Financial plan cost by city: median fees in 21 US cities

Key findings

1. None of the 21 US cities with at least 10 fee only firms publishing a current one time plan fee has a median plan fee that differs from the rest of the US by more than chance would explain; each city's median rests on 10 to 38 firms.
2. Among the 21 US cities with at least 10 fee only firms publishing a current one time plan fee, the median plan fee runs from $2,875 in San Antonio, TX (10 firms) to $8,000 in Seattle, WA (11 firms), though neither city's plan fees differ from the rest of the US by more than chance would explain.
3. Of the 21 US cities with at least 10 fee only firms publishing a current one time plan fee, 14 have a median plan fee above the US median of $4,950 (2,537 fee only firms), 6 below it, and 1 equal to it.
4. Fee only firms in the 5 US cities with the lowest median one time plan fee publish a median hourly rate of $300 (101 firms), the same as firms in the 5 cities with the highest median one time plan fee (136 firms).
5. San Diego, CA has more fee only firms with a current one time plan fee than any other US city (38); its median plan fee, $5,750, is 15th lowest of the 21 ranked cities.

The 5 lowest medians for a one time plan

The 5 highest medians for a one time plan

All 21 ranked cities

No city's plan fees differ from the rest of the US by more than chance would explain. The line marks the US median one time plan fee, $4,950 (2,537 firms).

Select a column heading to sort. Firms: firms with a current one time plan fee. A dash in Median hourly means fewer than 8 of the city's firms publish a current hourly rate.

How we did it

• The data: 8,139 US fee only financial planning firms and the fees they publish in their Form ADV Part 2A brochures, filed with the SEC or a state regulator, as of November 4, 2026. The numbers update every month with new filings.
• A current fee: one value per firm, from a brochure under 18 months old, and not just a cap or a minimum. A range counts at its midpoint. The one time plan fee is the flat or project fee a firm publishes for a financial plan.
• Cities: the city in the firm's main office address, not the metro area, so a suburb counts on its own. New York City means a New York, NY address; Brooklyn and the other boroughs count separately. A city is ranked when at least 10 of its firms publish a current one time plan fee, the same rule that ranks a state.
• Tests: each city's plan fees are compared with the rest of the US by a Mann-Whitney rank test, and the p-values are Holm adjusted across the 21 cities. A city is called different only when its adjusted p is under 0.01 and the two medians differ. The hourly rates of the 5 cheapest and 5 priciest cities are compared once, pooled, with the same test.

The full rules are on the methodology page.

How to cite this study

PlannerFees, "Financial plan cost by city: median fees in 21 US cities," 2026, https://plannerfees.com/research/financial-plan-cost-by-city/ (data as of November 4, 2026).

The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit PlannerFees, link to this page, name the license (CC BY 4.0) and say if you changed the data. The numbers update every month, so give the data date, November 4, 2026, when you quote one.

Download the data

City ranking (CSV): all 21 cities, with the rank, median and middle half of the plan fee, firm counts, the hourly median, the raw and Holm adjusted p-values and a link to each city page. The firm level data is in the full fee dataset.

CC BY 4.0 covers PlannerFees' compilation and the fee figures. The quoted brochure sentences are the firms' own words, quoted for reference, and the license doesn't cover them. Terms of use.