US Wealth Management Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis, Digital Finance & Fintech | Last updated: September 3, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
When the SEC’s Division of Investment Management published its August 2026 Form ADV extract, it recorded $27.7 trillion sitting in separately managed accounts for individual clients of SEC-registered investment advisers, spread across 61.1 million client relationships. Both are records. The number of people paid to manage that money went the other way.
Quick Answer
US SEC-registered investment advisers held $27.7 trillion in separately managed account assets for individual clients at December 31, 2025, across 61,111,000 client relationships — figures Axis Intelligence Research derives from the SEC’s Form ADV Item 5.D tabulations. That advised pool equals 19.42% of all US household and nonprofit financial assets. Meanwhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 299,400 personal financial advisors and projects the occupation will grow 1% through 2035.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, SEC-registered advisers managed $27.7 trillion for 61,111,000 individual client relationships at December 31, 2025, up 15.4% in assets and 4.4% in relationships year over year.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that high-net-worth individuals represent 16.13% of advised individual clients but 67.87% of advised individual assets, giving an Advised Wealth Concentration Ratio (AWCR) of 4.21.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, individual advisory assets equal 19.42% of the $142.6 trillion in household and nonprofit financial assets reported by the Federal Reserve at December 31, 2025.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics cut its ten-year growth projection for personal financial advisors from 10% (2024–34) to 1% (2025–35) and lowered projected annual openings from 24,100 to 17,100, citing AI advice tools as a factor moderating demand.
- Axis Intelligence Research estimates 204.1 advised individual relationships per personal financial advisor in 2025, against a mean advised account of $1,907,468 for high-net-worth clients and $173,642 for everyone else.
How Big Is the US Wealth Management Market in 2026?
The honest answer starts by throwing out the number most people reach for.
The SEC’s Investment Adviser Statistics report $177 trillion in regulatory assets under management across all SEC-registered investment advisers at the end of 2025, up 21.0% in a year. That figure gets recycled as a wealth management statistic constantly, and it is the wrong one. RAUM counts hedge funds, private equity vehicles, sub-advised mandates, insurance general accounts and pension money — assets that pass through advisers registered under the Advisers Act but have nothing to do with a household hiring somebody to manage a portfolio. It also double-counts: when one adviser sub-advises another’s fund, both report the assets.
The wealth management number lives one level down, in Form ADV Item 5.D, where advisers report separately managed account assets by client type. Individuals — high-net-worth and everyone else — accounted for $27.7 trillion of the $177 trillion total, or 15.65%.
US RIA Separately Managed Account Assets by Client Type, 2025
| Client type | RAUM (USD trillions) | Client relationships | RIAs reporting | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High-net-worth individuals | 18.8 | 9,856,000 | 10,093 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Individuals other than high-net-worth | 8.9 | 51,255,000 | 9,402 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Insurance companies | 8.7 | 16,000 | 1,336 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Pension and profit-sharing plans | 8.5 | 733,000 | 5,424 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| State and municipal entities | 4.4 | 28,000 | 1,519 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Corporations and other businesses | 3.6 | 409,000 | 5,965 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Other investment advisers | 2.2 | 1,482,000 | 1,257 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Charitable organizations | 2.2 | 192,000 | 5,765 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Non-US institutions | 2.1 | 3,000 | 711 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Other clients | 1.7 | 676,000 | 1,447 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
| Banking or thrift institutions | 0.8 | 12,000 | 744 | SEC Form ADV Item 5.D |
Source: SEC Investment Advisers — Clients, August 2026 report, data as of fiscal years ending in 2025. RIA counts are not mutually exclusive; an adviser serving both HNW and mass-market clients appears in both rows. The SEC publishes RAUM in this table rounded to $0.1 trillion.
Read the table sideways and the shape of the industry appears immediately. Insurance companies hand advisers $8.7 trillion through 16,000 relationships. Individuals hand them $27.7 trillion through 61 million. Same regulatory regime, completely different business — one is a handful of institutional mandates, the other is retail distribution at national scale, and the cost of servicing the second is why fee schedules look the way they do.
