How Much Does a Typical Financial Advisor Charge?

If you are looking for a financial advisor, understanding their true cost is essential to protecting your long-term wealth. Many investors want to know: what are the average fees at major wealth management firms like Edward Jones, Ameriprise, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, or Merrill Lynch?¹

To begin with, it is important to understand that many financial professionals at traditional brokerage firms do not operate under a continuous, unconditional fiduciary duty across all your accounts. Instead, they may be dual-registered as investment advisors and brokers. This means they are often compensated not just through a standard advisory fee, but can also receive additional commissions for placing clients into specific, proprietary financial products.

1. Assets Under Management (AUM) fees

Advisory fees typically start at 1.00% of assets annually, but that is rarely where they end. Wealth management fees are often tiered. While clients with multi-million dollar portfolios might get a slightly lower percentage, accounts with under $1 million are commonly charged 1% or more annually.² This base fee is usually in addition to several internal investment costs listed below.

2. Mutual fund revenue sharing costs

Mutual funds and other financial products utilized by high-fee financial advisors often carry substantial, ongoing internal management expenses (expense ratios). Some of these costs include revenue sharing, where product providers pay the brokerage firm to be featured on their platform. These hidden layers of fees directly subtract from your portfolio's performance. For a deeper dive into this practice, read our guide: "What is Mutual Fund Revenue Sharing?"

3. Front-end commissions and load fees

When placing clients into annuity products or A-Share Mutual Funds, financial advisors can receive an upfront commission (often called a sales load) deducted immediately from your investment. Furthermore, these products typically carry high ongoing marketing and distribution fees (12b-1 fees) that the client pays through a higher annual expense ratio.

4. Hidden markups and markdowns

Clients at more traditional brokerage firms often pay a hidden commission or a markup/markdown fee every time they buy or sell individual bonds, CDs, stocks, Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs), Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), or preferred stock.

How does One Day In July stack up against other financial advisors?

Reducing investment fees is one of the most critical, controllable factors in your long-term financial success. If you want to see how much you are currently paying in hidden costs, we invite you to request a complimentary review of your investment account statement.

At One Day In July, we operate as low-fee financial advisors and are legally bound to put your financial interests first. We regularly help clients transition away from high-fee environments into low-cost, transparent portfolios.

1. "Merrill" is a registered trademark of Bank of America; "Ameriprise" is a registered trademark of Ameriprise Financial, Inc; "Wells Fargo" is a registered trademark of Wells Fargo & Company; "Edward Jones" is a registered trademark of Edward Jones Investments; "Morgan Stanley" is a registered trademark of Morgan Stanley. We believe these claims to be true based on publicly available information as of August 2026.
2. SEC Investor Bulletin. How Fees and Expenses Affect Your Investment Portfolio. https://www.sec.gov/investor/alerts/ib_fees_expenses.pdf