LPL Retaining Larger, High-Quality Commonwealth Advisors
Last fall, LPL Financial reported 80% retention of Commmonwealth Financial Network assets. As of today, that’s in the low 80% range of advisors that have signed agreements to stay with Commonwealth. Some news reports have suggested LPL will not meet its original target asset retention rate of 90%, but on its fourth quarter earnings call, executives said they still expect to hit that target.
“When you look at the advisors who have signed to stay with LPL so far, we’re now just over 80%,” said Matt Audette, chief financial officer at LPL, on the firm’s fourth quarter earnings call on Thursday. “And you look at those on average, they are larger; they’re faster growing; and they’re higher producers than those that have decided to go elsewhere.”
LPL CEO Rich Steinmeier said the firm has its top recruiters focused on retention of Commonwealth advisors.
“We are deeply connected between Commonwealth and LPL to help educate them on the continuing value proposition of Commonwealth,” Steinmeier said. “And we are very confident that by keeping the community intact, safeguarding their experience, their culture, their capabilities and their leadership, that will ultimately win the day. And quite honestly, those are the conversations that we’re having as folks have gone through a very elongated due diligence process, they’re coming back to having much more productive conversations now than we were even having at the beginning.”
LPL is on track to complete the conversion of Commonwealth in the fourth quarter of 2026, and as its approaches that conversion, the firm’s recruiters will be getting back to their organic recruiting efforts.
“We should gradually return to more normalized recruiting outcomes driven by increased win rates in traditional markets with our unmatched value proposition, further penetrating the wire and regional employee advisor space, where there was growing awareness of our solution,” Steinmeier said.
He added that over the last couple of years, LPL has grown its capture of wirehouse and regional employee advisors from 9% of all advisors in motion to over 11% of all advisors in motion.
“Commonwealth is a very validating event to our position in the marketplace,” Steinmeier said. “They are a premium brand; they have premium capabilities; and they have the best advisors in the industry. The leadership of that firm chose us as the best firm to support those advisors, and that made more W-2 advisors stand up and take notice of this firm as a leading firm in wealth management.”
During the fourth quarter, LPL recruited $14 billion in assets, $13 billion in its traditional independent channel and $1 billion in its newer affiliation models. The firm reported $104 billion in recruited assets for 2025, and it ended the year with a total advisor headcount of 32,178, up 50 from the third quarter.