Sarah Davis: Every conversation about advisory fees eventually collides with this table. Insurance companies place $8.7 trillion through 16,000 relationships. Individuals place $27.7 trillion through 61,111,000. Those are not the same business and they should not be benchmarked against each other on basis points, because the second one is buying compliance, custody reconciliation, statements, phone calls and a fiduciary standard across sixty-one million sets of life decisions. The spread between those two cost structures is where most “advisory fees are too high” arguments quietly go to die.
How Many RIAs Are There?
The SEC counted 16,413 SEC-registered investment advisers at the end of 2025, up 3.5% from 15,856 a year earlier, plus 6,519 exempt reporting advisers, for 22,932 total filers — a 4.2% annual increase.
One reconciliation worth stating plainly, because these two figures circulate side by side: the Investment Adviser Association’s 2026 Snapshot, also built on Form ADV, reports 16,544 registered advisers for the same year. The gap of 131 firms reflects different extract dates from a register that changes daily as filings, withdrawals and registrations post. Neither number is wrong. Axis Intelligence Research uses the SEC’s own August 2026 tabulation throughout this page so that every figure here traces to one extract.
Full RIA firm-level detail — growth by firm size, M&A, advisor migration — sits in US RIA Statistics 2026.
How Many Wealth Management Clients Are There in the US?
Individual advisory relationships nearly doubled over eight years. In 2017 SEC-registered advisers reported 32,156,000 individual client relationships. By 2025 that had reached 61,111,000 — 28,955,000 more relationships, a 1.90x increase.
Individual Advisory Assets and Clients, 2017–2025
| Year | HNW RAUM ($T) | Non-HNW RAUM ($T) | Total ($T) | HNW clients | Non-HNW clients | Total clients | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 6.1 | 4.5 | 10.6 | 4,736,000 | 27,420,000 | 32,156,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2018 | 6.0 | 4.5 | 10.5 | 4,453,000 | 30,867,000 | 35,320,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2019 | 7.6 | 5.3 | 12.9 | 4,969,000 | 36,266,000 | 41,235,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2020 | 9.3 | 6.0 | 15.3 | 6,211,000 | 40,367,000 | 46,578,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2021 | 11.8 | 7.1 | 18.9 | 6,915,000 | 43,899,000 | 50,814,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2022 | 10.8 | 6.6 | 17.4 | 7,402,000 | 44,868,000 | 52,270,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2023 | 13.0 | 7.2 | 20.2 | 7,985,000 | 46,493,000 | 54,478,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2024 | 15.9 | 8.1 | 24.0 | 9,271,000 | 49,237,000 | 58,508,000 | SEC Form ADV |
| 2025 | 18.8 | 8.9 | 27.7 | 9,856,000 | 51,255,000 | 61,111,000 | SEC Form ADV |
Source: SEC Investment Adviser Statistics, August 2026 report (Form ADV Item 5.D). Totals are Axis Intelligence Research sums of the two individual client-type rows.
Over that span, high-net-worth assets compounded at 15.11% a year against 8.90% for everyone else. Client counts moved much closer together: 9.59% a year for HNW relationships, 8.13% for non-HNW. Assets diverged; people did not. That single asymmetry is the whole story of the last eight years, and it is the reason the two ratios below exist.
A caution on 2022, because it will trip up anyone extending this series: individual RAUM fell from $18.9 trillion to $17.4 trillion. No client exodus took place — 1.5 million relationships were added that year. Markets fell. RAUM is a market-value measure and it inherits equity beta, which is why Axis Intelligence Research never reads a one-year RAUM move as a flows signal.
Household-level detail on the two client segments lives in US High-Net-Worth Statistics 2026 and US Mass Affluent Statistics 2026.
