Financial Advisor Exit Fees by Firm (2026): What Leaving Costs at 115 Firms

Guides › Switching Financial Advisors

Updated September 28, 2026. Quick answer: Across the 115 advisory firms and brokerages whose own published schedules we have read and priced page by page, 114 publish an exit figure and 1 publishes none. The median ceiling is $100.00 per account, the dearest published ceiling is $500.00 (Cambridge Investment Research) and 2 of the 114 publish nothing to pay at all. The number that surprises people: 63 of the 114 firms charge nothing of their own to leave. The bill comes from whoever holds the account, which is why 50 of these rows cite the same Charles Schwab line item and 18 the same Pershing one. Every figure below is the amount that firm or its named custodian publishes, with a link to our page for that firm.

Related guides on this topic: Do You Need a Financial Advisor for a $250,000 Inheritance?, Fee-Based Financial Advisor Near Me 2026 and Fee-Only Financial Advisor Near Me 2026.

What this roster counts, and what it does not

Each row reports what it costs to move the account out or close it, per account, taken from the firm’s own fee schedule or its named custodian’s own published schedule. It is a one-time charge, not an ongoing fee. Annual maintenance, custody and IRA service fees are deliberately excluded even where the same schedule prints them, because they are the cost of staying rather than the cost of leaving. Partial transfers are excluded for the same reason: they are usually cheaper or free and they are not the same transaction.

A range means the firm publishes more than one figure. The usual reason is that a retirement account costs more to close than a taxable one, or that the firm names several custodians and each publishes its own number. 64 of these firms charge no dollar of their own, so every dollar above $0.00 in their row comes from a custodian’s schedule: the floor is what the adviser charges and the ceiling is what the custodian charges. Where a schedule is silent we publish the silence rather than a zero, because a gap and a free transfer are not the same claim.

The firm usually is not the one charging you

63 of the 114 priced firms put an explicit $0.00 in their own Form ADV against terminating the advisory agreement, beyond a pro-rated refund of any prepaid fee. That is the genuinely reassuring part of leaving an adviser, and it is easy to miss because the cost that does land comes from the custodian, a separate company whose schedule you probably never read. So the question to ask is not what your adviser charges to fire them. It is who holds the account and what that firm charges for a full outgoing transfer. 50 of the rows below cite the same Charles Schwab line item and 18 the same Pershing one, which is why so many otherwise unrelated firms show an identical ceiling.

Two practical consequences. First, moving to a firm that reimburses transfer fees can make the charge disappear entirely, so ask the receiving firm before you ask the one you are leaving. Second, the fee is per account, not per household, so a couple with four registrations pays it four times. Our guide to switching financial advisors sets out the order to do things in, and the tax side of switching covers the part that can cost far more than any transfer fee.

How many firms sit at each exit cost

Every firm that publishes an exit figure, cheapest first

Where no figure is published

Before you pay any of this

Three things are worth doing in order. Transfer in kind rather than selling, because liquidating to cash can trigger a tax bill that dwarfs a $150 transfer fee; our list of investments that cannot transfer in kind covers the holdings where that is not an option. Export your cost basis and statements while you still have access. And confirm the advisory billing has actually stopped after the transfer settles, because the fee schedule and the billing system are two different systems and the second one does not always hear about the first.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from the named firm’s own published fee schedule, its Form ADV Part 2A brochure, or the published schedule of a custodian that firm’s brochure names, read for each firm individually. The per-firm page linked in each row carries that firm’s citation, the quoted line item and the document it came from. Schedules change without notice and firms publish on their own timetables, so the linked page is the place to check the date of the document behind any figure here. See also the financial advisor fee comparison for what these firms charge while you are still with them.

Methodology

This page is generated from the 115 linked pages themselves, so the roster and the pages cannot disagree: every figure was read out of the linked page’s own published table, a random sample was re-checked against the archived document that authored it, and every figure a page states in its own title was asserted to appear in the figures extracted from it. Counts, the median and the bands are computed at build time, never typed. Annual and partial-transfer charges are excluded by rule, and the exclusions are listed above rather than left implicit. We are not an investment adviser and this is not personalised advice; it is a reading of published schedules. See our Editorial Policy, Corrections, Affiliate Disclosure, and Disclaimer.