Guides / Valuation
What multiple do financial advisor books sell for?
Six named Canadian transactions, five of them with a disclosed revenue multiple, running from 1.0x to 3.25x with a median of 3.00x. This article builds the answer from realized deals rather than from published ranges.
Key takeaways
- The five Canadian deals in our set with a disclosed revenue multiple have a median of 3.00x and a mean of 2.65x, spanning 1.00x to 3.25x.
- Four of those five sit at 3.00x or 3.25x, which is almost certainly a reporting artefact. Nobody writes up the deal that closed at 1.4x, so the median should be read as an upper-middle estimate.
- US closed-deal aggregates are higher and better documented: Succession Resource Group reports an average of 3.27x recurring revenue across 171 deals closed in CY2025, against FP Transitions medians of 2.49x for RIAs and 1.84x for registered reps in 2018.
- A Canadian marketplace operator reports multiples drifting from roughly 2.6x to 2.1x over ten years while the US series rose from 2.39x to 3.27x. Both can be true, because they are different buyer markets.
- The Lichtman deal at 1.0x is the clearest evidence of the size and concentration discounts: 20 households, one client holding 20% of assets, and a seller already on the way out.
Canadian advisor books, in the transactions we can name and source, sold at 1.00x to 3.25x recurring revenue with a median of 3.00x. Across the wider set of realized deals in our research, including US transactions, the median is also 3.00x on eleven deals, with a mean of 2.96x and a maximum of 3.82x.
Almost everything else published on this question is a range rather than a transaction. This article does it the other way round: start from the deals that actually closed, name the buyers, then hold the published ranges up against them. The difference between the two is instructive, and mostly unflattering to the ranges.
One caveat first, stated up front because it changes how you should read every number below. Canada has no transaction database. Investment Executive puts it flatly: "There is no database or organized practice exchange in Canada in which past transactions can be used as references for valuation." What follows is journalism assembled into data, not a market index.
The named Canadian deals
| Buyer and book | Price | What drove it | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Dunn, IPC Securities, Cobourg ON. Roughly 80 households and $15M AUM, added to his existing $30M | 3.00x revenue | Bought around the going rate, and said so with reservations: "This is roughly the going rate [but] I think I paid a bit too much and would definitely do things differently next time." The transaction ran from an IIROC seller to an MFDA buyer, which the article records as making the negotiation more complex | Investment Executive |
| Mr. Sanche, Insight Wealth Management / IPC Securities. A 60-household book | 3.25x recurring revenue, paid 100% upfront | The highest realized Canadian multiple in the set. Clients were primarily over 60, engaged and responsive, and the buyer described the price as exceeding the industry standard of 2.5 times. His three prior acquisitions used 90% upfront with a 10% retention holdback, so the all-cash term was itself a premium for book quality | Globe Advisor |
| Twyla Hardham, Safe Harbour Financial Solutions, Kelowna BC. Roughly 320 clients with balanced portfolios plus life and living-benefits coverage | 3.00x recurring revenue, 90% upfront with a 10% holdback for 18 months | Again described as exceeding the 2.5x industry standard. Financed through Manulife Bank. Structured as a share purchase because the seller wanted the lifetime capital gains exemption, against the buyer's preference for an asset purchase. Lifestyle withdrawals were carved out of the holdback test. She retained 95% of clients and honoured the agreed price after a market decline shrank the book | Globe Advisor |
| Elke Rubach, Rubach Wealth Holistic Family Advisors, Toronto. A book of 650 clients | 3.00x annual recurring revenue | Negotiated a client-by-client clawback: if a client left in the first year, the retiring advisor repaid the amount allocated to that client. She also flags that on insurance policies the carrier may keep paying the originating advisor after the file transfers | Globe Advisor |
| Samuel Lichtman, Millen Wealth Advisors, London ON. A book of 20 client households | 1.00x, one year's worth of revenue. 25% up front, 75% over 12 monthly instalments | Priced down on three grounds: the book's small size, the seller's exit from the business, and concentration risk with one client holding 20% of assets. He notes this was well below the average seller's valuation of two to five times derived from asset trailers | Globe Advisor |
| Mike Berton, Assante Financial Management, Vancouver. Internal sale of 45 client relationships, roughly $7.5M AUM, to an associate in his own branch | 1.75% of AUM adjusted for retention | Priced as a percentage of assets rather than a revenue multiple. An internal sale to a known associate, with no competitive bidding, which is exactly where the evidence says multiples sit lowest. Transition completed 30 November 2021 | Investment Executive |
Read the notes column rather than the price column. Every one of these prices was set by a specific characteristic of the book and the process, and in four of the six cases the buyer says so on the record. That is more useful than any average.
