Family office fees are what a family pays to have its wealth and its paperwork managed. With a multi-family office, that is a charge from the firm, usually a percentage of assets. With a single-family office, it is the operating budget of the family's own team. Published benchmarks put both at roughly 30 to 120 basis points of assets a year.
On the accounting side, the cost depends mostly on structure: how many entities the family owns and how often money moves between them. A family with 40 entities pays more for its books than a family with the same wealth in two accounts.
Family office costs at a glance
Model | How it charges | Typical cost | Typical client |
Multi-family office | Share of assets under management, flat retainer, or a mix | About 40 to 70 basis points of assets a year | Net worth from roughly $30M, up to families worth billions |
Single-family office | The family funds the whole budget | About 30 to 120 basis points of assets a year, or about 100 at $100M | Net worth of $100M or more |
Outsourced family office | Separate providers, each billing for its own service | About 20 to 125 basis points of assets | Net worth from roughly $10M |
Accounting layer (inside any model) | Staff time plus software, often priced per entity | Grows with entity count | Every family office with more than one entity |
Ranges from NerdWallet, Creative Planning, and J.P. Morgan.
How multi-family offices charge
A multi-family office runs one team for several families and charges each family for the work. Families can start with less wealth than a single-family office needs, often from about $30 million of net worth, and some multi-family offices also serve families worth billions. Creative Planning lists five pricing structures: asset-based, fixed annual, performance-based, hourly or per service, and hybrids that combine them.
What the fee buys depends on the firm. A multi-family office that started as an RIA leads with investments and prices like an advisor. A family office practice inside a CPA firm leads with accounting and tax work and often bills per service. Some firms cover full wealth management, and some only produce reports.
Asset-based pricing
Most multi-family offices quote a percentage of assets under management. NerdWallet puts the usual range at 40 to 70 basis points a year, or $200,000 to $350,000 for a family with $50 million. Firms that bundle wealth management and reporting tend to price this way.
The fee goes up as the portfolio grows, whether or not the workload changes. Some firms also add investment management fees on top.
Flat or retainer pricing
More multi-family offices now charge a flat annual retainer. We hear the reason often: families don't want to pay a share of assets for work that stays the same size.
A retainer fixes the annual cost. Projects such as an estate restructuring are usually billed separately, by the hour or by the project.
Performance-based fees
Some firms add a fee tied to returns above a benchmark. Few multi-family offices use them, since they reward the firm for taking more investment risk than the family may want.
What the fee usually covers
Investment management: asset allocation, manager selection, and oversight of private equity and other alternatives.
Wealth management and planning: estate planning, tax planning, and succession planning.
Family governance: family meetings, education for the next generation, and rules for how family members make decisions.
Risk management: insurance reviews, cybersecurity, and privacy protection for family members.
Accounting and reporting: bookkeeping, bill pay, and statements for every entity the family owns.
Ask which of these the quote includes. Bookkeeping for a long list of trusts and LLCs often sits outside the base fee, and some families buy accounting from one firm and wealth management from another.
What a single-family office costs to run
A single-family office has no fee in the usual sense. The family pays the office's operating costs directly, so the annual budget is the cost.
Creative Planning puts the cost at about 30 to 120 basis points of assets a year, starting at around $1 million for a lean office. For a family with $100 million, that lean office costs about 100 basis points. J.P. Morgan's 2024 Global Family Office Report puts the average budget at about $3.2 million a year, and about $6.1 million for offices managing more than $1 billion.
Staff
Staff is the biggest line in the budget, according to J.P. Morgan's report. A small office needs at least a CFO or controller, an accountant, and someone to run investments. Larger offices add a person for governance and family relations.
In our experience, the timeline is harder to get right than the budget. Hiring and getting processes to work usually take longer than families plan for.
Technology
Most offices build their technology stack on a general ledger for the books of each entity, an investment reporting tool such as Addepar, and a bill pay platform such as Bill.com. Many now connect AI tools to that data as well.
Software is a small share of the budget, but it changes how staff spend their time. A ledger that can't handle multiple entities adds hours of spreadsheet work every month.
