Is the Move to the RIA Channel Slowing Down?

The story this year has been that independence is cooling. The data says something more precise, and more useful. RIA growth has not slowed. The flow of advisors out of the wirehouse model has. Those are two different things, and the industry keeps treating them as one.

For three years the headline wrote itself. Advisors were leaving the wirehouses in waves, the registered investment advisor channel was absorbing the industry, and the only real question was how fast. In 2026 the tone has shifted. The waves look smaller. The conclusion many have drawn from that, that the move to independence is losing steam, is the wrong one.

The structural growth of the independent channel has not decelerated. What has decelerated is attrition at the source firms. The advisors who were always going to leave the wirehouse have largely left. The ones who remain are a more deliberate, better informed population, and they are sorting themselves carefully rather than rushing the door. Most of the movement that still makes news reflects sorting, not slowing.

Is RIA channel growth actually slowing?

No. By every structural measure, the independent channel remains the center of gravity in wealth management.

Independent and hybrid RIAs have grown assets under management over the past decade at annualized rates of 10.9% and 12.2%. Their combined share of industry assets rose from 21% in 2014 to 27% in 2024, and Cerulli projects the channel will pass 30% of all industry assets within five years. That is not the profile of a fading trend. That is compounding.

Movement data tells the same story. In 2025, an estimated 25,443 advisors managing $3.06 trillion in client assets changed firms through recruiting and M&A. That represents 8.8% of the industry's advisors and 8.5% of its assets repricing their affiliation in a single year. An 8.8% annual movement rate does not describe a market in retreat. It describes a market in motion, and the direction of that motion still runs toward independence.

Preference data closes the loop. Seventy-one percent of advisors say they would choose an independent channel if they were to switch firms. Eighty-eight percent of independent RIAs say they are very likely to remain with their current firm over the next twelve months, and among independent RIAs who would consider a move, 97% would go to another independent RIA. The channel is not only attracting advisors. It is keeping them.

This is the part of the market that has not changed. The demand for ownership, enterprise value, and structural autonomy is fully intact.

So what has actually changed?

The deceleration is at the source, not the destination.

Wirehouses lost just 1,864 advisors to other channels in 2025, down from 3,501 in 2021. That is close to a 47% decline in outbound attrition in four years. The pipeline of advisors leaving the W2 model for independence has thinned considerably.

The second half of the picture explains why the headlines feel contradictory. Roughly 60% of the advisors and 58% of the assets that moved in 2025 stayed within the same channel. Only 39% of advisors and 42% of assets crossed channel lines at all. Lateral moves now dominate. An advisor changing firms in 2026 is more likely to be moving sideways than breaking away.

The conclusion is straightforward. The easy breakaway decisions have already been made. The advisors still inside the wirehouses are not the population that left five years ago, and they are not behaving like it.

Why are W2 advisors staying?

Five forces are holding the remaining wirehouse population in place. None of them suggests independence has lost its appeal. All of them suggest the decision has become more considered.

The wirehouses finally reset compensation

The 2026 pay cycle was the most advisor-friendly in years, and it was a direct response to the prior wave of departures.

UBS rewrote its plan after a 2025 in which more than 50 teams managing close to $52 billion in assets left the firm. The new plan raised payouts for advisors producing between $1 million and $3 million in revenue, and introduced a 60% compensation rate for advisors generating $20 million or more, the highest headline payout in the industry. Morgan Stanley cut its deferral rates roughly in half, shifting more pay into advisors' pockets each month. Merrill held its core grid flat, a meaningful signal after years of stretches, even as it trimmed payouts on its smallest households. Wells Fargo left its grid unchanged for a fifth consecutive year and layered on recurring trail payouts on banking balances along with enhanced credits on annuity business.

After years of grid stretches and lending-linked incentives that frustrated advisors, the largest firms have made consistency itself a retention tool. The payout arbitrage that once made leaving an easy financial decision is now markedly narrower.

Demographics changed the risk calculus

The advisor population is older than the breakaway narrative assumes.

The average advisor in the United States is 46.7 years old, and 14.4% of advisors are over 60. According to J.D. Power's 2025 study, 46% of advisors plan to retire within ten years and 26% are already 65 or older. Advisors aged 55 and older account for 42% of head count but 57% of assets.

