What Is My RIA Worth? How Valuation Actually Works in 2026

Start with the number buyers actually use. It is not a percentage of AUM, which is shorthand traded at conferences, and it is not revenue. It is adjusted EBITDA: your earnings after a market-rate salary for the work you personally do. Founders who pay themselves nothing and take distributions, or pay themselves everything and show no profit, both get adjusted to the same baseline. That adjustment is often the single largest swing in a valuation, and it happens before any multiple is discussed.

Then the multiple. At the end of 2025, an RIA M&A attorney quoted platform buyers offering 9 to 16 times EBITDA, a range wide enough to be nearly useless as a benchmark on its own.¹ What decides where a specific firm sits is unglamorous: how much revenue recurs, how many clients leave each year, how fast the firm grows without acquisitions, what the margin looks like after the salary adjustment, and how much of the business would survive six months of the founder being unavailable.

That last variable is the one founders underprice. A firm where the founder holds the top thirty relationships personally is worth materially less than an identical firm where three advisors do, because the buyer is underwriting revenue that stays after you stop. Concentration cuts the same way: if a quarter of revenue sits with five households, that is a discount, not a rounding error.

Scale matters for a different reason than founders expect. The market has been busy at the top: Echelon Partners counted 466 announced wealth management transactions in 2025, up 27.3% over 2024, with a record 185 of those involving firms holding at least $1 billion in assets.² Larger firms attract more bidders, and more bidders raise price. A $300 million firm is priced on its own merits, not on the multiple its billion-dollar neighbor got.

Which brings up the harder truth about ranges. Two offers at the same multiple can leave you in different financial positions, because structure decides what the number means. Cash at close is certain. Rollover equity is a bet on the buyer. An earnout is a job with a bonus plan you did not write. A lower headline with more cash and cleaner governance often beats a higher one with three years of conditions attached.

What to do about it, in order. Get an independent valuation now, before anyone calls you, so the first number you ever see is not the first number a buyer offers. Refresh it every two years. Clean up the adjustments a buyer will make anyway: owner compensation, personal expenses in the P&L, related-party rent. And spread the client relationships, which raises your value and reduces your risk at the same time.

If a buyer gives you a multiple before seeing your financials, they are not valuing your firm. They are anchoring you.