Legal, tax, and compliance
Outside counsel and a CPA firm handle trust documents, entity formation, tax planning, returns, and compliance. Each new trust or partnership comes with its own documents and its own return, so these bills grow with the entity count.
Office space and security
Rent, insurance, and cybersecurity make up the rest of the operating costs. Some offices share space with the family's operating business, and some run fully remote. Larger offices add a formal risk management function.
Why structure drives family office fees more than assets
On the accounting side, family office fees follow the structure of the wealth more closely than its size. We work with billion-dollar families whose books are simple, and with $100 million families whose partnerships, co-investments, and loans between entities add real complexity to the books.
SumIt's data, from the family offices that keep their books on our platform, shows the same pattern:
Entity counts vary widely: the median office on SumIt keeps books for 10 entities, and the largest runs 224.
Assets say little about complexity: among clients that report assets, AUM explains only 10% to 15% of the variation in entity count.
Teams stay small: the median office has between 3.5 and 7 users in every asset band, from under $50M to over $1B. Offices with 1 or 2 entities average 5.6 users, and offices with 41 or more average 7.8.
A team of five or six people may run 10 entities or 200. The workload grows with the activity between entities. One trust lends to another, an LLC pays a bill that belongs to a partnership, and someone has to record both sides.
When QuickBooks stops working
We see the tipping point at 5 to 10 entities. In QuickBooks, 10 entities means 10 company files and 10 logins, with the combined picture rebuilt by hand each month. Past that point the team spends most of its time reconciling, and accounting takes a bigger share of the family office budget.
What automation changes
SumIt is a general ledger built for multi-entity family offices. Every entity sits under one login, and an intercompany entry books both sides at once.
In SumIt's data, about 97% of inter-entity journal entries at our multi-entity clients in the 12 months to September 2026 were created by the system from bank-feed transfers and bill payments. Under 3% were typed by hand.
Single-family office vs multi-family office: where the costs cross
A single-family office makes financial sense once its fixed budget is lower than what a multi-family office would charge. At 50 basis points a year, a family with $200 million in investable assets would pay about $1 million to a multi-family office, close to the low end of a single-family office budget. Raffles Corporate Services puts the same break-even point for Singapore at roughly S$200 million.
Some families set up their own office before the numbers line up, for privacy, or to put governance in place across several generations. In SumIt's client data, about 1 in 5 offices that report assets manage more than $1 billion. Our guide on family office minimum net worth covers the thresholds for each model.
How to budget for the family office accounting layer
Build the accounting budget from the list of entities the family owns.
Count your entities
List every trust, LLC, partnership, holding company, and individual that needs its own books, including real estate entities and deal-by-deal investment vehicles.
Ask how the software is priced
Family office accounting software usually combines an annual license with a charge per entity. Ask each vendor how the price changes as you add entities, integrations, and migration work.
Check what the price includes
Ask whether data migration, integrations, and support are part of the base price. Our onboarding app maps your existing chart of accounts and cleans the imported data, and our team handles the conversion with you.
Keep access to your data
Make sure you can export every transaction across every entity. SumIt exports all transactions to a single file, and the MCP connector lets your team query the books from Claude or ChatGPT.
Frequently asked questions
What are typical family office fees?
Multi-family offices usually charge 40 to 70 basis points of assets a year, or a flat retainer. A single-family office usually costs 30 to 120 basis points of assets a year, and J.P. Morgan puts the average budget at about $3.2 million.
Are performance-based fees common?
They are rare. Firms that use them usually add them on top of an asset-based charge, and many multi-family offices avoid them because they link the firm's pay to investment risk.
Why do two families with the same net worth pay different amounts?
The two families have different structures. A family with 40 entities, several trusts, and loans between entities needs much more accounting and legal work than a family holding the same wealth in two accounts.
What makes family office costs go up over time?
New entities, new generations, and private investments held in their own vehicles. Each one adds books, tax returns, and governance work for the office.
If your accounting costs go up with every new entity, schedule a demo and bring your entity list. We'll show you how SumIt handles it for a single-family office or a multi-family office.
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