Firm Churn
The share of a firm's advisors who left for another firm over the trailing 12 months - and which firms captured them. Look up any firm with 50 or more registered advisors and compare its churn against the industry pace. Competitive losses only: advisors who left the industry are not counted.
Start with a firm. Then test the rate against context.
Churn is a cohort measure, not a firm grade. Search first, compare the firm's starting roster with its competitive departures, then investigate where those registrations went.
Compare firm churn.
Search any tracked firm with 50 or more advisors at the window start. Read its rate, timing, and leading destinations, then compare up to four firms at once.
See the baseline before the outliers.
The industry pace and major-firm range provide context for an individual profile. These are registration-derived signals, not rankings of firm quality.
Highest churn - major firms
Lowest churn - major firms
Select any firm to open its full churn profile.
Who captures the leavers?
See which destinations captured the most competitive departures across all tracked firms.
Deeper cutInside multi-channel firmsCompare registration entities within the same operating family.Open analysis +
Several large firms run more than one registration entity - an employee channel and an independent channel, or a stable of acquired brands. Entities shown have 150+ advisors at the window start; churn counts advisors who left the family entirely, so internal channel switches are not churn. Firms that run every channel under one registration entity cannot be split in registration data. Select any entity for its full profile.
Full directoryChurn rate, by firmSortable detail for every ranked firm with 250+ advisors.Open table +
Every firm with 250 or more registered advisors at the window start. Select a firm for its full profile.
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MethodologySource, scope, and limitationsRead details +
- Trailing 12-month churn rate
- Of the advisors registered with a firm at the start of the trailing 12-month window, the share who are now registered with a different firm. It is a cohort measure: the denominator is the firm's headcount 12 months ago, and every leaver in the numerator was part of that starting group, so the rate can never exceed 100%. Example: a firm had 8,628 registered advisors at the window start and 531 of them are now registered elsewhere - a 6.2% churn rate.
- Advisors at window start
- The firm's registered-advisor headcount 12 months before the data date, reconstructed from each advisor's registration begin and end dates. This is the churn denominator. It counts investment-adviser representative (IAR) registrations, not producing advisors, assets, or revenue.
- Competitive churn, not total attrition
- Only advisors who show up at another firm count as churn. Advisors who retired or left the industry entirely disappear from the SEC's registration feed and are invisible at both ends of this calculation, so the figures here are losses to competitors specifically - typically the number a firm cares most about, and lower than total attrition.
- Capture rate
- Among the advisors who left a firm in this window, the share now registered with a given destination. A high capture rate means one competitor is absorbing a large slice of a firm's departures - a recruiting pipeline, not scattered attrition. Example: if 531 advisors left a firm and 166 are now at LPL Financial, LPL's capture rate on that firm is 31%.
- Operating-family rollup
- Brand variants and sister registrations are rolled up to their operating family before churn is computed - every Osaic entity counts as Osaic, every Raymond James entity as Raymond James. An advisor who moved between two entities of the same family is not churn; corporate re-registrations, mergers, and platform conversions inside a family do not inflate the rate.
- Channel view (multi-entity firms)
- Some large firms run several registration entities - an employee channel and an independent channel, or a stable of acquired brands. The channel view breaks those families apart: each entity's churn counts advisors who were registered with that entity at the window start and have since left the family entirely. An advisor who switched between two entities of the same family is not churn. Entities are shown when a family has two or more with 150+ advisors; firms that run everything under one registration entity cannot be split.
- Why a firm's numbers differ from the Advisor Flow Index
- The Flow Index counts moves that arrived during the window - each advisor once, at their most recent firm-to-firm change, whether or not they were at the firm a year ago. Churn counts members of the starting cohort who have since left. A firm's "lost" count there and its "left" count here will therefore differ somewhat; both are correct answers to slightly different questions.
- Smaller firms
- Rates are shown for every firm with 50 or more registered advisors at the window start, but below roughly 250 advisors a handful of departures can move the rate noticeably, so those figures are labeled as approximate. The ranked table covers firms with 250+; the leaderboards cover firms with 1,000+.
- This window / dataset
- A rolling trailing-12-month period ending at the data date shown above, refreshed daily from the SEC's public registration feed. The first and last months of the monthly departure chart are partial months.
- Directional
- These figures describe broad patterns in IAR registration data, not audited counts. They can include non-producing registrants such as home-office or supervisory staff, and they exclude advisors registered only as brokers. Use them to spot trends and questions worth exploring, not as a precise scorecard.
Continue exploring
Three useful next views of the same public SEC IAPD registration-change data.
The data shows the patterns. The decision is personal.™