How Concentrated Are US Advised Assets? The AWCR and AWCI
Nobody publishes a concentration measure for advised wealth specifically. Household wealth concentration is measured constantly; the advised slice is not, even though it is the slice that determines which clients an advisory business is actually built to serve. Axis Intelligence Research publishes two here.
AWCR — Advised Wealth Concentration Ratio
Formula: AWCR = (HNW share of individual advisory assets) ÷ (HNW share of individual advisory client relationships)
2025 inputs, from SEC Form ADV Item 5.D:
- HNW share of individual RAUM: 18.8 ÷ 27.7 = 67.870%
- HNW share of individual client relationships: 9,856,000 ÷ 61,111,000 = 16.128%
- AWCR = 67.870 ÷ 16.128 = 4.2082
An AWCR of 1.00 would mean advised assets are spread evenly across advised people. At 4.21, high-net-worth clients carry 4.21 times their headcount share of advised assets.
The trajectory is where it gets interesting, and it does not go the way an industry press release would tell it.
| Year | AWCR | Mean HNW account | Mean non-HNW account | HNW-to-non-HNW ratio | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 3.9073 | $1,288,007 | $164,114 | 7.85x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2018 | 4.5324 | $1,347,406 | $145,787 | 9.24x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2019 | 4.8890 | $1,529,483 | $146,142 | 10.47x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2020 | 4.5584 | $1,497,343 | $148,636 | 10.07x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2021 | 4.5879 | $1,706,435 | $161,735 | 10.55x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2022 | 4.3831 | $1,459,065 | $147,098 | 9.92x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2023 | 4.3907 | $1,628,053 | $154,862 | 10.51x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2024 | 4.1809 | $1,715,025 | $164,510 | 10.43x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2025 | 4.2082 | $1,907,468 | $173,642 | 10.99x | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
AWCR peaked at 4.89 in 2019 and has run below that every year since, finishing 2025 at 4.21. Client-level concentration in advised assets is not rising. It rose sharply into 2019 and has drifted sideways-to-down for six years, because advisers added HNW relationships fast enough to keep pace with HNW assets.
AWCI — Axis Wealth Advice Concentration Index
Client-level concentration is one dimension. Firm-level concentration is another, and it behaves completely differently. AWCI combines three ratios, each computed from the same SEC Form ADV table and each rebased so that 2017 = 100.
| Component | Definition | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| C1 — client concentration | AWCR, rebased to 2017 = 100 | 50% |
| C2 — firm concentration | (HNW RAUM ÷ HNW-serving RIAs) ÷ (non-HNW RAUM ÷ non-HNW-serving RIAs), rebased | 30% |
| C3 — growth divergence | (HNW RAUM index) ÷ (non-HNW RAUM index), 2017 base, rebased | 20% |
AWCI = (0.50 × C1) + (0.30 × C2) + (0.20 × C3)
| Year | C1 | C2 | C3 | AWCI | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 100.000 | 100.000 | 100.000 | 100.000 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2018 | 115.999 | 98.168 | 98.361 | 107.122 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2019 | 125.126 | 107.075 | 105.784 | 115.842 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2020 | 116.664 | 115.703 | 114.344 | 115.912 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2021 | 117.419 | 124.450 | 122.604 | 120.565 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2022 | 112.177 | 123.091 | 120.715 | 117.159 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2023 | 112.374 | 135.434 | 133.197 | 123.456 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2024 | 107.004 | 147.340 | 144.809 | 126.666 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
| 2025 | 107.702 | 159.007 | 155.830 | 132.719 | Axis Intelligence Research from SEC Form ADV |
The 2017 reading of 100.0 is the baseline, set by construction rather than observed. The 2025 reading is 132.7.
The components tell you more than the headline. C1 is up just 7.7 points over eight years and has been falling since 2019. C2 is up 59.0 points and has risen in every year since 2018 without exception. The firm-level ratio (FCR) went from 1.2375 in 2017 to 1.9677 in 2025 — an RIA serving high-net-worth clients now carries almost twice the assets per firm of one serving everyone else, where in 2017 the gap was a quarter.
