What a Financial Adviser Actually Costs in the UK

This article is general information, not financial advice, and it is not a recommendation to use or not use an adviser. Charges vary widely between firms and change over time, so check current figures before relying on any of them.

Most people have no clear idea what financial advice costs, and the regulator has measured exactly that: the FCA's Financial Lives survey found 68% of UK adults would pay for advice if the costs were reasonable, while only 37% felt they understood what advice costs. The figures are not secret. They are just scattered across regulatory evaluations and fee surveys that nobody reads before their first meeting. Here they are in one place, with the sources named.

The Regulator's Own Figures

The most authoritative numbers come from the FCA itself. In its December 2020 evaluation of the Retail Distribution Review, it found average adviser charges of 2.4% of the amount invested for initial advice and 0.8% a year for ongoing advice. It then said something most fee conversations skip: those figures exclude the underlying product and portfolio charges, which averaged another 1.1% a year. Put together, the FCA's figure for the all-in annual cost of holistic advice was 1.9% a year.

One fairness note on that 1.9%: some of the 1.1% of product and platform charges inside it would be paid by a self-directed investor too, because funds and platforms charge whoever holds them. The part that is specific to being advised is the 0.8% a year, plus the 2.4% at the start.

Percentages Into Pounds

Percentages are slippery, so convert them. At the FCA's average ongoing charge of 0.8%, a £250,000 portfolio costs about £2,000 a year in adviser fees alone, and a £500,000 one about £4,000. Those are our sums on the regulator's percentage, not the regulator's own worked example. And because the fee is a percentage, it grows every year the portfolio does, whether or not the work that year grew with it. That is a fact about the charging model, not about any individual adviser, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before comparing quotes.

Hourly and Fixed Fees

Not all advice is charged as a percentage. Unbiased, whose fee page was updated on 26/06/2026 from research carried out in February 2026, quotes £100 to £350 an hour, £2,000 to £3,000 for initial advice on portfolios up to £100,000, and ongoing charges commonly between 0.5% and 1%. For the complex one-off jobs it quotes average fixed fees of around £8,550 for a defined benefit pension transfer, £6,700 for at-retirement advice on a £500,000 pot, and £8,995 for inheritance tax planning on a £1m estate.

Those last three numbers sound large until you set them against what a mistake on any of those decisions costs. That is the honest frame for fixed-fee advice: it is expensive the way a structural survey is expensive, priced against the size of the error it prevents.

Whether You Can Get Advice at All

For a lot of households the price is not the barrier. Access is. Research published by the lang cat in 2025 found just under two thirds of advice firms operate a minimum asset requirement, and among firms that name a specific figure the average was £276,000, with £100,000 the most common answer. Most firms will not flatly turn someone away, but a service designed around a quarter of a million pounds is not a service designed around a mortgage, two salaries and a childcare bill.

The scale of the gap is measured too. The FCA's Financial Lives survey, published in May 2025 from fieldwork to June 2024, found 8.6% of UK adults, about 4.6 million people, had taken regulated financial advice in the previous twelve months, while 29%, about 15.8 million, had not but may have needed support. In December 2025 the FCA put it plainly: around 23 million consumers are currently underserved by the markets for advice and guidance. Offered a hypothetical £100,000 windfall, 63% of adults said they would make the decision themselves with no advice or guidance at all, up from 52% in 2020.

When Paying Is Genuinely Worth It

On the right problems, advisers earn their money, and the people who pay them mostly agree: the same lang cat research found 93% of those who had paid for advice found it helpful. The right problems are the complex, irreversible, tax-heavy ones. A defined benefit pension transfer. Drawing an income from a large pot. Inheritance tax planning on a substantial estate. Anything where the sequence and the wrapper matter more than the arithmetic, because getting those wrong costs more than any fee.

Advisers also do something no software does. Vanguard's 2025 UK study of adviser value put behavioural coaching, which mostly means stopping people selling at the bottom, at up to 200 basis points, the largest single component of its estimate that good advice can add up to or more than three percentage points of net return. Read that figure carefully: Vanguard says it is three percentage points over an unspecified period, not per year, and Vanguard is a fund manager estimating the value of a channel that sells its funds. Even discounted heavily, the behavioural point stands. People are bad at holding their nerve, and a good adviser is worth paying to be the person who tells you to do nothing.

The Decisions That Are Not Investment Decisions

Here is the part the fee conversation usually misses. A great many household decisions are not investment decisions at all. Should we overpay the mortgage or build the savings. What does one of us dropping to four days do to the next five years. Can we afford the bigger house. When is this debt actually gone. Those are arithmetic and consequence, not product selection, and no rule says you need a personal recommendation to answer them.

If you are weighing paying for ongoing advice against running the numbers yourself, our self-directed alternative page sets the two side by side properly, including the regulatory line between information and advice, and the cases where the adviser is plainly the right call.

And if the real question is what order to do things in, the UK personal finance flowchart is the free community answer: the order to work through the decisions in, before you pay anyone to tell you the order.

For free, impartial guidance backed by government, MoneyHelper is the right place to start, and the FCA Financial Services Register is where to check that anyone calling themselves an adviser actually is one.