Ongoing Adviser Charges Explained

A financial plan is not a document you file and forget. Markets move, tax rules change, and your own life rarely follows the script. The ongoing adviser charge is what pays for the plan to stay alive, reviewed, adjusted and kept suitable year after year. It is also, for many people, the largest advice cost they will pay over a lifetime, so it deserves real scrutiny.

This guide explains what the ongoing charge is, what it must legally deliver, what genuinely good ongoing service looks like, and most usefully, how to judge whether yours is still worth the money. It is information, not personal advice; whether an ongoing service suits you depends on your circumstances, and investments can fall as well as rise.

What the ongoing charge is

The ongoing charge is a recurring fee for a continuing advice relationship, as distinct from the one-off initial charge that pays for the original recommendation. It is usually expressed as a percentage of the assets under advice, commonly 0.5% to 1% a year, and deducted from your investments, though a growing number of firms charge a fixed annual retainer instead. Because it recurs, it quietly becomes the biggest advice cost most people ever pay, dwarfing the initial charge over a couple of decades.

Crucially, it is optional. You can take advice once and manage things yourself afterwards, returning only when you next need help. But for anyone with a substantial portfolio, a complex situation, or simply no wish to steer their own finances, the ongoing service is often where the real, compounding value of advice is delivered, provided it is actually being delivered. The way it is priced, percentage or fixed, follows the same logic set out in our guide to how much a financial adviser costs.

What good service includes

A vague promise of “looking after your money” is not enough. A well-run ongoing service has concrete, repeatable components you should be able to see each year. If you cannot point to what you received for the fee, that is a warning sign, and increasingly, a question the regulator expects firms to be able to answer.

• 1

  A periodic suitability review

  A structured check that your plan still fits your goals, your circumstances and your appetite for risk, at least annually for most services, and documented.

• 2

  Rebalancing and investment oversight

  Keeping your portfolio aligned with its target mix as markets move, and adjusting the strategy when your needs or the outlook change.

• 3

  Tax-year planning

  Using each year’s allowances, the £20,000 ISA, the £60,000 pension annual allowance, capital gains and dividend exemptions, before they expire on 5 April.

• 4

  Life-event adjustments

  Reworking the plan around retirement, an inheritance, a sale, ill health or a change in the rules, so it never drifts out of date.

• 5

  Access to a qualified professional

  Someone who knows your situation and can be called when a decision or a worry arises, often the most valued part of all.

The quiet value here is behavioural as much as technical. An adviser who talks you out of selling in a market panic, or who nudges you to use an allowance you would have let lapse, can be worth many times the fee in a single year, even though none of it shows up as a flashy product. This is the same “stewardship” thread that runs through our guide to what wealth management is, and through sensible long-term investing more broadly.

It is worth being clear about what an ongoing service should not be. It is not simply the right to phone your adviser once in a while, nor a vague sense that someone, somewhere, is watching your money. If those are the only things you can point to, you are almost certainly paying too much. A properly delivered ongoing service produces evidence each year, a written review, a record of the allowances used, a note of the decisions taken and the reasons for them. When you renew, or when you consider switching, that paper trail is exactly what tells you whether the fee has been earned.

What the rules require

You are not merely relying on goodwill. Since the MiFID II rules took effect in 2018, any firm charging an ongoing fee for advice must carry out a periodic assessment of suitability, checking, and evidencing, that the advice remains right for you. If you pay for an ongoing service, you are entitled to receive it, and the firm must be able to prove it did. This is a legal obligation, not a courtesy, and it is exactly the sort of standard the vetting behind a good adviser introduction is designed to confirm.

What it costs, and on top

The ongoing adviser charge itself typically runs at 0.5% to 1% a year. But, as with all advice costs, it does not sit alone. The platform holding your money charges perhaps 0.15% to 0.45% a year, and the funds you are invested in levy their own ongoing charges of roughly 0.1% to 0.9%. Added together, the true annual cost of a fully advised, actively managed plan is often around 1.5% to 2%.

None of these layers is improper, but you should see them combined as a single total cost of ownership. Our overview of what a financial adviser costs shows how the layers stack up; the number to hold in your head is the all-in annual percentage, not the adviser’s slice alone. Over a long retirement, even half a percent of unnecessary cost can quietly compound into a meaningful share of your pot.

Is yours still worth it?

An ongoing charge earns its keep when the service is active and the value is visible; it becomes dead weight when the plan is left on autopilot and the fee keeps flowing regardless. The honest test is not whether the market went up: it is whether the adviser did something useful you would not have done yourself.

How to review your charge

Reviewing an ongoing charge is straightforward if you ask the right questions. Request a clear statement of the fees taken over the last year and precisely what service they bought. Ask for your total cost of ownership as one percentage. Compare that against what you are actually receiving, and against what other vetted firms would charge for the same work. If the answers are fuzzy or the value is thin, that is your cue to act rather than to drift on out of inertia.

A sensible rhythm is to review the arrangement properly every couple of years, and always after a major life change, retirement, an inheritance, a house move or a shift in the tax rules. Fees are not fixed in stone: as your portfolio grows, a percentage that felt fair at £150,000 can become poor value at £600,000, and it is entirely reasonable to renegotiate towards a tiered rate, a cap or a fixed retainer. Advisers expect these conversations from engaged clients, and a firm that reacts badly to a polite question about value is itself telling you something worth knowing.

Changing or stopping it

You are never locked in. You can cancel an ongoing service, usually at short notice, and simply stop paying the fee, moving to one-off advice as and when you need it, or transferring to a firm that offers better value. Switching costs are generally modest, and a good adviser will make the process painless rather than obstruct it. The relationship should be earning its fee every year; if it stops doing so, you are free to change it.

Cancelling does not have to mean going it entirely alone. Many people step down rather than step off, dropping from a full ongoing service to an occasional paid review, or moving from a percentage charge to a lighter fixed retainer that covers only the work they truly value. Others keep the relationship but move to a cheaper platform or simpler funds underneath, cutting the total cost of ownership without losing the adviser. The point is that the arrangement is yours to shape: an ongoing charge is a service you buy year by year, not a subscription you are stuck with, and treating it that way is how you keep it honest.

Vetted Wealth charges you nothing and sells nothing. We are a free concierge service that matches you with independently vetted, FCA-regulated advisers whose ongoing service you can hold to account, start from our financial advisers hub, or read whether advice pays its way at all in our answer on whether a financial adviser is worth it. An ongoing charge should feel like paying for stewardship, if it feels like paying for silence, it is time to review it.

Common questions on fees & costs