How to Price a Financial Planning or Broker Service in 2026

The fastest way to break a financial-services practice in Australia in 2026 is to price it like it is 2014. The Royal Commission, the LIF reforms, FASEA, the unwinding of grandfathered commissions, the rise of separately-charged advice fees, and the post-COVID acceleration of fee-for-service have all rewritten what a client will and will not pay — and what a planner or broker can sustainably charge to remain profitable. This piece walks through the pricing frameworks we see working across the LeadsNow.ai finance cohort: how fee-for-service compares to commission models, what each advice tier looks like in dollar terms, and the ongoing-review economics that decide whether a practice is profitable across a 5 to 10 year client lifecycle.

Why under-pricing financial advice is a structural problem

The Australian advice market is one of the few professional-services categories where the supplier consistently under-charges relative to the value delivered. The pattern is well-documented: an advice piece that produces $50,000 to $250,000+ of NPV for the client over a 10-year window is routinely priced at $3,500 to $5,500 in a one-off statement-of-advice fee, then a thin ongoing-review fee that barely covers the practice’s compliance overhead. Brokers face a similar mismatch in commercial and SMSF files where the gross commission is modest relative to the strategic uplift the client receives.

The under-pricing has two causes. First, the legacy of commission-only revenue, which made the headline fee invisible and trained both planners and clients to treat advice as “free”. Second, post-LIF anxiety that any meaningful fee will scare the client back to industry-fund default advice. Both are real. Neither is a reason to price below contribution-margin viability. Below are the frameworks we see working in 2026 across fee-for-service, hybrid, and commission-led practices.

Fee-for-service vs commission: a clean comparison

Fee-for-service

The dominant model for personal advice in 2026, particularly for HNW and pre-retirement clients. Fee-for-service strips the conflict-of-interest perception and lets the planner charge for advice complexity rather than product placement.

Typical fee structures observed in the network:

• Statement of advice (initial): $3,500 to $8,500 for personal advice, $8,000 to $22,000+ for complex SMSF, estate-planning or business-succession advice
• Ongoing advice / review: $3,300 to $7,200 per annum for personal review, $5,500 to $15,000+ for SMSF or HNW review packages
• Project-fee advice: $2,500 to $9,500 for one-off scoped pieces (insurance review, super consolidation, redundancy planning)

The maths inside fee-for-service is unforgiving. A $4,500 statement of advice with 14 to 22 hours of file work behind it (initial fact-find, research, paraplanning, presentation, implementation, compliance review) is producing a recovered hourly rate of $200 to $320 before practice overheads. Under-pricing the statement-of-advice fee is the single most common margin leak in modern Australian advice practices.

Commission-led (broker and risk insurance)

Still dominant in mortgage broking and risk insurance, where statutory fee-for-service models are either prohibited (mortgage broker remuneration is regulated) or commercially unworkable (risk insurance, post-LIF).

Typical commission structures in 2026:

• Residential mortgage: ~0.65% upfront, ~0.15 to 0.20% trail (band varies by lender)
• Commercial loan: 0.6 to 1.5% upfront depending on lender and structure
• Risk insurance: capped at 60% upfront, 20% trail per LIF
• SMSF establishment plus loan: a blend of upfront establishment fee ($1,800 to $4,500) plus the underlying broker commission

The maths inside commission models depends entirely on file mix. A residential-only broker with a $650,000 average loan settles at a $4,225 upfront commission, and is structurally locked out of charging much more without falling foul of best-interests-duty and remuneration regulations. The fix is not to push fees up; it is to expand into commercial and SMSF files where the commission per settled file is materially larger and the file-mix lift more than compensates.

Hybrid (fee-for-service plus product commission)

The most common model in 2026 advice practices that also write mortgage and risk insurance under separate authorisations. The planner charges a transparent advice fee for the strategic piece, then receives regulated commission on any implementation that involves a credit or insurance product. Disclosure is non-negotiable; the model is workable; client trust in the advice piece is typically higher because the fee is named and justified separately from any commission.

The advice-tier pricing framework

Across the network we see three working advice tiers that map cleanly to client complexity and willingness-to-pay. The framework below assumes a fee-for-service or hybrid model.

Tier 1: Personal advice (accumulation phase, $50k to $250k investable)

The volume tier. Mid-career professionals, dual-income households, first-time advice clients. Initial advice typically focuses on super consolidation, insurance review, debt optimisation and one or two strategic projects.

• Statement-of-advice fee: $3,500 to $5,500
• Ongoing review: $2,800 to $4,200 per annum
• Typical client tenure: 5 to 9 years
• LTV per client (initial + review + ad-hoc): $20,000 to $42,000
• Profitable cost per signed client ceiling at 25% of LTV: $5,000 to $10,500

Tier 2: Pre-retirement and SMSF ($250k to $1.5m investable)

The yield tier. 50 to 65 year-old clients with material super balances, often with an SMSF in play or considered, and a 5 to 15 year planning horizon to retirement. The advice piece is materially more complex; the fees follow.