Sarah Davis: Concentration is moving up the stack, not down it. Individual HNW clients are not hoarding a larger share of advised assets than they were in 2019 — that ratio peaked and drifted. What changed is which firms hold the HNW book. The money is consolidating into a narrowing set of balance sheets while the client-level distribution stays put. That distinction matters commercially, because a rising C1 would be a client-mix story you fix with segmentation, and a rising C2 is a competitive-structure story you fix by buying somebody. The Form ADV data says it is the second one.
Scope of these measures. AWCR and AWCI describe separately managed account assets reported by SEC-registered advisers on Form ADV Item 5.D. They exclude brokerage assets held at broker-dealers, state-registered adviser assets, bank trust assets, direct-to-consumer holdings and pooled vehicle exposure. The SEC publishes the RAUM inputs rounded to $0.1 trillion, so derived ratios inherit that precision — Axis Intelligence Research reports four decimal places for reproducibility, not for accuracy claims beyond the source. “High-net-worth individual” on Form ADV is a regulatory category tied to the Rule 205-3 qualified client tests, not a wealth survey definition, and that category is changing (see below).
How Much of US Household Wealth Is Professionally Advised?
Set the advised pool against the whole household balance sheet and the industry stops looking as large as its own conference keynotes suggest.
The Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts of the United States put household and nonprofit total financial assets at $142,618,439 million — $142.6 trillion — at December 31, 2025, the same date as the Form ADV extract.
AAPR — Advised Asset Penetration Rate $27.7 trillion ÷ $142.618439 trillion = 19.42%
Roughly one dollar in five of US household financial assets sits in an SEC-registered adviser’s separately managed account for an individual client. The other four are in brokerage accounts, employer retirement plans, bank deposits, direct holdings, insurance products and state-registered adviser accounts.
Two things this ratio is not. It is not the share of Americans without an advisor, and it cannot be inverted into one — a household can hold advised and unadvised assets simultaneously, and brokerage relationships at FINRA member firms are a large advised channel that Form ADV Item 5.D does not capture. And the numerator and denominator come from two different federal collections with different valuation conventions: RAUM is reported by the adviser under Advisers Act rules and may include some non-discretionary assets, while the Z.1 is a national accounts estimate that includes nonprofit organizations alongside households. Axis Intelligence Research publishes AAPR as a directional penetration estimate, not a household participation rate.
How Many Financial Advisors Are There in the US?
Here is the number that should have made more noise than it did.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 299,400 personal financial advisors in 2025 and projects 303,500 in 2035 — growth of 1%, or 4,100 jobs across an entire decade, against 3% for all occupations. The previous projection vintage, covering 2024–34, had the occupation growing 10% and adding 31,200 jobs.
BLS Personal Financial Advisor Projections: Two Vintages
| Measure | 2024–34 vintage | 2025–35 vintage | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base-year employment | 326,000 (2024) | 299,400 (2025) | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook |
| Projected growth | 10% | 1% | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook |
| Numeric change | 31,200 | 4,100 | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook |
| Average annual openings | 24,100 | 17,100 | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook |
| Median annual wage | $102,140 (May 2024) | $105,070 (May 2025) | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook |
Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Personal Financial Advisors (SOC 13-2052), last modified August 27, 2026, and the superseded 2024–34 vintage of the same profile.
BLS names the cause directly: the availability of AI tools for financial advice may moderate demand for personal financial advisors, though the agency expects many consumers to keep using human advisors for complex work. That is a federal statistical agency writing AI displacement into the ten-year outlook for a $105,070-median occupation.
Now the correction, because the “advisors down 9 points” headline is being read too simply. The base year also fell, from 326,000 to 299,400 — a 26,600-job difference between vintages that reflects revised employment estimates as much as a changed forecast. Projected annual openings dropped 29.0%, from 24,100 to 17,100, and openings are dominated by replacement need rather than growth. Axis Intelligence Research reads the revision as a level correction and a demand-outlook cut arriving together, and would not attribute the whole nine-point swing to AI on this evidence alone. The direction is unambiguous; the decomposition is not.
