What Percentage of Clients Follow Their Advisor to a New Firm?

The short answer: High, but not automatic. Cerulli's 2025 transition research implies asset retention of roughly 78% for broker-dealer-to-broker-dealer moves, 82% for moves to independence, and 89% for independent-to-independent moves. Advisors in Fidelity's 2023 study of advisors who switched firms reported keeping an average of 80% of the clients they wanted to bring. The averages are comforting; the distribution is the real story. In Fidelity's 2016 client research, 62% of promoter-grade clients said they would follow, against 17% of detractors, which means your retention rate was largely written before you ever picked a destination.

Every advisor considering a move asks the same first question: will my clients come with me? The industry's honest answer is that the clients you actually want have already decided, and the research can tell you what they decided if you read it carefully.

What do the studies actually say?

Several bodies of research matter, and they measure different things.

Cerulli measures assets, by path. The 2025 Cerulli transition study found advisors typically lose about 22% of assets when moving between broker-dealers, about 18% when moving from a broker-dealer to an independent model, and only about 11% when moving from one independent firm to another. Two things stand out. First, even the worst path retains three-quarters of assets. Second, the independent-to-independent loss is half the broker-dealer-to-broker-dealer loss, which says something important about what kind of relationship survives a move. The release does not publish a sample size or say whether planned departures are counted; Cerulli's 2021 estimate, a 19% loss, was in addition to planned attrition.

Fidelity measures clients, against intent. In Fidelity's 2023 Advisor Movement Research Study, advisors who moved reported retaining an average of 80% of the clients they wanted to move with them. Read that phrasing twice. Advisors triage before they resign; small households, firm-attached relationships, and unprofitable accounts get deliberately left behind. Whole-book retention and target-list retention are different statistics, so it is worth asking which one a figure reports.

Client surveys measure the resistance. Broadridge asked investors directly in 2019 and got the sobering side: 47% of Gen X clients and 39% of Boomers said they would stay with their current firm even if their advisor left, and 47% of Gen X and 42% of Millennials said the firm's reputation weighed more than the advisor. Stated intent and realized behavior differ, and the gap is instructive: advisors self-select whom they invite, which is exactly why reported retention beats surveyed intent. The client side has a newer reading too: Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2025 found 62% of next-generation high-net-worth individuals said they would follow their advisor to a different firm.

Newer studies widen the range. Schwab's Supported Independence Study, fielded in March and April 2024 among 200 advisors, found the 42 recently independent advisors reported keeping 86% of the clients they sought to retain, while the 158 considering the move expected about 85%. The peer-reviewed estimate is lower: a study by Gurun, Stoffman and Yonker in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2021 estimated from registration filings that about 40% of client assets follow an adviser who changes firms, a figure measured across whole firms. These count different things: advisors' reports on the clients they targeted, clients' stated intent and assets measured across firms. The figures do not line up exactly; what they share is a range set by relationship strength, channel and preparation.

Our own placements sit at the strong end of the reported data. When Craig Haba and Ben Sherry moved their Boston practice from Northwestern Mutual to Raymond James, they retained 98.7% of their wealth management clients, a result you can read about on our testimonials page. Numbers like that come from preparation meeting a portable book.

Why do some clients follow and others stay?

Because retention is a weighted average of relationship strengths that already exist.

Relationship depth dominates everything. Fidelity's 2016 Millionaire Outlook research segmented clients by loyalty and found 62% of promoters said they would switch firms with their advisor, against 17% of detractors. Same industry, same product, a 45-point spread on the single variable of how the client feels about you. An advisor who wants to forecast retention should start by honestly sorting the book into those two columns.

The destination channel matters. The Cerulli path data implies clients follow most readily into independence and least readily between look-alike employee platforms. A move that gives clients a story, lower costs, fiduciary structure, more personal service, converts better than a move that looks like a payday. Schwab's research on newly independent advisors backs this: 60% reported their clients were immediately aligned with the move, and 74% said independence lets them build better long-term relationships.

Legal structure sets the tempo. Moves under the Broker Protocol allow immediate solicitation with basic client contact information. Non-protocol exits do not, and industry veterans have been blunt that firms withdrawing from the Protocol created an impediment that bakes legal cost into each move. Add enforced garden leave, designed precisely to interrupt client contact during the decisive window, and the paperwork can matter as much as the relationship. We cover the legal machinery separately in can my firm sue me for leaving.

Product portability decides the marginal client. Assets that transfer in kind move easily. Assets in proprietary funds, lending relationships, and banking entanglements create friction, tax consequences, and a reason for a wavering client to stay. This is also the quiet answer to who owns the book: whoever the client can follow without pain. That question has its own guide in do you actually own your book of business.

How fast does it happen?

Faster than the folklore says, and the speed is strategic.

The account transfers themselves take days. Since October 2025, DTCC says a full ACATS transfer can be processed in three to four business days once the new firm submits it, and how client accounts move when you change firms covers what moves, what clients sign and where transfers stall. The weeks go to outreach and paperwork, and the first 90 days after a move are where the outcome is decided. The documented extremes are striking: in one 2025 RIA transition covered by Financial Planning, more than half of a $400 million book was in motion within six days.

The operational lesson: retention is front-loaded. The clients who move in the first three weeks were won before resignation day, by years of relationship and weeks of lawful preparation. The clients still undecided at day 60 are being actively re-recruited by your former firm, which has your production history, your client list, and a retention team. Every day of drift favors the incumbent. The full sequencing, what you can prepare before resignation and what must wait, is laid out in our transition checklist and in how long a transition actually takes.

How do you engineer the number upward?

Four disciplines separate the 98% outcomes from the 75% ones.

Score the book before you decide anything. Rate every household on relationship depth, portability, and firm entanglement. The promoter-detractor spread is a forecasting tool: applied honestly, it tells you which twenty relationships need a plan as well as a phone call.

Pick the destination for the client story. The path data points one way: moves toward a model that changes the client's experience retain better than lateral trades. If you cannot explain in two sentences why the client wins, retention will tell you what the clients concluded.

Respect the legal choreography. Protocol status, non-solicit language, and garden-leave provisions determine what you may say and when. The advisors who lose clients in litigation-shaped moves are almost always the ones who improvised.

Execute the first 90 days like a campaign. The advisors who retain in the high 90s treat the window as the campaign it is: sequenced outreach, paperwork ready, every top household contacted lawfully within days.

Retention is the variable that decides whether a transition was a triumph or a haircut, and it is largely determined before resignation day. If you want an honest, house-by-house forecast of what your book would do, and a plan for the twenty relationships that will decide it, request an introduction. We have run this campaign many times, and the numbers above are why preparation is the strategy.

The averages are set by what happens in the window immediately after resignation. That window, phase by phase, is in the first 90 days after an advisor move.

Which of your own households sit at which end of that band is assessable now rather than on the day, and the sorting exercise is in what makes a book portable.