Financial Adviser Fees in New Zealand

Ring three financial advisers and ask what they charge, and you will get three different answers. One bills by the hour. One quotes a price for the plan. One takes a percentage of your money every year, for as long as they look after it.

None of them is doing anything wrong. New Zealand has no set price for financial advice — no national schedule, no standard package. Every business sets its own price and writes it down in its own way.

That is what makes comparing them so difficult. The numbers are published in disclosure statements and on fees pages, but never in a format you can compare side by side. So we did that part. Someone here has read every business's fee page or disclosure statement, and every figure sits under the same heading as every other business's. The Fee source link under a name goes to the page we read from, so you can check any number yourself.

This page covers every licensed financial advice provider in New Zealand. This isn't a shortlist, and it isn't just the business we happened to hear about.

The Three Tables on This Page

Every business below falls into one of three groups, sorted by what you would actually be charged rather than by how well-known it is.

How We Researched This Article

The list of businesses starts with the Financial Markets Authority's register of licensed financial advice providers. That is where the list comes from—not a directory, not a membership list, and not a shortlist we assembled by hand. We review every business on the register that offers investment or retirement advice the same way.

The register does not publish fees, so every figure here comes from the business itself. For each one, we read its published fee page or its disclosure statement — the document a licensed provider is required to give you that sets out what it charges and who pays it. We take the figure from the business's own wording, aligned with a fixed set of headings, so every row answers the same questions: hourly rate, fixed fee, ongoing percentage, GST, minimum. The date we read it sits in the last column of the row, and the Fee source link under each name opens the page it came from.

Where a business publishes no figure for a basis, the cell reads "Not published." We do not estimate a rate, infer one from a similar business, or fill the gap from a third-party directory. A blank would leave you unable to tell "we found none" from "there is none", so we include the words instead.

The licence cancellations in Table 3 come from the FMA's published notices, with their wording and a link to each notice.

No business pays to appear in any of these tables, and no link on this page earns us a commission. We don't rank businesses within a table, and we don't recommend one over another. Fees change without notice, so a business's own page is always the authority — treat this as a starting point for a conversation, not a quote.

How businesses charge

A fixed fee is a set price for a defined piece of work, usually a financial plan. You agree to it before the work starts, and it doesn't change if the job takes longer than expected. It is the easiest of the three to compare between businesses.

An hourly rate is a time-and-materials arrangement. You pay for the hours the work takes, so the total is hard to predict in advance. Ask for an estimate of hours in writing, and ask what happens if it runs over.

A percentage of your money is charged on the balance the business manages or advises on, and it is charged again every year. That is what makes it different in kind rather than degree: a one-off fee is a cost, while a percentage is an ongoing arrangement that continues as long as the money stays.

A fourth arrangement is one where you don't pay a fee at all. Some businesses are paid by the product provider through commission, or through a trial on the products they recommend. That must be disclosed, and it changes who the business is working for.

Why a Business Charging a Percentage Sits in Table 1

The split is not whether a business charges a percentage. It is whether you can buy its ordinary advice without one. A business that publishes a fixed-plan fee and also runs a managed portfolio belongs in Table 1 because you can take the plan and decline the portfolio. A business whose standard basis is a percentage of the amount invested cannot be bought in any other way, so it is listed in Table 2.

Where a business in Table 1 offers a percentage as an option, the Ongoing % column indicates this and notes when the rate itself is not published. If a business publishes no figure for a basis, the cell reads Not published. That is a finding, not a gap we filled in with an estimate.

Before You Choose a Business

• Ask whether the fee is one-off or ongoing. The same advice applies either way, and only one of those keeps costing you.
• Ask who pays the business. A fee you pay and a commission a product provider pays are both legal, and they are not the same arrangement.
• "Not published" is not the same as "free". It usually means the business quotes on a case-by-case basis or the provider pays instead.
• A financial advice provider must hold an FMA licence. You can check any business' licence on the FMA register before you engage it.