How many clients can a single financial adviser handle?
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6 May 2026
by
Jessica Penny, Australian Financial Review
Article link:
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/how-many-clients-can-a-single-financial-adviser-handle-20260416-p5zokh
Dunbar’s theory suggests that a human has the emotional bandwidth for approximately 150 sustainable social relationships. Unfortunately, there’s no such magic number for financial advisers and their clients.
The average adviser was managing 112 ongoing clients in 2025, according to a survey of 512 respondents by CFS, marking a slight increase from 110 the year before. But they aspire to serve 152, provided their “business hurdles are overcome”.
Of these main pain points, 42 per cent of advisers find themselves or their client service teams operating at full capacity. They also cited inefficiencies in providing financial advice, with the time required to generate Statements of Advice and Records of Advice remaining one of the most common obstacles to serving more Australians.
Sue Viskovic, head of consulting at financial advice outsourcing business VBP, says there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how large an adviser’s client books should be. A number like 152 could feel like an unachievable, or equally, modest number of clients depending on the practice.
“If it’s more complex clients – there are multiple meetings and actions happening throughout the year – then that number will often be reduced,” Viskovic says. “There are quite a few different strategies that [advisers] are deploying, I think, to be able to increase that number.”
If a firm wants to get to the bottom of how they’re spending their time and where they can find more of it for front-facing work, Viskovic says some preliminary questions they should begin to ask include:
- How many hours a week do you work and how many of those hours are spent with clients?
- For every hour spent with a client, how much of that is ancillary or peripheral tasks?
- How many meetings do you conduct a week and how much downtime or allocated administrative time do you prefer between them?
- How regularly do you meet with most clients?
- Accounting for annual and sick leave, how many meetings does that leave with you with a year? What’s leftover?
“Sometimes that, in and of itself, surprises people. Because if they’re currently only managing four client meetings a week, and they think they’re busy, when I show them how you could be doing, you know, 12 to 15, often it requires a completely different approach to their workday,” she says.
Industry research firm Investment Trends says that, historically, compliance was the greatest challenge for advisers wanting to scale. “What’s changed now is that building efficiency into the business has overtaken compliance as the number one focus area for advice businesses,” Julian Cappe, head of research at Investment Trends, says.
For those who have an eye for clientele growth in 2026, these are some of the ways that advisers are streamlining how they do their work.
Staffing support
“High performing” advice firms, which VBP defines as delivering, among other things, annual revenue per adviser of $1 million and can keep pre-review prep for a simple client under 30 minutes, are found to have between 2.9 and 3.3 support staff per adviser, on average.
Viskovic explains this could include client service managers, para-planners, receptionists and HR professionals; anyone that can help spread the administrative load.
“It’s like a tipping point. If the business can’t afford to have additional support around them, then everything falls back to the adviser,” she says.
In crunching the numbers, a report from VBP earlier this year found that if an adviser can delegate six hours of administrative work a week, it would allow them to serve 35 to 40 more ongoing clients per year.
“Even small refinements compound - trimming 15 minutes from each review for 120 clients saves 30 hours annually per adviser,” the report says.
Automation and new technologies
Research house Adviser Ratings, in its 2025 annual report, found that 85 per cent of advice practices were actively pursuing growth last year. What holds them back is not a fear that their capability will implode at Dunbar-esque client number 151. Often, it’s legacy technology.
“You’ve got advisers who fundamentally are wedded to existing processes when you’ve been doing things the same way for 30 years,” Angus Woods, managing director of Adviser Ratings says. “It’s often what I’d call the more progressive firms, or progressive advisers, that are using the technologies in a much more efficient way.”
Adoption of AI is reshaping various aspects of advice operations, according to Adviser Ratings’ 2025 annual report. Out of those who do use it, 86 per cent are streamlining file notes and meeting documentation. Many are also applying AI as a client engagement tool for the likes of newsletters and marketing, along with statement-of-advice and record-of-advice production.
For instance, it takes about 15 hours, in total, to complete and deliver an SOA. Woods reckons nine of those hours are dedicated towards inefficient tasks like chasing missing client documents, manual data entry and navigating incomplete data sets. Efficient or value-add time involves client meetings, strategy development and compliance reviewing.
The most strategic users of AI, the research house found, can scrape eight whole hours off the process; time that can be redirected to new clients.
Woods says that it will be digital tools that will allow advisers to expand to serving over 200 complex clients every year – in fact, he says about one-fifth of all firms already are. But it’s due to a three-fold, common thread that they’re achieving this by.
“They’ve moved to model portfolios or managed accounts, so advisers aren’t rebuilding investment wheels for every client. They’ve embraced technology, including AI, to strip out the repetitive admin,” he says. “And they’ve invested in back-office capability so advisers’ time is spent where it matters. These are generally well-run businesses that have figured out how to scale quality advice.”
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