RIAs grew assets sharply in 2025 – but barely added clients. What gives?

The numbers behind 2025 tell two very different stories about the wealth management industry, depending on which one you count.

By assets, it was a banner year. By clients, it barely moved at all.

That's the core finding of the newly published RIA Signals Report from Paithos Research, which examined Form ADV filings from more than 14,000 SEC-registered advisory firms that filed in both the 2025 and 2026 annual-amendment seasons. The median firm grew regulatory assets under management by 14.5% in fiscal 2025, according to the report. Over the same period, the median firm's reported client count rose just 2.1%, and nearly a third of firms grew assets while adding no reported clients at all.

The gap was not simply a function of markets doing the heavy lifting. The S&P 500 returned 17.9% in 2025, and the report notes that median asset growth came in below that benchmark. The firm stopped short of drawing conclusions about performance, net flows or acquisitions from that, since Form ADV does not separate the three.

Where the data does draw a sharper line is on concentration. The largest tenth of advisory firms, those with more than $10 billion in assets, held 82.5% of all reported clients in fiscal 2025, up a shade from 80% a year earlier. Those same large firms posted the fastest median client growth of any size band, at 4.11%, while smaller firms under $100 million in assets showed essentially no client growth at all despite posting the strongest asset gains in the entire dataset, at a median of 17.91%.

In a possible sign of prosperous stagnation in the industry, the report also found that reported assets per advisory-function employee rose to $108.5 million in fiscal 2025, up from $98.6 million the year before, even as clients served per employee barely shifted, from 31.7 to 32. More than half of firms, 56.7%, grew assets while holding headcount flat or even trimming it, a sign that existing staff are managing larger books rather than firms adding capacity to chase new relationships.

A familiar pattern from a different data set

The Paithos findings track closely with independent research published this year by The Ensemble Practice. The consulting firm's True Ensemble Data Insights study, based on responses from 173 advisory firms with complete financial data, found that the average firm reported a 38.6% operating profit margin in fiscal 2025, more than ten percentage points above where the industry stood a decade earlier. Organic growth from new client relationships, meanwhile, came in at just 3.7%, the lowest figure in the firm's ten-year data set.

"The long-term pattern is clear: advisory firm profitability has risen steadily, while organic growth from new client relationships has declined," the report said. "This may reflect complacency among firms, lower consumer urgency to seek advice when markets are rewarding all investors, or both."

Read more: Advisory firms are hitting record profits – but their organic growth engine is stalling

Marketing and referral practices diverge among growers

Paithos found that firms whose client counts grew by 10% or more differed from flat or declining firms well beyond the headline metric. The growers were roughly twice as likely to use client testimonials in their advertising, at 15.2% versus 7.4%, and more likely to pay third parties for referrals, at 28% versus 21.1%, according to the report. Restricting to retail-shaped firms with at least ten individual or high-net-worth clients, the gap held: 17.9% of retail client growers used testimonials, against 9.2% of firms with flat retail rosters.

Schwab's latest RIA benchmarking research reinforces the importance of intentional marketing efforts. Among the firms it surveyed, Schwab found top-performing firms achieved 9.3% asset growth from a mix of inorganic activity, COI referrals, existing client referrals, and other marketing; all other firms, meanwhile, managed just 3.8% asset growth. The survey also found top-performing firms were more likely to have a documented referral plan for existing clients (52%) as well as a plan for getting referrals from COIs (36%).

Read more: AI enters RIA hiring and recruiting process, Schwab finds

Compared to firms without client referral plans, Schwab found independent RIAs that have one reported 1.5x more clients generated from current clients putting in a good word for them. Similarly, firms with business partner referral plans generated 1.6x more new clients from business partners' recommendations.