RIA M&A runs up to 5x reported totals, Steward Partners CEO says

RIA M&A deal activity is running at three to five times the volume that industry trackers report, according to Steward Partners CEO Jim Gold, who describes an “underground” market led by advisor-to-advisor sales and internal succession moves. 

Investment bank DeVoe & Company tallied a record-setting 322 RIA deals in 2025 and 244 through September 2026, slightly ahead of that pace even though third-quarter deal volume fell 17% year over year. M&A consultancy Echelon Partners tracked 466 RIA M&A deals in 2025. 

DeVoe focuses on announced RIA mergers and acquisitions, while Echelon’s broader methodology also includes capital infusions, restructurings and breakaway transactions. 

“If your transaction is not directly tied to an investment bank of some sort, no one reports on it,” Gold told InvestmentNews. “I think the number is probably 300% of what we’re seeing out there. [...] I think the numbers are literally three, four, or five times what’s being reported publicly.” 

Off the books

Gold said his own firm, a Connecticut-based hybrid RIA with $57 billion in client assets, is part of the underground M&A market doing deals that do not get shared publicly. 

“You have M&A where we're acquiring advisors at our firm, [who] are coming to us and saying, hey I've been here 10 years, I want to sell my book to the company,” said Gold. “There's a ton of peer-to-peer M&A going on. Many of these independent firms have a succession group where they're basically playing matchmaker and pairing up advisors to buy each other's books out, and none of this is reported.”  

Jeff Gonyo, Steward’s head of wealth management, said the firm logged 16 to 17 publicly reported deals over the past 12 months, alongside roughly a dozen internal transactions that do not get announced. 

“That movement is happening constantly, and we’re just a microcosm of that,” Gonyo said. "Anything under that $100 million [AUM] mark is not getting picked up anywhere. And if you think about the size of the RIA industry, the majority of RIAs live in that lower volume space.” 

Skewed valuations

Steward secured $475 million in strategic capital from Ares in December 2025. Joseph Glick, Steward’s chief operating officer since July 2026, said industry-wide valuation benchmarks are also skewed by the absence of reporting on smaller deals. 

“Deal terms are only disclosed for your larger marquee deals. You won't see those deal terms being floated around for some of these smaller deals or succession planning that we're doing with other firms,” said Glick. 

The median size of acquired RIAs increased from $517 million to $630 million in the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2025, according to Fidelity. According to Advisor Growth Strategies’ annual RIA Deal Room Report, the median multiple paid for RIA firms reached 11.6x EBITDA in 2025, the highest level the industry has recorded. 

“Some of the deal terms that we're seeing banded around in terms of valuation multiples and things of that nature, it's largely for bigger firms that are being acquired by scaled acquirers,” Glick added. “Some of the deal terms that we're seeing, I would say aren't necessarily representative of the entire market.”