By Matt Barthel
Barron's has ranked financial advisors since 2004, but it wasn't until 2009 that we realized that some of the highest-quality practitioners in the country were excluded from the three Top 100 advisor lists we published at the time.
That is because practices in wealthy states such as Florida, New York, and California were accumulating so many assets that they were filling up most of our top spots.
To solve that problem, we created a new listing in 2009 that ranked advisors against their geographic peers: the Top 1,000 Financial Advisors. It benchmarked professionals in each state and the District of Columbia, with the number of rankings in each area determined by its population and wealth. In 2014, we increased the number of advisors in the ranking to 1,200.
This year, we are boosting it again, this time to 1,500, for two reasons. First, significant numbers of elite advisors and their clients have relocated, necessitating a reassessment of the number of rankings spots in states such as Texas, Utah, and Florida. Second, and perhaps more significantly, the average account size of advisors in the ranking has risen to almost $16 million this year -- more than triple the average account size of a Top 1,000 advisor in 2009. Practically speaking, this means Barron's readers with investible assets of less than $5 million would find fewer prospective advisors if we had left our state-by-state ranking unchanged.
Every state received a bump in the numbers of advisors ranked, with an increase from six spots to 10 in the least-populous states and an increase from 120 to 125 in New York and California.
This expansion has increased the number of advisors who serve clients with lower asset totals. In Alaska, for instance, newly ranked advisor Michael Murphy of Merrill Lynch serves clients with an average account size of $1.5 million; last year, the lowest-ranked advisor in Alaska had a typical account figure twice that size. Across the entire state-by-state ranking, the average account size still grew, but that growth slowed to 1.7% year over year versus a compound annual growth rate of 3.4% from 2021 to 2025.
The Top 1,500 Financial Advisors is the most inclusive of Barron's eight advisor rankings, commingling advisors from the large national brokerage firms (Bank of America's Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Wells Fargo), independent broker-dealers (including Ameriprise, LPL, Cetera), and registered investment advisory firms (including Creative Planning, Mariner, Captrust, Edelman Financial Engines).
This list looks at individual advisors. In May, Barron's will publish two rankings of wealth management teams.
In ranking advisors, we assess multiple criteria, including regulatory records, experience, team resources, advanced degrees, and certifications. We also use assets under management and revenue as important proxies for a practice's overall health and client satisfaction; strong practices grow steadily, and satisfied clients vote with the fees they pay their advisors.
Readers may note that there are instances in which two advisors share the same ranking number. This happens when they have an identical score in our formula; we give both advisors the higher of two rankings spots, then skip the lower spot. So, if two advisors are both ranked No. 10, we skip No. 11 and resume regular numbering at No. 12.
Even though we have expanded the number of advisors this year, our Top 1,500 ranking remains quite selective. To put it into perspective, the National Football League has 32 teams with about 1,700 total players drawn from about 300,000 to 400,000 players at high-level high school and college football programs. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are around 300,000 "personal financial advisors" in the U.S. competing for the 1,500 spots in our annual state-by-state ranking.
Write to Matt Barthel at matthew.barthel@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
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March 20, 2026 09:30 ET (13:30 GMT)
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