What does it really cost to run a family office your size?
Answer three sets of questions about the office, the portfolio and what the family keeps in-house. We return the annual cost of running it, by expense line, with the range we see in practice.
The family office
Asset allocation
Enter shares of AUM. Whatever you leave unallocated is treated as cash.
Scope of services
What the office does itself, and what it buys.
What does investing cost you?
The full analysis prices it on your portfolio: manager and fund fees, custody, trading and carried interest, under three return scenarios.
Where should we send it?
Required
On its way.
We will prepare the analysis on your answers and email it to you. Reply to that email and you reach a partner.
- 01We review your answers before anything is prepared.
- 02The cost of investing is worked out on your allocation, with three return scenarios.
- 03It arrives by email, alongside the operating estimate you have just run.
Where the figures come from.
Built from mandates, not surveys
The calculator is built on offices our partners have set up, reset and run alongside families over decades. Pay levels, provider fees and running costs as they are actually paid, in each of the countries listed.
Why a range?
Two families of identical size can differ by half again in cost, on decisions no model can see: seniority of the hires, the standard the principal expects, how much the office absorbs that nobody wrote down. The spread carries that.
An estimate, not a budget
Use it to test whether what you pay today is defensible, and to frame the conversation with your family office executives. What comes out is an estimate, not a budget. Our partners can build you one, and there is a button at the bottom of this page.
Questions we are asked
There is no single answer, which is the honest starting point. What an office costs depends on the services it runs, how senior its people are, what it keeps in-house against what it buys, and how complicated the portfolio is. That is why this calculator exists. Assets under management alone will not tell you, and a figure quoted on that basis alone is guesswork.
Yes and no, and it turns on what you mean by a family office. We have seen principals run a “lean” family office from as little as $50M: the principal does most of the work themselves and buys in what they have neither the skill nor the time for. Below that, a private bank is usually the better place to hold the wealth and to help manage it.
Below roughly $250M the fixed cost of a credible team is hard to justify against what it saves, unless the family has operating businesses, unusual complexity, or a reason of control that outweighs the arithmetic. Above $1B the question reverses: the risk is no longer cost but drift.
Yes, and that is what makes us different. The traditional annual family office report written by banks stops at the operating side. What the family pays to invest (manager fees, embedded fund costs, custody, trading, selection, carried interest) is often the larger number, and the one nobody puts in front of the principal. We price it in full. To see it on your own figures, run your estimate, then ask for the full analysis.
It comes from the offices themselves. Our partners have built family offices, reset them and run them from the inside rather than advising on them from outside, and the model carries what that costs in practice: what these offices pay their people, what they pay their providers, what the structure costs to keep standing, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. We do not publish the benchmarks, the ratios or the factors behind it. What we will do is walk you through your own result, line by line, and say where we think your office is over- or under-built.
We read them. We do not build on them. You are rarely told who answered: the sample is whoever agreed to fill in the questionnaire, which skews towards the offices that want to be seen. And an average taken across offices of different shapes says very little about yours, because what an office does drives its cost far more than how much it holds. We would rather work from offices we have seen from the inside.
An hour with a partner, on your figures.
We take on a small number of mandates each year. Tell us what you are looking at and we will tell you what we see, including what you may not want to hear.