Largest RIA Firms by AUM (2026 Ranking)

There are roughly 17,000 active SEC-registered investment advisors in the United States today. They range from solo practitioners managing a few million dollars in family money to firms that custody trillions on behalf of pension funds and sovereign wealth. This article focuses on the firms at the very top of that distribution: the largest RIAs by reported assets under management, drawn directly from current Form ADV filings.

The live ranking is maintained on the Largest RIAs by AUM leaderboard, which updates each month as new SEC bulk data is published. What follows is a snapshot taken in May 2026, with commentary on what the numbers actually mean.

How RIA size is measured

Form ADV Part 1A Item 5F is the canonical source for regulatory assets under management. Every SEC-registered firm files it. The number includes both discretionary AUM (the firm picks investments without case-by-case client sign-off) and non-discretionary AUM (the firm advises but the client decides). It excludes assets where the firm only provides occasional consulting without an ongoing advisory relationship.

AUM is a useful but incomplete proxy for size. Two firms with identical $5 billion in AUM can look very different in practice. One might have 30 employees serving 50 institutional clients with $100M-plus mandates. The other might have 200 employees serving 4,000 individual households with average accounts of $1.25 million. Both are accurate to call "$5B RIAs" but they're entirely different businesses.

For that reason, we publish the leaderboard with three columns alongside AUM: employee count (Item 5A), client count (Item 5F-2), and the firm's primary client base. Those let you read the ranking as scale rather than scale-times-headcount.

The very top tier: above $1 trillion

A small handful of firms exceed $1 trillion in reported AUM. These are almost without exception institutional asset managers whose RIA registration is one of several regulatory hats they wear. Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity Management and Research, State Street Global Advisors, and similar names dominate this tier. Their AUM figures are accurate but they have very limited relevance to anyone shopping for personal wealth management.

If you exclude pure asset managers (firms whose primary business is running mutual funds, ETFs, or institutional separately managed accounts) and limit the ranking to firms that actively serve individual wealth clients, the picture changes dramatically. The top of that filtered list is dominated by the large national wealth platforms that have grown through acquisition over the past decade.

The wealth-platform tier: $100B–$1T

This tier is where the consumer-facing RIA industry actually lives. Firms here include:

• Edelman Financial Engines — built through the 2018 Hellman & Friedman acquisition of Financial Engines and the merger with Ric Edelman's practice. Hundreds of thousands of client households.
• Creative Planning — Peter Mallouk's Kansas-based firm that scaled aggressively through partner-firm acquisitions during the 2018–2023 RIA consolidation wave.
• Mariner Wealth Advisors — Marty Bicknell's roll-up vehicle, with offices in essentially every major U.S. wealth corridor.
• Fisher Investments — Ken Fisher's firm, distinctive for direct-response marketing and a highly templated investment process.
• Wealthsimple, Personal Capital, Betterment (where they operate as RIAs) — the digital-first wealth platforms.

Many of the names in this tier are products of the merger and acquisition activity tracked on our RIA M&A tracker. The pattern is consistent: a sponsor (PE or strategic) backs a platform CEO, who then acquires regional firms in exchange for cash, equity, and earn-outs. The platform absorbs the back office, keeps the local advisor team, and the rolled-up AUM accumulates on the parent's Form ADV.

The mid-major tier: $10B–$100B

This is where the most interesting variety lives. The mid-major tier includes specialists that have not pursued aggressive M&A:

• Family-office-style firms that serve a small number of ultra-high-net-worth households with bespoke service
• Institutional consultants whose AUM is in advisory mandates for pensions, foundations, and endowments
• Regional independents that have grown organically over decades by adding individual households
• Specialty firms focused on a single industry (medical, legal, tech executives) where deep domain expertise drives growth

A useful filter when researching this tier: look at the ratio of AUM to employee count, available on each firm's profile. The peer benchmark for fee-only wealth-management RIAs hovers around $100–150M per employee. Firms substantially above that ratio are usually institutional managers or platforms with heavy automation. Firms substantially below are usually high-touch boutiques where the per-employee work is more intensive.

What "largest" doesn't tell you

Three things AUM alone won't reveal, and that matter when you're evaluating a firm:

Whether the firm is the right fit for your situation. The largest firm in your state might be a $500B institutional manager that won't take a $2M household. The right firm for most individual investors is usually somewhere in the $250M to $5B range, where there's enough scale to invest in research and technology but enough focus to handle individual relationships properly.

How the AUM grew. A firm that grew from $400M to $2.5B over the past three years did so through some combination of (a) market returns on existing assets, (b) net new clients, or (c) M&A. The fastest-growing RIAs in the country are charted on our growth leaderboard and the breakdown matters. Acquisition-driven growth is real, but it can mean clients inheriting a new advisor without choosing them.

The compliance record. Every firm's Form ADV Item 11 lists regulatory and legal disclosures. Larger firms tend to have more total disclosures simply because they have more advisor representatives, more clients, and a longer history. The signal that matters is the disclosure rate per advisor, not the absolute count. You can see each firm's record directly on its profile page.

Browse the live data

The ranking above is a snapshot. The live, monthly-refreshed leaderboard is at /insights/largest-rias, with separate views for the fastest growers, newest entrants, and largest firms by state. Every firm name links to its public profile, where you can see ten years of AUM history, current advisor team, fees, services, and the full Form ADV record.

If you advise other professionals — accountants, attorneys, journalists, or institutional researchers — and you'd find a clean export of this data useful, the team behind Fingale would be happy to help. The directory exists to make the SEC's public filings easier to navigate.