How much does financial advice cost in Australia? (2026)

A one-off Statement of Advice costs $2,000 to $8,000. Ongoing advice costs about 1% of your balance a year, every year, plus the platform and funds underneath it. Over a working life, that's the difference between retiring earlier, with a larger super balance, or retiring later, with a smaller super balance and less security, and less confidence.

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." Charlie Munger

Your financial planner gets paid whether they do any work, whether they're asleep, whether they're on holiday and whether they go to work or not.

I've spent well over a decade in financial services. I was lucky enough to work at Macquarie Private Bank and at one of Australia's oldest stockbroking firms, Wilson HTM, and for the last five years I've run my own independent firm. I love my job. I was put on this earth to write and talk about super funds and investments.

I don't love my industry. People would do themselves an enormous favour if they replaced the words "financial planner" with "salesperson" every time they heard them. It's not ridiculous to say the Australian advice industry is 99% sales and 1% advice.

That isn't because advisers are villains. Most of them are perfectly decent people who do it because everyone does it. They live in an echo chamber that tells themselves a story about how the model helps their clients. The high fees their clients pay for literally nothing seriously enhances this belief. The adviser isn't a stranger in a dark suit; he's your cousin, your mate from footy, the bloke at the barbecue who "does finance." They often believe what they're telling you, and that's the problem.

The first fee

Every adviser in Australia must give you a document called a Statement of Advice before you act on their recommendations. It'll cost you between $2,000 and $8,000 as a one-off. Most advisers will waive it if you sign up for ongoing service, because the SOA was never the product. It's the pitch.

Ongoing service is the product. It's typically 0.6% to 1.2% of your balance a year, or a fixed retainer of $3,000 to $12,000. Underneath it sits a platform fee of 0.2% to 0.6%, and underneath that, the fees of whatever managed funds you've been put into.

On $1 million: about $10,000 a year to the adviser, $3,000 to $5,000 to the platform, and whatever the funds inside charge. Call it $15,000 a year. Over 20 years, before you count what that money would have earned had it stayed invested, that's $300,000.

A one-off Statement of Advice covering the same ground, from us, is $6,600. Once.

What a Statement of Advice actually costs, and why

Make no mistake, writing an SOA is expensive. Someone, usually a junior (there's always some spelling errors), produces a document that can run to 100 pages: your situation, every recommendation, the reasoning, the projections, the disclosures, the fees. They're assembled in Word from templated text, and a horrifying share of the cost is fixing the spelling, the margins and the formatting so it looks vaguely professional. In my opinion they still look terrible.

Behind that sits the overhead of an advice business: compliance staff whose job is to keep the adviser operating within the law (not well, within the law), licensee fees, professional indemnity insurance, research, software, rent, and the regulator. You cannot sneeze in this industry without ASIC being notified. An adviser can carry $50,000 to $80,000 a year in fixed costs before earning a cent.

So $2,000 to $8,000 for the document isn't a rip-off. It's roughly what it costs to produce. The rip-off is that the document contains about 1% advice and 99% sales, and the sales part is what comes next.

Why $2 million pays double

There's a bunch of problems with percentage based fees.

The first, is that you look at the 1% and not the $10,000 per year. This is a key reason advisers always talk in percentage terms, not dollars.

The second, is that a $2 million dollar superannuation account is not double the work of a $1 million account. You'll be in the same portfolio; every position will simply be twice as big. But at 1%, you'll pay $20,000 a year instead of $10,000, for identical work.

Advice is a scalable business. The fixed costs are real, but they're fixed. Once an adviser has 10 or 20 clients, every extra dollar of your balance is close to pure margin. It's an unbelievably profitable business model. Not because the work is hard. Because you get paid so much for so little of it.

I know this because I worked in stockbroking firms and witnessed this first hand. Every year, we had clients paying tens of thousands of dollars. And despite the incredible amount of fees, I knew for a fact, the clients would have gotten a higher return, with lower fees and less risk if they were with an industry fund.

Initially, get someone's super structured, demystifying retirement, sorting contributions, fixing insurances, all of that helps. The rest is just a total waste of your money. No clients ever asked the obvious question: "You're paying the fund manager to manage the money. So why are we paying the adviser 1%? Aren't they just a total middleman?"

What "not even 1%" actually costs

You'll hear advisers say the whole lot, platform, funds and adviser, comes to "not even 1%," as if that settles it. Here's what "not even 1%" does over 40 years on $100,000, at the long-run average of about 6% after inflation.

"Not even 1%" cost a quarter of the nest egg. A quarter of a million dollars, on a $100,000 start, for a middleman.

Put it the way a 60-year-old feels it. On a $1 million retirement balance at a 4% drawdown, it's the difference between $40,000 a year to live on and $30,000. A 1% difference in returns over 30 years is roughly 20% of your final balance. This stuff makes massive differences over time, and it's impossible for an adviser not to know that. So when one tells you 1% isn't much, you know whose interests they're working in.