The realized distribution
Computed across the realized deals with a disclosed revenue multiple in our data set:
| Cut | n | Min | Q1 | Median | Q3 | Max | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All realized deals with a revenue multiple | 11 | 1.00x | 2.91x | 3.00x | 3.29x | 3.82x | 2.96x |
| Canada only | 5 | 1.00x | 3.00x | 3.00x | 3.00x | 3.25x | 2.65x |
| US only | 6 | 2.59x | 2.89x | 3.23x | 3.51x | 3.82x | 3.21x |
| US fee-based or fee-only RIA | 4 | 2.82x | 3.04x | 3.34x | 3.63x | 3.82x | 3.33x |
Two health warnings, both important enough to override the table.
The sample is tiny and the Canadian rows cluster suspiciously. Four of five Canadian multiples land on 3.00x or 3.25x. Real distributions are not that tidy. What is far more likely is that trade publications write up buyers who paid a headline-friendly round number, and a buyer who paid 2.35x after a grinding negotiation does not become a magazine profile.
Selection bias runs upward on both sides of the border. Every US row in our set comes from a Succession Resource Group announcement about a deal SRG brokered and was paid on, and SRG publishes that its advocated sales achieve 6.91% more value and 75% average down payments against 61% for private deals. The Canadian rows are profiles of buyers who agreed to be profiled. Nobody publishes the deal that closed at 1.4x. Treat 3.00x as an upper-middle estimate of the Canadian market, not its centre. That is precisely why our published methodology anchors the low end of the range well below what the realized rows alone would suggest.
Realized deals against published ranges
The distinction that matters when you are handed a multiple: does the source state a sample of closed deals, or is it a range published by a firm that earns fees on transactions?
| Figure | What it is | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average 3.27x recurring revenue and 9.98x EBITDA across 171 deals closed in CY2025 | Closed-deal data with a stated sample. US, and brokered by the publisher | Succession Resource Group 2026 report |
| Average 3.08x recurring revenue and 9.20x EBITDA across 176 deals closed in CY2024, with 62.8% priced between 2.50x and 3.50x and zero deals below 1.50x | Closed-deal data with a stated sample. US | Succession Resource Group 2025 report |
| RIA median 2.49x and registered-rep median 1.84x of gross revenue in 2018, with a pooled observed range of 0.27x to 2.84x | Closed-deal data with medians and ranges published. US, and measured on gross rather than recurring revenue, which is why the level is lower | FP Transitions 2019 study |
| Canadian recurring revenue, external buyer: 1.16x to 3.38x of trailing twelve months, average 2.31x | Reported Canadian book-sale data, the closest thing to a Canadian closed-deal average that exists | Advisor.ca |
| 3x to 4x of gross recurring revenue, described as the highest in several years | Broker view. No sample stated. Marketing | Investment Executive |
| 1.5x to 2.5x of gross recurring revenue, from a competing broker in the same article | Broker view. No sample stated. Marketing | Investment Executive |
| 2x to 3.5x of recurring revenue, dealer scoring guidance with 3.5x for a top score and 2x for a low score | Dealer guidance. Directional, not transactional | IPC |
| 2x to 3.5x of revenue across three years of practice sales and valuations, with above 3.5x a rare outlier | Consultant claim against unstated sample. US | Advisor Legacy |
Notice that the two Investment Executive figures, published in the same story, do not overlap at all at the top end. That is the state of unsourced Canadian range publishing. When someone quotes you a multiple, the only follow-up question worth asking is how many closed deals it was computed from.
The most useful shape in the whole literature is a US bucket distribution from deals closed in the first half of 2023: 7.7% below 1.50x, 11.5% from 1.50x to 2.00x, 23.1% from 2.00x to 2.50x, 28.8% from 2.50x to 3.00x, 11.5% from 3.00x to 3.50x, 11.5% from 3.50x to 4.00x and 5.8% above 4.00x (Succession Resource Group). Roughly a fifth of closed deals fell below 2.0x. Any Canadian valuation model that cannot produce a sub-2x output for a weak book is mis-specified, and that is a large part of why we publish a floor of 1.8x rather than the 2.5x that gets called the Canadian standard.
