Ask ten advisors what it takes to leave a wirehouse and you will hear ten different numbers, each delivered with confidence, none from a spreadsheet. The AUM threshold is the industry's most durable folklore: everyone has heard one, nobody can source one, and the figure moves every time an advisor gets close. Let's take the question apart the way you would actually have to answer it.
Why AUM is the wrong measurement.
There is no minimum AUM to go independent, because AUM was never the variable that decides it. It is a proxy for the question that matters: can your revenue support the business you want to run once you are the one paying its costs? Two advisors with the same book size can be in completely different positions.
Picture them. The first runs a fee-based practice, bills quarterly on assets that stay put, and serves clients who followed her from her last seat. The second produces the same top line in a good year, but it arrives in lumps, and his clients feel like the firm's. Same AUM, different answer.
Predictable beats large.
Going independent swaps a payout grid for a profit-and-loss statement. At the wirehouse, the firm covers the office, the technology, and compliance out of its share. On your own, those costs belong to you, and most are fixed. Rent does not care whether this quarter's revenue showed up. Neither does payroll.
You are not too small. You might just be under-informed about what your own practice can actually support.
That is why the shape of the revenue matters more than its size. Recurring, fee-based revenue behaves like a salary for the business — it makes fixed overhead safe to carry. A smaller, steadier practice can often move more comfortably than a bigger, lumpier book.
What is actually yours to move.
The more useful version of the question is: how much of your book is genuinely yours to move? That turns on loyalty and rules, not size. The clients who call you when a parent dies or a business sale closes are yours in every way that matters. The clients who came for the name on the building may not be.
Then the rules. If both your firm and your destination are Broker Protocol signatories, the Protocol permits five pieces of information for clients you personally served: name, address, phone, email, and account title. Membership shifts — several large firms withdrew around 2017 and 2018 — so it depends on both ends of the move.
The models that change the math.
The folklore threshold quietly assumes one model: a solo advisor standing up a full RIA and buying every piece of infrastructure at retail. That version carries the highest fixed costs. But as the support level rises, the revenue a breakaway requires falls:
- A full solo RIA — you build and pay for everything, so it demands the most revenue.
- Supported independence — a platform provides technology, compliance, and back office for a share of revenue, spreading fixed costs across practices.
- A tuck-in or independent broker-dealer channel — the firm has already built the infrastructure, so the revenue required is lower still.
Run the numbers instead of guessing them.
It helps to know how ordinary the move has become. Fidelity's Advisor Movement Study, using 2023 data, found more than half of advisors had considered switching firms within a five-year window, and roughly one in four actually moved. Most set the bar higher than their practice requires — the number in their head was built out of caution, not calculation. Some do need more runway, and running the numbers tells you that too.