Why advisers charge a percentage at all

Commissions on investment products were banned in 2013. The percentage fee is what replaced them. The Royal Commission's final report said as much: the ongoing fee arrangement looked like an attempt to replicate the revenue that used to come from upfront and trailing commissions, and that shift is what sits at the heart of the "fees for no service" scandal. A commission was paid by the product. An ongoing fee is paid by you. Same money, different payer, and now it's technically for a service. Which means the service has to be invented.

Here's how it gets invented.

First, they convince you that you need something complicated. Think of it like a car. Who's better placed to build you one: your local mechanic, who's a great guy and says "I'll design one just for you," or Toyota, with thousands of engineers and resources your mechanic couldn't dream of? Now ask who gets paid more if you take the mechanic's car. That's an industry fund versus an adviser-built portfolio. Any suggestion that an individual adviser can outperform a $100 billion fund with hundreds of investment staff is ludicrous. They're in a completely different league. But Toyota doesn't pay the mechanic, and the bespoke car does.

Second, they build it so it needs them. A wrap platform, by design, has to be run by an adviser. Put a client in fourteen managed funds and an SMA and they can't manage it themselves, so they keep paying. It's treating the symptoms instead of the cure, and the symptoms are the business model.

Third, they get paid without you noticing. A percentage of your balance, deducted monthly from an account you look at once a year, is a fee you never see, never write a cheque for, and never have to be asked for. It becomes a fixed cost in your head, like the phone bill. And every financial services company apart from a profit-to-member fund answers to shareholders first and clients second. That isn't a conspiracy. It's what a company is.

Here's the tell. These portfolios are sold, not bought. In fifteen years I never once had a client walk in and ask to be rolled out of their low-cost, high-performing industry fund into a high-cost, lower-performing wrap platform. Not once. And yet that is the recommendation nearly every client of nearly every advice firm in the country receives. When 100% of customers get the same prescription regardless of the illness, you're not looking at medicine. You're looking at sales.

Where the fee hides: wrap accounts and platforms

A wrap, whether it's HUB24, Netwealth, Macquarie Wrap, CFS Edge, BT Panorama or AMP MyNorth, is an administration platform that sits between you and your investments and charges you for the privilege. It also goes by master trust, IDPS, SMA, IMA and MDA, depending on who's selling it. Same animal, six names. What it does brilliantly is let your adviser deduct their ongoing fee from your money every month without you ever seeing an invoice.

Here's what it feels like. You go to a restaurant. Instead of sitting inside and ordering through the waiter, you sit outside on the footpath and pay someone three times the price to go in, order for you, and carry the food out. It arrives cold. And on the way out, they take a bite out of every dish. That's a wrap account with an adviser on top. Worse food, worse setting, triple the price, and the first bite goes to someone else.

Whether you need one comes down to four questions. Do you need a complicated portfolio? Do you need unlisted funds? Do you need someone else to manage it for you? Do you need consolidated tax reporting, and what are you paying for it? For the overwhelming majority of people the answers are no, no, no, and MyGov pre-fills your tax return for free. Four nos means no wrap.

Two things that aren't on the brochure. Leaving usually costs about $100 per holding to transfer out in specie, so a client in 21 funds pays $2,100 to leave, plus the capital gains. And some platforms won't let you trade your own money without an adviser attached; if you want to leave, you either sell everything or find another adviser to keep paying. Complexity is job security.

You'll also hear "our fees are lower than an industry fund." Two things. First, most of the time they're not disclosing the full stack: platform, investment fees, transaction costs, performance fees. Second, it's the meal deal trick. One shop won't shut up about their 50-cent bottle of water, while the whole meal deal is $20. The shop next door charges $1 for the water and $10 for the meal. Advisers are the first shop. And the water they're selling at 50 cents is filled from the garden tap out the back.

Wraps have a place. A large SMSF with dozens of holdings, or someone who genuinely needs unlisted assets, can justify the fee. We'll tell you when that's you. It isn't most people, and the industry recommends them to almost everyone.

Are financial advice fees tax deductible?

Mostly no, and where yes, not the way the salesperson implied.

The fee for initial advice, the Statement of Advice, is a capital expense and is not deductible. Ongoing fees can be partly deductible to the extent they relate to managing investments that produce assessable income, and a portion may be deductible where the advice concerns your tax affairs. Fees deducted inside super are paid by the fund, not you, so they aren't a deduction on your personal return either.

If an adviser leads with "and it's tax deductible," ask them exactly which part, and get it in writing. The ATO's guidance is public and it's a lot narrower than the pitch.

What "independent" and "fee-for-service" actually mean

"Independent" is a legally protected word in this industry. Under section 923A of the Corporations Act, an adviser can only call themselves independent if they receive no commissions, no volume payments, no gifts or benefits from product providers, and have no ownership links to the products they recommend. Fewer than 1% of Australian advisers qualify.

