later, as the rising default and CCC volumes show.

For lenders and advisors, this means a longer but also more reliable opportunity than the headlines of 2023 suggested. If you want to source competitively, you have to do two things at once: identify companies with a concrete financing trigger early, and approach them before the process becomes competitive.

If you only pick up the phone once the tender is under way, you are just one of ten.

Create a longlist and identify your first qualified refinancing candidates in 5 minutes.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• PitchBook LCD, European maturity profile and Leveraged Loan Default Monitor, as at 30 June 2026
• Morningstar European Leveraged Loan Index (ELLI), default and CCC volumes, June 2026
• Bird & Bird, Navigating the European Leveraged Finance Landscape in 2026
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1623 (CRR III), Article 92(3) and Article 465(1), Official Journal of 19 June 2024
• Deutsche Bundesbank, Basel III reform package: no burden on Mittelstand financing, and results of the Basel III monitoring exercise for German institutions (2024)
• KfW Research, Nachfolge-Monitoring Mittelstand 2025 (succession monitor for SMEs)
• European Central Bank, key interest rate decision effective 17 June 2026
• EMMI, EURIBOR fixings, as at 3 August 2026
• Ropes & Gray, Deferred, Not Defused: Three Forces Reshaping Restructuring in 2026

Last updated: 8 August 2026. This article is not a substitute for individual financing or legal advice.