Cost of Financial Advice Calculator — The Honest 2026 Numbers

"1.5% initial, 0.75% ongoing" sounds genuinely modest as a sentence. On a £400,000 portfolio, that's £6,000 upfront and £3,000 a year, every year, for as long as the advice relationship continues. A cost of financial advice calculator exists specifically to close that gap between the abstract percentage and the concrete pound figure — because the two feel very different, even when they describe exactly the same charge.

On a £400,000 portfolio, the total annual cost — advice fee, platform fee and fund charges combined — ranges from roughly £3,400 (0.85%) at a lower-cost whole-of-market firm to roughly £6,600 (1.65%) at a higher-cost restricted firm. On a £1,000,000 portfolio, that range widens to roughly £8,500 to £16,500 a year.

Since the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) banned commission on investment advice in 2013, every UK adviser must charge a transparent, disclosed fee agreed with you in advance — no hidden commission from product providers is permitted.

It's genuinely important not to confuse investment or pension advice fees with mortgage broker fees, since the two work quite differently. Many UK mortgage brokers are free to the client, receiving a procuration fee directly from the lender instead, disclosed in your mortgage illustration. Some brokers charge an additional fee of £300 to £500, though many waive this for straightforward cases — a genuinely different economics to the ongoing percentage-of-assets model used for investment advice.

A gap of just 0.25 percentage points in ongoing fees feels trivial in a single year's statement, but it compounds in the same way charges reduce any investment return, working against you rather than for you. Over 20 to 30 years on a substantial portfolio, that seemingly small difference can genuinely amount to a five-figure sum — comparing at least two firms' total-cost quotes, converted into pounds, is a worthwhile use of an afternoon.

None of this is an argument against paying for financial advice — good advice, at key life moments such as a pension transfer, a major inheritance, or complex retirement planning, can genuinely add value well beyond its cost, through better tax structuring, sensible risk management, and simply avoiding costly mistakes. The point of a cost of financial advice calculator is to make sure you're paying a fair, transparent price for that value, with your eyes open to the real pound figure, rather than accepting a quote purely because the percentage sounded small.

A £400,000 portfolio, 1.5% initial fee, 0.75% ongoing advice fee, 0.5% platform and fund charges, 5% assumed growth, over 20 years. Initial fee: £6,000, paid once. Combined ongoing charge: 1.25% a year. Over 20 years, factoring in how fees compound against growth, the total cost comes to roughly £127,000 to £130,000 less in your final pot compared with paying no fees at all — a genuinely large number, though one that needs weighing against the real value the advice itself delivers.

Official sources & further reading: read general guidance on choosing an adviser at MoneyHelper, and verify any adviser on the FCA register. Check the fee-drag effect on a pension specifically with our SIPP calculator, or browse every tool on the mortgage calculators homepage.