Most of that 1% still charge a percentage of your balance. Independence stops the product from paying them. It doesn't stop your balance from paying them, forever.

"Fee-for-service" means you pay for the work, once, the way you'd pay a lawyer, a doctor or a plumber. Not as a percentage of what you own. Not monthly. Not for the rest of your life.

Both together is what we do. That's the whole pitch.

Do you need an adviser at all?

Honestly, most people don't. Not on an ongoing basis.

We turn away about 50% of the people who come to us. Not because they aren't wealthy. Because advice wouldn't improve the position they're already in: a good industry fund, sensibly invested, correctly structured. Paying us would be a waste of their money, and we tell them so.

Retirement planning, tax structuring and insurance can be genuinely valuable, and worth paying a professional for, once. What almost nobody needs is ongoing service, because the thing that used to justify it disappeared decades ago. In the 1980s you couldn't buy broad, low-cost exposure to the whole market without going through a broker. Today you can do it from your phone in four minutes.

If a financial adviser tells you an industry fund is a bad investment, they are either wrong or not telling you the truth. Recommending investments is the core of the job. An adviser who can't recognise a good one is a mechanic who can't drive.

Think of an adviser like a pharmacist. Whatever's wrong with you, there is essentially one prescription: a good low-cost fund, sensible allocation, appropriate insurance, and a plan for tax. High-risk 30-year-old? ETFs and an industry fund, this dose. Nervous 65-year-old retiree? ETFs and an industry fund, that dose. Same medicine, different dosage. Anyone selling you a different drug is selling you a different margin.

And if you're in a good fund and want to ring me once a week to chat about markets, go for your life. I love talking about stocks. But you won't make any money out of it. You'll just be spending time with me.

Paying ongoing adviser fees is paying for a personal trainer who's obese. It's doing the weekly groceries at the servo. It's paying Qantas Business prices for a Jetstar Economy seat, while the industry funds are handing out first class for the price of the Jetstar ticket.

Get the prescription once, from someone who has no reason to over-prescribe. Then get on with your life.

A note on SMSFs. The most common way people end up paying all of the above at once is by being talked into a self-managed super fund. ASIC's own file reviews found advisers failed to comply with the best interests duty in 91% of SMSF advice files in 2018 (Report 575, 250 files), and in 62 of 100 files in 2025, with 27 of those raising significant concerns that the client was worse off. The Royal Commission recorded that a fifth of all adviser revenue came from SMSFs. I made a 23-minute video on it. Watch it before you set one up.

What we charge, and why it's built this way

Initial Consultation: $330 inc GST. Forty-five minutes on Zoom with the figures on the table. At the end you get a plain verdict: whether full advice is worth it for you, what it would cover, and what it costs. If it isn't worth it, I'll tell you, and you've spent $330 rather than $6,600 to find out. If you proceed, the $330 comes off your fee.

Statement of Advice: $6,600 inc GST. Superannuation, insurance, investments and tax, with clear recommendations and the reasoning behind them. $8,800 for complicated positions: trusts, SMSFs, companies, defined benefit schemes. Fixed, quoted on the call, paid once.

After that: nothing. No ongoing fees, no retainers, no percentage of your assets, no platform. You implement the advice yourself with our guidance, and you come back if something material changes. Most people don't need to.

Why charge for the first meeting? Because a free first meeting isn't free. It's a sales cost, recovered from the clients who proceed. When you see a lawyer, a doctor or a tradesperson, you pay for their time from the first appointment, and you get their opinion, not their pitch. If you're not paying for someone's time, you're not dealing with an adviser. You're dealing with a salesman.

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Frequently asked questions

What is a reasonable fee for financial advice in Australia? Between $2,000 and $8,000 for a one-off Statement of Advice, depending on complexity. Ongoing fees of about 1% a year are common but rarely justified by the work involved.

Is it worth paying a financial adviser? Once, yes, if you have superannuation or investments of $100,000 or more and want your position properly structured. Ongoing, rarely. We turn away about half the people who come to us because advice wouldn't improve what they already have.

Why do financial advisers charge a percentage of assets? Because it's automatic, invisible and scales with your balance rather than their effort. It replaced commissions after they were banned, and the Royal Commission identified it as the root of "fees for no service."

How much does a 1% fee actually cost me? On $100,000 over 40 years, roughly a quarter of your final balance. On a $1 million retirement, about $10,000 a year of income.

Are financial advice fees tax deductible? The initial advice fee is not. Ongoing fees may be partly deductible where they relate to income-producing investments. Fees paid from super are not deductible personally.

What's the difference between independent and fee-for-service? Independent means the adviser takes no commissions or product payments (section 923A). Fee-for-service means you pay for the work once rather than a percentage forever. Very few advisers are both.

What does a wrap account cost? Typically 0.2% to 0.6% a year in administration fees, plus the investment fees inside it, plus the adviser fee it's designed to collect, plus transfer fees if you ever leave.