Somewhere in your firm, someone answers for the growth rate. The trouble with the question in the title is that most firms cannot answer the question underneath it: how much of last year's growth was the firm's work, and how much was the market's. The benchmarking studies put the median in the mid single digits, and the longer series show it falling for most of a decade. Here are the numbers with their sources, the arithmetic that separates organic growth from market growth, and the four figures to track so you are never reconstructing your rate the week before a board meeting.
Median net organic growth in Schwab's 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study was 4.8% of assets for firms over $250M and 7.2% for smaller firms, and the top fifth of firms grew 12.9%. Treat 5% as par and anything sustained above 10% as top-performer territory. Most firms cannot quote their own number because market movement hides it, so the first step is separating the two.
- Median net organic growth was 4.8% for firms over $250M and 7.2% below that line in Schwab's 2026 study. Schwab's top-performing fifth grew 12.9%.
- Organic growth is net flows over beginning assets, with market movement and M&A taken out. A 12% AUM year can hide a 1% organic year.
- The longer series fall: DeVoe's figures went from 9% in 2017 to 4% in 2021, and Fidelity measured under 4% in 2022, down from 8.2% the year before.
- The fastest growers run referrals as a managed channel. Firms with documented referral plans saw 1.6x more new client assets, and under half of firms over $250M have one.
- Four monthly numbers are enough to instrument the rate, and three of them already sit in your custodian files and CRM.
What do the benchmarking studies actually show?
The most current large sample is Charles Schwab's 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study, fielded in early 2026 across 1,236 firms and covering 2025 performance. Median net organic growth was 4.8% of assets for firms managing more than $250M and 7.2% for firms below that line. Schwab's Top Performing Firms, the top 20% of its index, grew organically at 12.9%.
The gap between the headline number and the organic number is the point. The same study put median total AUM growth at 17% for 2025. For a typical larger firm, fewer than 5 of those 17 points were the firm's own doing. The rest was the market, and the market does not repeat on request.
| Cohort | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Firms under $250M in AUM | 9.2% | 7.2% |
| Firms over $250M in AUM | 5.0% | 4.8% |
| Top Performing Firms (Schwab's top 20%) | 12.5% | 12.9% |
Other studies land lower. Fidelity's 2023 RIA Benchmarking Study, covering 3,537 advisors at 245 firms, measured 2022 organic asset growth at 3.6% for firms over $1B and 3.2% for smaller firms, down from 8.2% across the industry in 2021. That is Fidelity's most recent edition with public organic growth medians, so read it as a floor from a harder year rather than today's figure. DeVoe & Company's series runs 9% in 2017, 7% in 2018, 4% in 2019, 3% in 2020 and 4% in 2021, and David DeVoe's own verdict was that the industry "should be growing faster than 3% or 4%." One Schwab report cited in WealthManagement.com's coverage of the 2026 study puts growth across RIAs and independent broker-dealers combined below 2%.
Put the sources together and the benchmark is plain. Around 5% net organic growth is par for an established firm. Sustained growth above 10% puts a firm with the top performers in any of these studies. Below 3%, distributions and departures offset most of what new business brings in, which is the condition the older DeVoe and Fidelity numbers describe.
How do you separate organic growth from market growth?
Organic growth is the change in a firm's assets from new, existing, and lost clients before investment performance is taken into account, and it excludes the growth from acquisitions, divestitures, and advisors joining or leaving.
Charles Schwab, RIA Benchmarking Study definition
As arithmetic: take every client asset flow across the year. Assets from new clients, additional assets from existing clients, minus distributions, withdrawals and departed households. Divide that net flow by assets at the start of the year. Market appreciation stays out of the numerator entirely, and anything that arrived by buying a firm or hiring a team with a book stays out too.
A worked example, with round numbers. A firm starts the year at $800M and ends at $896M, up 12%. The flows underneath: $18M arrived with new households, existing clients added $10M, and $20M left through withdrawals, required distributions and two departed households. Net flow is $8M. Organic growth is $8M over $800M, so 1%. The market supplied the other 11 points. On the surveys above, that firm is not growing at 12%. It is growing at 1%, against a median near 5.
That is also the honest board answer to "our AUM is up 12%." Report three numbers, not one: total AUM change, net organic growth, and the flow detail behind it, new client assets, existing client additions, and outflows, each on its own line. A board that sees the decomposition once will never accept the blended number again, and the growth conversation improves immediately, because the lever the firm controls finally has its own figure.
Why is organic growth falling across the industry?
