Guides › Switching Financial Advisors
Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: you open the account at the receiving firm and sign the transfer form there; the new firm pulls the account through ACATS. If your account was opened as a Lincoln Financial Advisors or Lincoln Financial Securities account, it now runs under Osaic FS: Osaic completed its acquisition of Lincoln’s wealth-management broker-dealers on May 6, 2024, and the old Lincoln-branded fee schedule no longer exists as an independent document. Osaic FS prices a non-retirement outgoing account transfer at $150, retirement-account termination at $125, and the annual IRA fee at $35. This page states only what the current, governing schedule publishes.
The published numbers
Every figure below comes from the Osaic FS Brokerage Fee Schedule for NFS Accounts, effective October 1, 2024: the current document that governs a former Lincoln Financial Securities account today, fetched directly from the firm’s own disclosure microsite.
| What it charges | Amount | How it is charged |
|---|---|---|
| Outgoing Account Transfer Fee (Non-Retirement Account) | $150.00 | Per transaction, includes an Osaic FS markup on the fee NFS itself charges |
| Account Termination (Retirement Account Fees table) | $125.00 | Per transaction |
| Traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, Educational Savings Accounts | $35.00 | Annual |
If you remember being a Lincoln Financial client, this is the schedule that now applies to you. Osaic’s own press materials and industry coverage confirm Lincoln Financial Advisors Corporation and Lincoln Financial Securities Corporation ceased to exist as independent broker-dealers on May 6, 2024, rebranded Osaic FA and Osaic FS. The old Lincoln-branded fee-disclosure PDF now returns a server error on lincolnfinancial’s own site, and its last archived snapshot predates the merger by nearly a decade: too stale to cite. The document quoted above is dated after the merger and explicitly named “Osaic FS,” the direct successor entity, so it is the number that actually governs a former Lincoln account today.
The document does not itemize a separate “partial transfer” fee distinct from the flat outgoing-transfer and account-termination figures shown.
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The sequence
1. Pull a current statement for every account, showing the exact registration, account numbers and complete holdings list. 2. Check the holdings for anything that will not move. Ask the receiving firm directly: “Can you hold every position on this statement?” Anything they cannot hold has to be sold, and in a taxable account that is a realised gain in the year you switch: the categories that commonly do not transfer. 3. Open the receiving account and sign the transfer form there. Under FINRA Rule 11870 the delivering firm then has one business day to validate and three business days after validation to complete. 4. Send a dated termination letter for the record, the generator writes it, and confirm in writing that billing has stopped.
Two things to get right
Cost basis. Under IRC §6045A the delivering broker must furnish a transfer statement carrying basis for covered securities within 15 days of the transfer. Keep your final statements anyway, and check the first statement at the new firm for positions showing a missing or zero basis. Retirement accounts move as a direct transfer, trustee to trustee, not as a distribution to you. Why that distinction matters. Budget $150 for the exit charge and leave the cash to cover it in the account rather than sweeping the balance to zero first. Whether the fee is worth paying at all is a question of what you are moving to: our benchmark of published adviser fee schedules puts the weighted median annual cost near $2,000 to $2,500 on $250,000: the benchmark. The general mechanics: switching financial advisors. To put the exit charge next to the fee you would stop paying, the switching advisors cost calculator returns the break-even in months.