You've done the math at the end of a long year and wondered whether any of what you built is actually yours. The search-bar version is short — what is my book worth — and the answer satisfies nobody: it depends. The useful answer has two parts. What would a buyer pay for the revenue you produce? And do you hold title at all?
A book is valued as a multiple of its revenue.
Most simply, a buyer looks at what the book earns in a year and pays some figure based on that. Larger fee-based practices are sometimes priced on earnings or cash flow instead. Either way, someone is paying today for income they expect tomorrow. But the headline multiple is the least interesting part: two books with identical revenue can be worth very different amounts, and the difference lives in four places.
Four factors move the number up or down.
The levers are the quality of the revenue, who the clients are, how dependent the book is on you, and whether you own it at all.
- Recurring, fee-based revenue is valued very differently from transactional revenue: an advisory fee renews itself every quarter while a commission has to be re-earned from zero.
- A book concentrated in retirees drawing down shrinks on its own; a book still accumulating grows. Concentration in a few households is a discount.
- Transferability is the buyer's core worry — if every relationship runs through your cell number and your memory, that's flattering, and a discount.
You'll notice no specific multiples here. That's deliberate: the band is wide enough that any single number would mislead more readers than it helped. What an article can do is show you the levers.
Ownership is the question that comes first.
For many advisors at large firms, the answer stings: the book isn't theirs to value, because it belongs to the firm. You built the relationships and service them, but the client agreements sit with your employer — and you cannot sell or borrow against something you don't hold title to.
An employed advisor's book has enormous value to the firm and limited transferable value to the advisor — one is an asset you hold, the other is a salary you earn until you stop.
Even the information you may carry out is narrow. The Broker Protocol, created in 2004 by Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, and UBS, governs departures only when both firms are signatories, and permits exactly five items: name, address, phone, email, and account title. Membership shifts — so verify before acting, with a securities attorney.
The market still prices your revenue.
Here's the twist. Even when you cannot sell your book, the recruiting market prices your revenue through the forgivable loan. FINRA has described recruitment incentives amounting to as much as two to three times the prior year's commissions and fees, and its guidance walks through an illustrative nine-year note. The firm advances money upfront and forgives a slice each year you stay; leave early and the unforgiven balance generally comes due. That isn't a sale of your book — it's compensation for moving it, with strings attached.
Get the paperwork read before you plan around it.
The forgiven portion is generally treated as taxable compensation in the year of forgiveness, so a CPA who has read these notes is the right person to walk yours through. And if a senior partner mentions a sunset program, that's the moment to get the documents read by a specialist — before signatures, not after. Diamond Consultants counted 11,172 advisors changing firms in 2025, up 16.2 percent over 2024 — every one a price put on a book.