Advisor Pay
Median annual wage for personal financial advisors was $105,070 in May 2025, against $50,980 for all occupations. The distribution is wide: the bottom 10% earned under $50,190, the top 10% above $357,020. Advisors in securities and commodity contracts and other financial investments — 65% of the occupation — had a median of $120,870, against $96,010 in credit intermediation (16% of the occupation) and $84,500 at insurance carriers.
Compensation bands by seniority and channel are covered in US Financial Advisor Statistics 2026.
Registered Representatives and the Dual-Registration Shift
FINRA’s 2026 Industry Snapshot counted 639,723 registered representatives at year-end 2025, a fourth consecutive annual increase and 5% above 2021. Of those, 331,802 held both broker-dealer and investment adviser registration — 51.87%, a majority. A further 94,562 people held investment-adviser-only registrations and 307,921 held broker-dealer-only registrations, giving 734,285 total securities industry registered persons by Axis Intelligence Research’s sum.
Member firm revenue reached $776.8 billion in 2025 against $398.5 billion in 2021.
The certification track is growing faster than the occupation. CFP Board reported 107,529 CFP professionals at December 31, 2025, up 4.3%, with 6,709 new certificants and 11,037 exam candidates — both records. Women numbered 25,601, and 56.5% of all certificants are under 50. Set against the BLS advisor count, that is 359.1 CFP professionals per 1,000 personal financial advisors.
What Is an Advisor’s Client Load in 2026?
ACLI — Advised Client Load Indicator 61,111,000 individual advisory relationships ÷ 299,400 personal financial advisors = 204.1
At the same time, advised assets per advisor reach $92,518,370, and high-net-worth relationships alone run 32.9 per advisor. Against FINRA’s registered representative count, the same client pool works out to 95.5 relationships per registered person.
State this carefully, because the two inputs are collected differently. Form ADV counts client relationships at registered advisory firms; a household with a joint account and two IRAs may generate several. BLS counts occupational employment under SOC 13-2052, which excludes many people who service advisory clients — client associates, planners classified elsewhere, and self-employed advisors that the OEWS wage survey does not fully capture. Axis Intelligence Research publishes ACLI as a capacity indicator that tracks the direction of the gap between advisory demand and advisory labour supply, not as a caseload count for any individual practitioner.
The direction is what matters. Individual advisory relationships grew 4.4% in 2025 and 90% since 2017. Advisor employment is projected to grow 1% over the following decade.
Sarah Davis: Every industry has a moment where the growth story and the staffing plan stop agreeing, and the wealth business is having it now. Assets rose 15.4% last year while the ten-year hiring forecast reads 4,100 net jobs. Something has to absorb the difference, and there are only three candidates: bigger books per advisor, software doing more of the planning work, or a service tier that never touches a human. The firms that survive the decade will have picked one deliberately. Most will end up with the third by accident.
How Do the Largest Firms Compare?
Scale at the top has moved fast enough that the individual-adviser aggregates above are only half the picture. Morgan Stanley reported $3,022 billion in Wealth Management fee-based client assets at June 30, 2026, on record quarterly net revenues of $8,856 million, a 30.5% pre-tax margin and $148.1 billion of net new assets in the quarter, alongside $2,004 billion in Investment Management AUM. Charles Schwab reported $13.04 trillion in total client assets and 39.9 million active brokerage accounts at July 31, 2026.
These are reported on different bases — fee-based client assets, total client assets and RAUM are three distinct measures, and comparing them directly produces league tables that mean nothing. The full firm-by-firm comparison, on matched definitions and matched dates, sits in US Wealth Management Market Share 2026.
What Changes the Numbers in 2027
One regulatory adjustment will move the headline segmentation, and almost nobody has connected it to the data yet.
