2026 Advisor Fee Benchmark: Measured Cost of SEC-Registered Investment Advice

Measured annual advisory cost at five portfolio balances (USD 250,000 to USD 3,000,000), computed from the Form ADV Part 2A fee disclosures of a stratified random sample of 176 SEC-registered investment advisers and weighted to a screened frame of 9,234 advisers that serve individual clients. Includes the share of firms whose disclosures cannot be priced at all (a headline finding: at USD 250,000 only 28.4% of firms with an AUM program publish a computable price), and the share excluded by account minimums. Methodology: reproducible stratified sampling (16 cells: four AUM bands by four US regions, deterministic SHA-256 ordering frozen before extraction); two blind extractions per firm with page-level adjudication; pre-registered decimal-only formulas; population-share weighting with left-continuous weighted quantiles; 2,000-replicate within-stratum bootstrap. Fee ranges are preserved as low-high identification intervals, never midpoints. PRE-FINAL: the charter release gate is 200 firms; this release has 176 - treat as provisional. Canonical page and live tables: clearmoneyguide.com/financial-advisor-fee-comparison-chart