How Much Does It Cost to Run a Family Office? 2026 Benchmarks

Running a single family office costs between $875,000 and $6.6 million per year on average, depending on assets under management, or roughly 20 to 100 basis points of AUM. The global average is 41 basis points, and about two thirds of that number is people.

Those are the headline figures from the four most rigorous studies published on the subject: UBS's Global Family Office Report (300+ offices), J.P. Morgan Private Bank's 2026 Global Family Office Report (333 offices), Campden Wealth's Family Office Operational Excellence research, and Morgan Stanley's Single Family Office Compensation Report with Botoff Consulting (433 firms).

This article breaks down what the data actually says, why two offices with identical assets can have wildly different cost structures, and where the money goes. If you want your own number first, skip straight to the Family Office Cost Benchmark Calculator below. Enter four inputs and you'll see how your office compares to published peer ranges in about sixty seconds.

The benchmark: what family offices spend by size

The single most useful way to think about family office cost is basis points of AUM, total annual operating spend divided by the assets the office supervises. Here is what the published data shows:

Dollar averages: J.P. Morgan Private Bank, 2026. Cost intensity ranges: Campden Wealth/AlTi 2025 (North America) and UBS 2025. Staffing: Campden Wealth, UBS.

Two things jump out of this table.

First, the scale curve is steep. Campden Wealth's North America data shows large offices (over $1 billion) running at roughly 20 basis points while small offices (under $250 million) run at around 61 basis points, three times the cost intensity for the same core job. UBS's global sample shows the same pattern with a gentler slope: 41.1 bps on average, falling to 35.1 bps above $1 billion.

Second, the floor is high. Even a lean office supervising $200 million spends close to a million dollars a year. There is a fixed cost to doing this properly: books for a dozen entities, consolidated reporting, audit readiness, controls, and the people who run them. That fixed cost is why offices below roughly $250 million increasingly run virtual or heavily outsourced models, and why the cost question deserves more rigor than the back-of-envelope treatment it usually gets.

For context on whether your office is an outlier: in Morgan Stanley's US sample, 89 percent of investment-focused family offices keep total operating cost under 190 basis points of AUM, and 53 percent stay below 100. If you are above 100 bps, you are in the most expensive decile and should understand exactly why.

Where the money actually goes

UBS breaks total family office cost into four buckets: pure running costs (the largest share), asset management fees, banking fees, and external structures. Within pure running costs, staff compensation is about two thirds of the total.

That single fact explains most of the variance between offices. The cost question is mostly a headcount and seniority question. Benchmarks from the Morgan Stanley/Botoff study, the deepest US compensation dataset with over 2,200 incumbents:

• Chief Investment Officer: $900,000 median total direct compensation at investment-focused offices
• Chief Executive Officer: $825,000
• Senior Portfolio Manager: $785,000
• Chief Financial Officer: $620,000
• Chief Operating Officer: $571,000

These are medians, not top-of-market. At offices above $1 billion, the median CEO clears $1.2 million, and 62 percent of investment-focused offices now layer long-term incentives (carried interest, co-investment) on top. Every senior hire is a multi-hundred-basis-point decision for a smaller office.

In Campden's data, C-level compensation alone consumes 72 percent of total costs at small offices, versus 39 percent at large ones. Small offices are not inefficient because they waste money; they are inefficient because one or two unavoidable senior salaries sit on a small denominator.

The costs nobody benchmarks

The published numbers capture what offices spend. They capture less well what offices spend it on, and this is where the real dispersion hides.

Manual work is a payroll line in disguise. Campden finds roughly one in three family offices still performs more than half of all reporting manually, and 42 percent name spreadsheet reliance as their top technology concern. When a $600,000 controller spends a third of the year consolidating advisor statements in Excel, that is $200,000 of annual cost producing something a system should generate continuously.

Outsourcing shifts cost; it doesn't always reduce it. Effectively every office outsources something: legal (96 percent), tax (96 percent), IT (94 percent), cybersecurity (90 percent). But only 27 percent of offices report consistently excellent service from their providers, and 42 percent call results a mixed bag. The motivation is access to expertise (cited by 80 percent), not savings (31 percent). External spend deserves the same bps scrutiny as internal spend, which is why our calculator asks for both.

