Where Edward Jones Advisors Actually Go When They Leave

Every conversation about leaving Edward Jones eventually arrives at the same question: where would I even go? The trade press answers it with anecdotes, one team at a time. Registration data answers it with a distribution, and the distribution is lopsided enough to be the whole story.

This is the destination picture for the first half of 2026, drawn from the registered-rep movement data prepared for The State of Financial Advisor Movement and corroborated by the publicly reported moves in our Edward Jones tracker.

The H1 2026 ledger

Start with the raw movement. In the first half of 2026, 387 producing advisors joined Edward Jones and 327 departed, a net gain of 60. Of the departures, 28 were direct breakaways, meaning the advisor left the employee channel entirely and re-registered at an independent RIA in a single step.

A net gain sounds like health, and on headcount it is. The firm's own filings add a number worth reading closely: the accrual for future Retirement Transition Plan payments rose from $150M to $228M in a single year. The firm is backfilling seats faster than it is losing them.

Where the 265 actually went

By the end of June, 265 of the 327 H1 leavers had re-registered somewhere. Their destinations, by channel:

• 54% chose an independent broker-dealer, led by LPL Financial, Raymond James Financial Services, and Ameriprise.
• 15.5% went directly to an independent RIA, the full break in one step.
• Roughly 7 in 10, combined, landed in an independent channel of one kind or another.
• 7.5% went to a wirehouse. The channel that dominates recruiting headlines barely appears in the Jones destination table.

The remainder scattered across regionals, banks, and insurance-affiliated broker-dealers, none at a share worth a headline.

The publicly reported team moves we log daily tell the same story from a different vantage. Among tracked Edward Jones team departures through August 2026, Raymond James appears most often as the destination, followed by LPL and Ameriprise, with the rest landing at boutique independent firms most advisors have never heard of until the week they join one. Press-reported moves skew toward larger teams, which is exactly why the two lenses agreeing matters: the big departures and the broad base are choosing the same direction.

Why independence, and almost never a wirehouse

The pattern looks surprising only from outside the Jones model. From inside it, the destination table is close to inevitable.

A Jones advisor already runs a standalone office. They built their book in their own local market, often door by door, without a branch full of partners or a bullpen of specialists down the hall. Operationally, they have been practicing for independence for their entire career. What the model withholds is everything ownership means: the book belongs to the firm, the economics sit below market for a mature practice, and at the end of the road the practice cannot be sold, only surrendered back through the firm's own program. We covered the structural version of this argument in Why Advisors Outgrow Edward Jones, and the destination data is that argument expressed as behavior.

A wirehouse solves none of that. It trades one employer for a larger one, adds a floor of colleagues the Jones advisor never had or wanted, and keeps the book on someone else's paper. So the 7.5% wirehouse share is not an anomaly. It is the revealed preference of advisors whose daily work already resembles practice ownership choosing the channels that finally grant it.

The independent broker-dealer share leading the table, rather than the pure RIA share, is the other telling detail. An IBD offers the halfway house: independence with rails, a headline payout in the 85 to 95 percent range rather than 36 to 40 (in the deals we work on, that headline nets in the 80s after the broker-dealer's own charges, before the practice pays for its office and staff, and where a practice lands depends on the advisor and the book), and a practice that can be sold, without taking on full RIA infrastructure on day one. For a single-FA practice, that is frequently the rational first step, and the largest independent broker-dealers have built the industry's biggest receiving docks for exactly this advisor.

The economics underneath the choice

The destination decision is ultimately a valuation decision, and the two paths price very differently. Inside the model, the Retirement Transition Plan is the only monetization path, paying a published band of 170% to 300%+ of transitioned revenue for $1M+ producers, structured as years of continued employment plus a non-compete, with no asset changing hands. Outside it, practices under a broker-dealer umbrella trade at roughly 1.5x to 3x recurring revenue, with successor choice and capital-gains treatment, and the open-market comparison only sharpens from there.

That arithmetic, priced from the firm's own documents against the open market, is worked through line by line in The Edward Jones Movement Report, the six-page brief we built for Jones advisors specifically.

What a Jones advisor should take from the table

The destination data is not an instruction. Plenty of advisors thrive inside the model for a full career, and a net gain of 60 means the model still recruits successfully. What the table offers is calibration: when 7 in 10 of those who left and re-registered chose independence, and the leading destinations have processed thousands of these exact transitions, the path is not exotic. It is a well-paved road with known economics, known timelines, and known pitfalls, particularly around the firm's agreements, which reward professional preparation more than most.

Every number here depends on the advisor and the book. The specific answer comes from a confidential conversation: the best deal we can win for your practice through our relationships and our record of past deals, and how culture, technology, support and service compare at the firms that fit. Request an introduction.

The full firm-by-firm and channel-by-channel picture, including how Edward Jones movement compares to every other major firm's, is in The State of Financial Advisor Movement. The running log of who left and where they landed updates daily in the Edward Jones Knowledge Center.

The nine-month running count, updated through September 2026, is in how many advisors have left Edward Jones in 2026.

One advisor's account of that path: Josh Colwell's move from Edward Jones to Raymond James, where he founded CoWealth Advisors in 2021 and built it from $150 million to more than $600 million in assets under management.