• Statement-of-advice fee: $6,500 to $14,000
• Ongoing review: $5,500 to $9,500 per annum
• Typical client tenure: 8 to 14 years
• LTV per client: $55,000 to $135,000+
• Profitable cost per signed client ceiling at 25% of LTV: $13,750 to $33,750

Tier 3: HNW, business owner and complex estate ($1.5m+ investable or operating-business clients)

The premium tier. Founders, business owners, multi-entity families, multi-generational estate planning, business-succession files. Advice is bespoke; the fee is bespoke; the practice infrastructure required to deliver is substantial.

• Statement-of-advice fee: $14,000 to $35,000+
• Ongoing review: $12,000 to $28,000+ per annum, often inclusive of structured family-office-style coordination
• Typical client tenure: 10+ years
• LTV per client: $145,000 to $400,000+
• Profitable cost per signed client ceiling at 25% of LTV: $36,000 to $100,000+

This is the tier where most Australian advice practices leave the most money on the table. A $35,000 statement-of-advice fee priced at $18,000 because the principal is afraid to ask for the full number is a 48% revenue-per-engagement haircut and, paradoxically, often produces lower close rates because the price no longer matches the seriousness of the engagement.

The ongoing-review economics

The single biggest driver of profitability across all three tiers is the renewal rate on ongoing-review fees. Post-FASEA opt-in renewal requirements, every ongoing-review client must consent in writing each year. The renewal rate at the 90 to 120 day mark after the first review is the most predictive number in the practice’s P&L.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A practice with 220 ongoing-review clients at an average $4,800 review fee, renewing at 92% per year, has $972,672 in committed annual ongoing-review revenue. Drop the renewal rate to 78% and the number falls to $824,544 — a $148,128 hole. Lift the renewal rate to 95% and it rises to $1,003,200, a swing of nearly $180,000 against the same client base.

The levers that move renewal are structured: a clear annual review agenda, named outcomes per year, a portfolio of small advice “wins” the client can point to (“we got the tax-effective insurance structure in place this year”), a written renewal pack two months ahead of opt-in, and a deliberate post-renewal cycle that re-anchors value. Practices that ship this consistently see renewal rates above 90% and double-digit fee-rise tolerance.

Bundling, packaging and the menu trap

The most common pricing mistake in 2026 advice practices is the printed fee menu. A page on the website listing “Initial SoA: $4,500. Ongoing review: $3,300” trains the client to anchor on the cheapest line item and forces the planner to negotiate up from a low baseline. The fix is package-based pricing presented at the close of a discovery meeting, where the planner has the context to justify the engagement size.

The packages we see working in 2026:

• Foundation: initial SoA + 12 months of light-touch implementation support, single fee, $5,500 to $8,500
• Strategic: initial SoA + 12 months of structured ongoing review + 2 ad-hoc advice pieces, $9,500 to $18,000
• Family office (HNW): initial multi-entity SoA + ongoing coordination + accountant / solicitor liaison + annual review of the full structure, $35,000 to $90,000+ per annum

Broker pricing: file-mix is the lever, not headline rates

For brokers, “pricing” is largely fixed by the regulated commission structure. The lever is file mix. A practice that settles 80% residential and 20% commercial has a fundamentally different P&L from one that settles 50% residential, 30% commercial and 20% SMSF / asset finance. On a 60-file-per-year practice:

• Residential-heavy mix (80/20): approximately $300,000 to $400,000 in upfront commission, $250,000 to $320,000 in NPV trail per year of new files
• Diversified mix (50/30/20): approximately $580,000 to $720,000 in upfront commission on the same file count, plus higher-NPV trail per file

The diversification work is operational: train into commercial, build a referral network for SMSF, recruit a junior to handle residential while the principal moves up-market. The fee-per-file is set by the lender; the file-mix is set by the practice.

How Pay-Per-Result changes the pricing conversation

One of the under-rated benefits of Pay-Per-Result lead generation is that it changes the pricing conversation inside the practice. When the principal knows exactly what each booked meeting costs (a fixed, known number paid only on a result), the maths around what the advice or broker fee has to deliver becomes cleaner. The temptation to discount disappears because the practice can run the LTV-to-CPA ratio on the back of an envelope and know precisely whether the engagement is profitable.

Conversely, when CPB is volatile (paid-traffic retainer model), practices often shave fees to compensate for marketing inefficiency — compounding the damage. Fixed cost-per-result removes that incentive.

The takeaway

Price your practice against the LTV the advice or file genuinely produces, not against the cheapest comparable practice in your suburb. Use the three advice tiers as orientation, work out your contribution margin per client with real numbers, and set your cost-per-signed-client ceiling at 20 to 25% of LTV. Then design the ongoing-review experience so renewal rates sit above 90% and fee rises are absorbed without flinching.

If you want a second pair of eyes on where your practice pricing is leaking and where it is under-charging, we run a no-pitch 45-minute strategy session where we map the maths against your current numbers. For the cost-side companion to this article, see cost per broker meeting in Australia, and for the AEO playbook see AEO for brokers and planners. Cluster home: /finance/. Layered on top of any of the above, database reactivation is the cheapest channel in the entire mix.