Technology is the cheapest line on the page. Typical family office technology budgets run $100,000 to $500,000 a year, per Campden. That is roughly half the loaded cost of one senior hire. The build-versus-hire math has quietly inverted: the question for most offices is no longer whether they can afford modern systems, but whether they can afford to keep solving software problems with headcount.

Benchmark your own office

Four inputs: AUM, internal operating cost, external spend, and headcount. You get your cost in basis points, your position against the published peer band for your size, the J.P. Morgan dollar average for your bracket, and your cost per FTE against the loaded-compensation norm.

A note on method: exclude asset management fees from your inputs for a like-for-like comparison, since most surveys exclude them from operating cost. And treat the ranges as directional. Survey definitions differ, and a high-touch office serving five households across three generations is buying a different product than a lean investment office serving one principal.

How to read your result

If you are below the peer band, confirm you are measuring everything. The most common reason an office looks cheap is invisible cost: services absorbed by the operating business, family members working below market, or external spend that never gets tallied. Genuinely lean offices do exist, and they are almost always the ones that systematized early.

If you are inside the band, the question becomes composition. Two offices at 40 bps can be very different businesses: one spends it on investment talent generating returns, the other on administrative load that technology should have absorbed. The staff share of your costs, against the two-thirds peer norm, is the fastest diagnostic.

If you are above the band, you are in good company (someone has to be the top quartile), but you should be able to name the reason. Legitimate reasons: heavy direct investing, large household and lifestyle operations, a recent build-out you are still growing into. Illegitimate reasons: manual reconciliation, duplicate systems, reporting produced by hand every month, and provider fees nobody has rebid in five years.

The structural answer: small team, large system

Across every study in this dataset, the offices with the best cost profiles share one trait: they spend on judgment and automate the rest. The average UBS-surveyed office employs about 12 people; half of J.P. Morgan's respondents employ five or fewer. At that scale you cannot hire your way to institutional infrastructure. You can only systematize your way there.

That is the thesis behind Asseta. One platform for the general ledger, multi-entity consolidation, banking, bill pay, and reporting, with AI handling the categorization, reconciliation, and report assembly that used to be someone's job description. Our customers typically reconcile accounts 8.5x more efficiently and close their books 85 percent faster, which shows up directly in the denominator this entire article is about.

If your number came in high, or you simply could not produce the inputs without opening six spreadsheets, that is the conversation to have.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to run a small family office? Offices supervising under $250 million average about $875,000 to $900,000 per year (J.P. Morgan, 2026), typically 60 to 100 basis points of AUM. Below roughly $100 million, most families run virtual offices: a single executive plus outsourced accounting, tax, and reporting, often near $1 million all-in.

What is a reasonable family office budget as a percentage of assets? The global average is about 41 basis points of AUM (UBS, 2025). Large offices above $1 billion run between 20 and 42 bps; smaller offices commonly run 60 to 100 bps. Morgan Stanley finds 89 percent of US investment-focused offices stay under 190 bps all-in.

What is the biggest expense in a family office? Staff. Compensation is roughly two thirds of operating cost on average, and the share rises in smaller offices, where C-level pay alone can be over 70 percent of the budget.

How many people does a family office employ? The UBS average is about 12. Half of J.P. Morgan's surveyed offices run on five or fewer. Headcount scales with assets and service scope: 1 to 6 below $250 million, 8 to 12 at $500 million to $1 billion, and 12 to 45 above $1 billion.

How much does family office software cost? Typical family office technology budgets run $100,000 to $500,000 per year (Campden Wealth), roughly half the loaded cost of one senior hire. Consolidated reporting and accounting platforms have become the highest-leverage line in the budget: adoption of consolidated investment reporting jumped from 47 to 64 percent of offices in a single year.

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Sources

UBS Global Family Office Reports 2024 to 2026; J.P. Morgan Private Bank 2026 Global Family Office Report; Campden Wealth / AlTi Tiedemann Global Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025; Campden Wealth / RBC North America Family Office Report 2024; Morgan Stanley Single Family Office Compensation Report 2025 (with Botoff Consulting). All figures are attributed to their original publishers; this article provides directional benchmarks, not financial advice.

Stan Perry is COO of Asseta, the intelligent family office suite. Asseta unifies accounting, banking, and investment operations for single and multi-family offices, with $70B+ in assets on platform.