Before a single investment has succeeded or failed, a family office above $1 billion in assets has already spent an average of $6.6 million in the year — on staff, systems, advisers and oversight. J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s 2026 Global Family Office Report puts that figure at the top of a curve that behaves in a way families rarely expect when they commission an office of their own.
The shape of the curve
The research, based on a survey of 333 family offices across 30 countries with an average AUM of $1.1 billion, sets out operating costs across four brackets. Offices with $250 million or less in assets average roughly $875,000 a year; those between $250 million and $500 million average $1.7 million; those between $500 million and $1 billion average $3.2 million; and those above $1 billion average $6.6 million. As a simple curve, costs rising with assets looks unremarkable. As a share of assets under management, the picture is more interesting: smaller offices spend a materially higher proportion of their assets on operations than larger ones. The fixed costs of running a credible institution do not scale down neatly for a smaller balance sheet.
This is the central economic tension in the single-family office model. A compliance function, a proper reporting system, a genuinely independent investment committee cost roughly the same to build whether the office manages $300 million or $3 billion. An office at the smaller end is, in effect, paying a far higher price per dollar of assets for the same institutional infrastructure a larger office spreads across a bigger base. That is not evidence that a smaller office is being poorly run. It is a structural feature of the model: fixed institutional costs are spread across a smaller asset base, which makes the economics of a fully internal structure more demanding at lower scale.
Where the spend actually sits
External services — legal, trading, cybersecurity and similar specialist functions — account for 25% to 28% of total operating costs across the offices surveyed. That is a substantial share, and it reflects a pattern this issue returns to elsewhere: family offices increasingly buying in specialist expertise for functions that do not justify a full-time internal hire, rather than attempting to build every capability under one roof. The remainder sits across staffing, technology, and the general overhead of running a professional organisation.
Treating the headline figures as a simple price list for institutional quality would be a mistake, because composition, not size, tends to distinguish a well-run office from an expensively run one. Two offices spending broadly similar amounts can arrive at very different outcomes depending on whether that spend concentrates in genuine capability — investment expertise, robust reporting, credible governance — or diffuses across administrative overhead that has simply accumulated unreviewed.
Complexity does more work than size alone
It would also be a mistake to read this data purely through the lens of assets under management. Complexity — jurisdictions, asset classes, family members, reporting obligations — drives cost at least as much as scale does. An office with $600 million concentrated in a single jurisdiction with a straightforward public-market portfolio faces a genuinely different cost profile from one holding the same assets across several jurisdictions, active private investments, and family members with different tax residencies. J.P. Morgan’s brackets are useful precisely because they are organised by size, but a family reading them should be honest about where its own complexity, not its asset total alone, places it on the curve.
That distinction matters most at the point families are deciding whether to build a dedicated office at all, rather than opt for a multi-family platform or an outsourced arrangement. An office with modest assets but genuinely high complexity — multiple operating businesses, cross-border family members, a philanthropic vehicle with its own governance — may need more infrastructure, and face a higher relative cost, than a much larger but comparatively simple portfolio. Reading the cost curve as a function of assets alone risks over-building for a family with modest actual complexity, and under-resourcing one whose complexity outpaces its balance sheet.
The fastest-moving line item
Competition for qualified staff shows up directly in the cost data. As family offices compete with private equity firms, investment banks and multi-family platforms for the same pool of experienced professionals, compensation has become one of the more variable, faster-rising components of the operating base. This compounds with the trend toward specialist hiring — dedicated real estate, private credit or venture professionals rather than generalists — which tends to command a premium over broader investment roles. An office that assumed its staffing base was stable because headcount has not grown may still face real cost inflation simply because the market rate for its existing roles has moved.
Using the benchmark without being ruled by it
The obvious temptation with any published cost benchmark is to treat it as a target — a smaller office wondering whether it is overspending relative to the $875,000 average for its bracket, a larger one wondering whether $6.6 million represents value. That comparison has some use. It can also mislead if taken too literally: an average across 333 offices in 30 countries necessarily flattens real differences in ambition and what the family wants the office to do beyond managing a portfolio. Education, philanthropy, family governance, and the other functions discussed elsewhere in this issue all carry their own cost, and none of them show up as a distinct line in a simple AUM-based benchmark.
The more useful exercise is not benchmarking spend against the average for an office’s size, but auditing spend against the complexity actually being managed — and asking honestly whether the infrastructure being paid for is the infrastructure the family needs, rather than the infrastructure that has simply accumulated as the office has grown. Cost, on its own, tells you neither efficiency nor waste. What it is spent on does.
"Cost, on its own, tells you neither efficiency nor waste. What it is spent on does."