Form ADV’s “high-net-worth individual” client type is defined by reference to the Rule 205-3 qualified client tests under the Investment Advisers Act. On April 28, 2026, the SEC issued its five-yearly inflation adjustment to those thresholds, effective June 29, 2026: the assets-under-management test rose from $1,100,000 to $1,400,000, and the net worth test from $2,200,000 to $2,700,000.
Advisory relationships entered into before that date are generally grandfathered. New ones are not. Mechanically, a higher bar means some clients who would have been classified as high-net-worth under the old test will be reported in the non-HNW row going forward. Any year-over-year comparison of the HNW client count across the 2026 boundary is measuring a definition change alongside a market change, and AWCR will absorb part of that shift. Axis Intelligence Research will re-baseline and disclose rather than splice the series silently.
Generational asset movement through these segments is tracked in US Wealth Transfer Statistics 2026.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure on this page was retrieved from a primary source on September 3, 2026. Adviser, client and asset counts come from the SEC Division of Investment Management’s Investment Adviser Statistics, August 2026 report, drawn from Form ADV Part 1A Items 2 and 5.D, accessed through the SEC’s published JSON data files. Household balance sheet data comes from the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts of the United States (Z.1), table B.101, series FL154090005.Q. Occupational data comes from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook profile for SOC 13-2052, together with the superseded 2024–34 vintage of that profile for the projection comparison. Registration data comes from FINRA’s 2026 Industry Snapshot; certification data from CFP Board’s January 2026 release. Firm figures come from Morgan Stanley’s second quarter 2026 earnings release and The Charles Schwab Corporation’s Form 8-K exhibit filed with the SEC. No figure on this page is sourced from an industry consultancy estimate, a market-sizing report or a secondary aggregator.
Reporting dates. Form ADV data reflects each adviser’s most recent fiscal year end, which for most filers is December 31, 2025; assets may be calculated within 90 days of filing. Federal Reserve and Form ADV figures are aligned to December 31, 2025. Firm figures carry their own reporting dates and are labelled accordingly.
Formulas. AWCR, AWCI (with components C1, C2 and C3 and weights of 50%, 30% and 20%), AAPR and ACLI are defined in full in the sections above, with every input shown. All arithmetic was computed twice — in floating point and in exact rational arithmetic using Python’s fractions.Fraction — and every value in this article exists as a row in the accompanying CSV with its source URL and retrieval date.
Scope. Form ADV Item 5.D covers separately managed accounts at SEC-registered advisers only. It excludes state-registered advisers, brokerage assets at FINRA member firms, bank and trust company fiduciary assets, and assets held through pooled vehicles. Client counts are relationships, not households or individuals. RAUM is reported under Advisers Act rules and is not identical to market value or to firm-reported client assets. Where two federal series are combined — AAPR and ACLI — the article states the methodological mismatch and labels the output an estimate rather than an observation.
Disclosure. Axis Intelligence Research has no commercial relationship with any adviser, broker-dealer or firm named on this page.
About This Dataset
us-wealth-management-statistics.csv contains 301 observations covering US wealth management assets, client relationships, adviser and firm counts, occupational employment and wages, registration data, certification counts, household balance sheet totals and the four Axis-calculated metrics (AWCR, AWCI, AAPR, ACLI), spanning 2017 through July 2026.
Each row carries metric, value, unit, as-of date, geography, segment, source organisation, source document, absolute source URL, retrieval date, a primary-source flag, an Axis-calculated flag, a method note stating the formula for every calculated row, and licence.
Released under CC BY 4.0. Reuse, redistribution and adaptation are permitted with attribution to Axis Intelligence Research.
Citation
APA — Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). US wealth management statistics 2026: Assets, clients, advisors and the capacity gap. https://axis-intelligence.com/us-wealth-management-statistics/
MLA — Axis Intelligence Research. “US Wealth Management Statistics 2026: Assets, Clients, Advisors and the Capacity Gap.” Axis Intelligence, 3 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/us-wealth-management-statistics/.