The decade-long slide in the DeVoe and Fidelity series has structural causes. Client books are aging, so required distributions and retirement spending run against new contributions, and at many firms the outflow side now grows mechanically every year. Meanwhile the inflow side depends overwhelmingly on referrals: Cerulli's U.S. Advisor Metrics 2025 report attributes 54.2% of new clients to referrals from existing clients, friends and family, with centers of influence adding 13.9% more.
And that channel, at most firms, is not managed. There is no owner, no instrumentation and no record of the asks. It runs on personality, memory and luck, which worked when markets and demographics were generous and stops working when they are not. A firm that wants the rate to move has to work the inflow side deliberately, and the four places organic growth actually comes from all sit inside the book the firm already has.
What separates the fastest-growing firms?
They treat growth as an operated system rather than an outcome. The clearest signal in Schwab's data is documentation. In the 2026 study, firms with a documented client referral plan generated 1.6x more new client assets than firms without one, yet only 44% of firms over $250M have such a plan, and only 30% have a documented program for professional centers of influence. Firms with a written marketing plan, an ideal client persona and a stated value proposition gained 87% more new clients and 127% more new client assets in 2025, per the same study. Referral growth has been the industry's self-declared top priority every year since 2023. The plans that would make it real remain a minority position.
The gap the plans close is old and well measured. Research by Advisor Impact with Schwab Advisor Services and Texas Tech University, published in 2010, found 91% of clients saying they were comfortable referring their advisor while only 29% had done so in the previous year, and just 2% had referred because the advisor asked. Clients are willing. The asks are not happening, and nobody at the firm can see that they are not happening.
So the top performers' habits are unglamorous. Someone owns the organic growth number. The firm measures asks and openings, not just funded accounts. The referral plan is written down, reviewed and resourced like any other operating plan. That owner's job is the reason the Growth Office exists: one view of the whole engine, from the conversations where referral moments surface to the assets they eventually produce.
How do you instrument your own organic growth rate?
Four numbers, tracked monthly, are enough to run this. None of them require a new system of record.
- Beginning assets and net flows. Gross inflows and gross outflows, from custodian data. This alone gives you the organic growth rate, and most custodians can report it with modest effort.
- Flows by source. Each inflow tagged new client, existing client addition, or consolidation of held-away assets; each outflow tagged distribution, withdrawal or departure. The tags live in the CRM, and they are what turn a rate into a diagnosis.
- Introductions in motion. How many referral conversations are open, from first mention to funded account. This is the number that predicts next year's rate rather than reporting last year's.
- Openings versus asks. How many referral-ripe moments surfaced in client conversations, and how many an advisor acted on. The gap between those two is where the growth is, and it is the number almost no firm has.
The first two live in systems every firm already runs. The last two live in conversations, which is why they have historically gone unmeasured and why the channel runs on memory. That is the specific gap AmpUp for Wealth Management instruments: it reads across client conversations, surfaces the referral moments as they happen, and traces each ask through to the introduction and the assets, so the growth leader sees the engine rather than the anecdotes.
An honest note on what software can and cannot see. Flows, conversations the firm records, and the trail from ask to funded account are all measurable. The ask an advisor makes on the golf course is not, and some of the best ones happen there. Instrument the channel for the signal, not for surveillance of advisors, and accept that the measured number will slightly undercount the activity. It will still be the most useful growth figure the firm has. How RIAs track and measure referral activity goes deeper on the measurement itself.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good organic growth rate for a $1B RIA? The relevant Schwab cohort is firms over $250M, where median net organic growth was 4.8% in 2025. Fidelity's harder-year figure for $1B+ firms was 3.6% in 2022. For a firm that size, beating 5% beats the median, and sustained double digits would place it among Schwab's Top Performing Firms, which grew 12.9%.
Does M&A count as organic growth? No. Schwab's definition excludes acquisitions, divestitures and advisors joining or leaving with their books. A firm that grew 20% by buying a $150M practice had a big year, but not an organic one, and boards increasingly ask for the split.
How often should we measure it? Compute flows monthly and report the rate quarterly. An annual number arrives too late to manage: by the time a weak year is visible, the conversations that would have fixed it are twelve months gone. Monthly flow data also makes the year-end board reporting a formality instead of a reconstruction.
Is organic growth the same as net new assets? Net new assets is the dollar figure, net organic growth is that figure divided by beginning assets, expressed as a rate. One wrinkle to settle internally: whether consolidating a client's held-away assets counts. Schwab's definition counts flows from existing clients, so include it, and be consistent, because switching definitions between quarters makes the series meaningless.