Same fund, two owners, different numbers — where LP disclosures diverge
CalPERS and CalSTRS both publish fund-by-fund private-equity performance — and where they hold the same fund, the reported numbers don't always agree. We matched 87 funds held by both plans and compared their since-inception net IRRs. Most agree closely — the median gap across 54 mature funds is 0.39 points — but the outliers reach 8.09 points on the same underlying fund. That spread is the point: there is no standardised way to compute private-fund returns.
Why would the same fund show two different IRRs?
Four honest reasons, all visible in the plans' own footnotes: the two plans report to different dates (CalPERS as of September 30, 2025, CalSTRS as of June 30, 2025 — private valuations move between quarters); they may hold different vehicles of the fund with different fee terms; each computes IRR from its own cash-flow dates; and there is no industry-standard method for valuing unrealised positions. A gap is not an error — it is what LP-specific reporting looks like.
The widest gaps (2021 and older vintages)
| Fund | Vintage | CalPERS net IRR | CalSTRS net IRR | Gap (pts) | CalPERS multiple | CalSTRS multiple (derived) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carlyle Asia Partners V, L.P. | 2018 | 16.1% | 8.01% | +8.09 | 1.4x | 1.21x |
| Carlyle Europe Partners V, S.C.Sp. | 2019 | 4.6% | -3.49% | +8.09 | 1.1x | 0.91x |
| Carlyle Partners VII, L.P. | 2018 | 13% | 8.32% | +4.68 | 1.5x | 1.39x |
| WCAS XIII, L.P. | 2019 | 15.9% | 18.73% | -2.83 | 1.7x | 1.61x |
| Permira Europe III | 2004 | 26.6% | 24.15% | +2.45 | 1.7x | 1.66x |
| Carlyle Partners VI, L.P. | 2013 | 15.8% | 13.36% | +2.44 | 2x | 1.87x |
| Blackstone Capital Partners VII, L.P. | 2016 | 15.3% | 13.1% | +2.2 | 1.8x | 1.73x |
| TPG Partners VIII, L.P. | 2019 | 18.9% | 17.23% | +1.67 | 1.4x | 1.56x |
| Palladium Equity Partners V, L.P. | 2018 | 13.2% | 14.86% | -1.66 | 1.6x | 1.68x |
| Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe XII, L.P. | 2015 | 25.3% | 24.07% | +1.23 | 2.5x | 2.45x |
| Advent International GPE IX Limited Partnership | 2019 | 13.6% | 14.75% | -1.15 | 1.6x | 1.66x |
| Centerbridge Capital Partners III, L.P. | 2015 | 13% | 14.12% | -1.12 | 1.6x | 1.58x |
| TPG Partners V, L.P. | 2006 | 3.7% | 4.8% | -1.1 | 1.2x | 1.44x |
| CVC Capital Partners VII (A) L.P. | 2018 | 20% | 20.87% | -0.87 | 2.1x | 2.12x |
| Trident VIII, L.P. | 2020 | 11.9% | 12.7% | -0.8 | 1.6x | 1.57x |
Top 15 gaps of 54 mature matched funds · young vintages excluded (early IRRs are not meaningful — both plans say so in their own footnotes).
This page shows the widest gaps — behind it sits the full matched dataset: every fund held by both plans, both sets of reported figures, and the deltas. Email us if you're interested in the full dataset.
How the matching works
Deliberately conservative: fund names are matched exactly after normalising style (punctuation, "&" vs "and", entity suffixes), plus a short hand-checked alias list. Parallel vehicles and sleeves of the same fund (a "Fund VI-A", an "L.P.2") are not treated as the same disclosure — they genuinely carry different fee terms. A name match whose vintage years disagree is rejected. Funds we could not match with certainty stay unmatched — 87 matches is what survives that bar, and CalSTRS' multiple is derived from its published cash flows (the report has no multiple column).
The underlying tables: CalPERS' full record · CalSTRS' full record · all tracked plans.