Chicago — Axis Intelligence Research. “US Wealth Management Statistics 2026: Assets, Clients, Advisors and the Capacity Gap.” Axis Intelligence, September 3, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/us-wealth-management-statistics/.
Last updated: September 3, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the SEC’s $177 trillion RAUM figure mean US advisers manage $177 trillion of household money?
No. Regulatory assets under management covers everything an SEC-registered adviser manages under the Advisers Act, including hedge funds, private equity vehicles, insurance general accounts, pension mandates and sub-advisory relationships, and it double-counts assets where one adviser sub-advises another’s fund. Individual clients accounted for $27.7 trillion of the $177 trillion total at December 31, 2025 — 15.65%.
What does “high-net-worth individual” actually mean on Form ADV?
It is a regulatory classification, not a wealth-survey band. Form ADV ties the category to the Rule 205-3 qualified client tests, which as of June 29, 2026 require either $1,400,000 in assets under management with the adviser or a net worth above $2,700,000, up from $1,100,000 and $2,200,000. Because the thresholds ratchet with inflation every five years, the HNW client count is not a constant-definition series across those boundaries.
Why did the number of advisory clients grow while the advisor headcount forecast fell?
They are measured by different agencies on different bases and they are genuinely diverging. SEC Form ADV recorded 61,111,000 individual advisory relationships in 2025, up 4.4% year over year and 90% since 2017, while BLS projects personal financial advisor employment rising 1% between 2025 and 2035. BLS attributes part of the moderation to AI advice tools, and the base-year employment estimate also fell 26,600 between projection vintages, so the swing reflects a level revision as well as a demand forecast.
Are advised assets becoming more concentrated among wealthy clients?
At the client level, no — that trend stalled. The Advised Wealth Concentration Ratio peaked at 4.89 in 2019 and stood at 4.21 in 2025. Concentration is rising at the firm level instead: assets per HNW-serving RIA relative to assets per non-HNW-serving RIA went from 1.24 in 2017 to 1.97 in 2025, and that component has risen every year since 2018.
How much money does a typical advisory client have with their adviser?
Mean advised account size was $1,907,468 for high-net-worth clients and $173,642 for everyone else at December 31, 2025 — a ratio of 10.99 to 1. These are means across all reported relationships, not medians, so a small number of very large accounts pulls the HNW figure upward; a household with several accounts also appears as several relationships.
What share of American household wealth is under professional management?
Individual separately managed account assets at SEC-registered advisers equal 19.42% of the $142.6 trillion in household and nonprofit financial assets the Federal Reserve reported at December 31, 2025. That is a penetration estimate for one channel, not a participation rate: it excludes brokerage assets at FINRA member firms, state-registered adviser accounts, bank trust assets and employer plan balances not managed through an RIA separate account.
Is the industry consolidating around dual-registered advisors?
Dual registration is now the majority model. FINRA reported 331,802 people holding both broker-dealer and investment adviser registration at year-end 2025 — 51.87% of its 639,723 registered representatives — against 307,921 holding broker-dealer-only registration and 94,562 holding adviser-only registration.
How many CFP professionals are there relative to working advisors?
CFP Board counted 107,529 CFP professionals at December 31, 2025, up 4.3%, against 299,400 personal financial advisors counted by BLS — roughly 359 CFP professionals per 1,000 advisors. Certification is growing faster than the occupation: 6,709 new certificants and 11,037 exam candidates in 2025 were both records.
Why do published wealth management market-size figures disagree so much?
Because four different measures circulate under the same label: regulatory assets under management (adviser-reported, includes funds and sub-advisory, double-counts), fee-based client assets (firm-reported, advisory only), total client assets (firm-reported, includes custody and brokerage) and separately managed account RAUM by client type (the individual-client measure used on this page). Morgan Stanley’s $3,022 billion in fee-based client assets and Schwab’s $13.04 trillion in total client assets are not comparable quantities, and any table that stacks them without stating the basis is producing a ranking rather than a measurement.