Why Canadian and US multiples moved in opposite directions
A Canadian marketplace operator reports multiples drifting from roughly 2.6x down to about 2.1x over ten years. Over roughly the same period the US average series ran the other way: 2.39x in 2013, 2.60x in 2015, 2.72x in 2019, 2.83x in 2021, then 3.08x in 2024 and 3.27x in 2025. Both series can be right, because they measure different buyer markets.
- Different buyers. The US price level is set by consolidators and private equity. In Canada the buyer for a typical book is a peer advisor at the same dealer. SRG itself notes that a $46M practice may be too small for consolidators even in the US, and most Canadian books are smaller than that.
- Different asset sizes. One US deal tracker reported average seller AUM of $937M in 2025 year to date (DeVoe). The average Canadian brokerage advisor runs $149.0M AUM across 300 client households (Investment Executive Brokerage Report Card). Those are not the same asset.
- Different consent regimes. Canadian transfers need written client authorization and prior written consent before client information moves (CIRO). Higher attrition risk for the buyer is priced into the multiple.
- Supply pressure. The average Canadian dealer advisor is 52.8 and plans to retire at 66, with 53.6% of 461 advisors surveyed holding a documented succession plan (Investment Executive Dealers' Report Card), while 81% of advisors in one survey had no succession plan at all (Wealth Professional). More sellers arriving into a small buyer pool pushes prices the way the Canadian series went.
Practical consequence: do not take a US average and apply it to a Canadian book. It overstates value, and the 2.5x figure Canadian buyers keep calling the industry standard sits about a quarter below the US CY2025 average for a reason.
What the 1.0x deal teaches
The Lichtman transaction is the most useful single Canadian data point in the set, because it is the only one that shows the discounts working. A 20-household book. One client holding 20% of the assets. A seller leaving the business rather than transitioning. The result was one year's revenue, 25% up front and 75% over twelve monthly instalments, against comparable Canadian books that fetched 3.0x in the same period.
Each factor is independently supported. On concentration, a buyer who inherits a book where one client is a fifth of the revenue is buying a coin flip, and the instalment structure is how that risk got shifted back to the seller. On size, books at the small end are hard to place: the insurance side of the market makes the same point, with buyers wanting C$500k-plus of total revenue and sub-$500k blocks proving difficult to move (Insurance Portal). On the absent seller, distressed and no-transition sales carry a discount of roughly 25% to 35%: SRG's own distressed-sale average was 1.94x against a market average near 2.9x to 3.1x in the same period.
Stack all three and 1.0x stops looking like an outlier and starts looking like arithmetic. It also tells you what to fix. Concentration is reducible over a few years. Household count is not easily changed, but a documented transition commitment is entirely within your control, and it is the cheapest multiple you will ever buy.
None of this promises any particular price for any particular book, and the structure of a deal can matter more than its headline multiple. Holdbacks, clawbacks, share versus asset sale and lifetime capital gains exemption eligibility are tax and legal questions for your own accountant and lawyer, and our guide to earnouts and holdbacks covers what the Canadian deals in this set actually used.
To see where your own book sits against these numbers, run the free valuation estimate, then read how the range is calibrated. When you want price discovery rather than an estimate, listing confidentially exposes the book to more than one buyer, which is the only mechanism in this market that produces a price instead of an opinion.
Common questions
What multiple did named Canadian advisors actually pay?
Mike Dunn paid three times revenue, Mr. Sanche paid 3.25 times recurring revenue, Twyla Hardham and Elke Rubach each paid three times recurring revenue, and Samuel Lichtman paid one year's revenue. Mike Berton sold internally at 1.75% of AUM adjusted for retention. Those are the Canadian transactions we can document with a named buyer and a stated price.
Are US multiples a good guide for a Canadian book?
No, and applying them will overstate value. The US price level is set by consolidators and private equity bidding for firms far larger than a typical Canadian book, supported by a lending market Canada does not have. The two multiple series have moved in opposite directions over the past decade.
Why did one Canadian book sell for only one year's revenue?
It had 20 client households, one client held 20% of the book's assets, and the seller was leaving the business. The buyer negotiated the price down explicitly on those grounds and paid 25% up front with the balance over twelve monthly instalments. Concentration and small size are the two discounts the evidence supports most clearly.
Is a published range from a broker the same as transaction data?
No. A broker or dealer range is a marketing figure with no stated sample. Closed-deal data reports a number of transactions and a computed average or median. In one Investment Executive article two brokers quoted 3x to 4x and 1.5x to 2.5x of gross recurring revenue in the same story, which tells you how much weight to give an unsourced range.