Age changes the arithmetic. For a 58-year-old advisor with a seven-year horizon, a multi-year transition arc plus the operating learning curve of running an enterprise is a very different proposition than it was at 48. Independence rewards a long runway. The advisors most likely to still be weighing a move are precisely the ones with the least runway left to amortize the lift.

Succession math favors staying

Succession is the quiet anchor.

Within the next decade, roughly 37% of financial advisors, representing about 40% of industry assets, are expected to retire. Yet only 42% of firms have a written succession plan, the lowest level since tracking began in 2019, and among advisors nearing retirement only about 6% have a fully documented plan. The gap between the retirement wave and the planning for it is enormous.

For a senior wirehouse advisor in a sunset or book-acquisition program, the firm's structured exit solves a problem most independents have not solved for themselves. Internal valuations, internal continuity, and an internal next generation to absorb the book have become genuine competitive features at the large firms, not merely retention levers. The advisor who stays inherits a succession solution. The advisor who leaves has to build one.

Technology and research quietly caught up

The platform-inferiority argument that powered breakaway moves five years ago no longer lands as cleanly.

At Morgan Stanley, more than 98% of advisor teams now use the firm's internal AI assistant, and advisor access to the firm's proprietary documents has climbed from 20% to 80%. The firm's wealth head has pointed to more than 3,500 tools and capabilities on the platform, including a growing set for tax planning. The institutional stack has quietly become a reason to stay, not only a constraint to leave.

The other side of that trade has gotten harder. Deloitte's 2026 Investment Management Outlook makes the point directly: building competitive research capability outside a large firm has become close to prohibitively expensive. Matching institutional research now requires expertise spanning data science, AI tooling, and asset-class depth, which is not a realistic single hire. The moat advisors once left is, for some, becoming a moat they evaluate staying behind.

A credible third path now exists

The most underappreciated shift is that high-quality W2 alternatives are absorbing demand that once flowed straight into independence.

Raymond James disclosed for the first time that it spent just over $390 million in 2025 on recruiting and retention, bringing in advisors who generated about $460 million annually at their prior firms. In the first three months of 2026, its net new assets surged 160% year over year to $23 billion, and it added advisors carrying $21 billion in prior client assets and $141 million in annual revenue in a single quarter. Satisfaction data reinforces the trend. In J.D. Power's 2025 study, Stifel ranked highest among employee advisors for the third consecutive year at 819 out of 1,000, with Edward Jones at 729 and Raymond James at 722.

Firms like these now offer wirehouse teams a culture reset and competitive economics without the operating lift of building a standalone RIA. The choice is no longer binary. The W2 alternative to the W2 incumbent has become a credible third path, and it is recruiting hard.

What does this mean for an advisor weighing a move?

The remaining wirehouse population is not one group. It is three, and they are moving in different directions.

The first is older advisors with shorter runways, for whom the operating lift of independence no longer pencils against retirement timing. They are increasingly choosing internal sunset structures over external builds, and the firms have engineered those structures specifically to keep them.

The second is mid-career producers at firms that have finally invested in pay and platform. For them the payout gap is narrower, the technology gap is narrower, and the decision is genuinely closer than it was three years ago. These advisors are not staying out of inertia. They are staying because the math changed.

The third is the lateral mover, the advisor who wants change without rebuild risk. Regionals and boutiques are competing hard for this advisor on both economics and culture, and they are winning a growing share of the movement that does occur.

What has not diminished is the demand for genuine independence among advisors who want long-term enterprise value and full control. That demand simply looks different now. It is more selective, more sophisticated, and more concentrated among advisors who have done the work to understand which path actually fits their book, their stage, and their goals.

The market is maturing, not cooling

The era of advisors leaving for the brochure has ended. The era of advisors leaving for the right structural fit is intensifying.

That is a healthier market. It raises the bar for what independence has to offer to win the next breakaway, and it raises the bar for what the wirehouses must deliver to keep the advisors they have. The constant in both directions is the same. Advisors who evaluate every option privately and rigorously reach better outcomes than advisors who default to either path.

The question for 2026 is not whether the move to independence is slowing. It is whether a given advisor has the runway, the structure, and the clarity to make independence pay. For the right advisor, the case has never been stronger. For others, staying has quietly become a defensible decision for the first time in a decade. Knowing which advisor you are is the entire exercise.

This piece is editorial commentary and not transition guidance for any specific situation. Winthrop & Co. is happy to arrange a confidential conversation for advisors evaluating their next chapter.