> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.capitalfounders.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Four Family Office Models and What They Cost
- URL: https://www.capitalfounders.io/family-office-models-compared/
- Published: 2026-09-24T08:05:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T11:05:36.000Z
- Description: Ask about a family office at $30m and you get four names back and almost no prices. What each one costs, who ends up making the decisions, and what you are really buying when someone offers you a fractional setup.
- Author: Taras
- Tags: Wealth Architect

If you have $30m and you start asking about a family office, you get four names back. Single, multi, virtual, and now solo.

Most founders start comparing them. I'd start somewhere else.

Answer the question first. What do you want to do with the money, and do you want to run it professionally, almost like a business? Answer that, and the list gets a lot shorter.

I meet a lot of founders who have priced three models and never written down what the money is for.

## What's Inside

- **Start with what the money is for.** That question, and whether you want to run it like a business, decides more than any fee comparison.
- **Three of the names are about the work. One is about the decisions.** Single, multi and virtual describe how the work gets done. Solo describes who is accountable.
- **A staffed office costs about $900k a year.** That is the average for offices running $250m or less. Salaries are two thirds of it.
- **Fractional is a way of hiring, not a model.** It means someone looks after your money part time, and part time comes with an obvious catch.
- **Two of the four have no published costs.** Nobody surveys solo or virtual setups, so every number you see comes from someone selling one.

## How to choose a family office model

Three of the four names are about how the work gets done. Single, multi, virtual: who does it, and how it is organised. Solo is different. It is about who makes the decisions.

Solo means one person is accountable for the decisions. It says nothing about how many people you hire. You can run solo and still use a virtual setup or share a part-time CIO, because nobody has taken the decisions off you.

So the real question is how much of that you want to hand over.

Many don't want to give money in discretionary management and hope for the best. Founders want control over structure. They need to understand everything and make decisions. Different people understand it differently, but think about it as being an active operator of your wealth or business, or being a passive investor in a company where you don't have much say.

Both are fine. An operator has to understand the structure and make the decisions, and that takes time. A passive investor buys someone else's process and pays for it in fees. Picking the one that doesn't suit you costs more than the fees ever will.

## Four family office models, defined

Here is what each name means.

### Solo family office

A family office run by one person: the capital founder. One person makes the decisions, which is why it works the same at $5m and $100m. No payroll. You hire specialists for the work in front of you, and you keep the decisions. [We wrote about solo family offices in more detail here](https://www.capitalfounders.io/solo-family-office/).

### Single family office

A dedicated organisation serving one family, with staff on the payroll. UBS puts the average at 12 people. Deloitte found offices running $2bn with 15 staff. You are in control on paper, though in practice a lot of the day-to-day judgement sits with the people you employ, and if the right one leaves, you feel it.

### Multi-family office

A firm doing family office work for several families at once. You are a client. It costs less than your own office, and it is less bespoke, and the team's time belongs to the firm. Before you sign anything, ask what else they earn from your money beyond the fee they quote you.

### Virtual family office

Nobody agrees on what this one means, so ask whoever is using the word.

Usually it means a network of independent specialists - investment, tax, legal, insurance - working to one strategy with nobody in-house. It can also mean a multi-family office without the expensive offices, with most of the team working remotely. Or a software-led setup with senior people brought in part-time. All three get sold as virtual.

What they have in common is that the work sits outside. Who makes the decisions is a separate question, and it comes down to whether anyone is coordinating. It only works if someone is. Without that, you are paying several good specialists to pull in different directions.

You'll also hear lean family office and micro family office. The ideas overlap, though the definitions don't line up neatly, and different people use all three terms for different things. Lean usually points to a small in-house team with the rest outsourced. Micro is about size.

| Model   | What defines it       | Who decides         | What it costs            |
| ------- | --------------------- | ------------------- | ------------------------ |
| Solo    | One decision-maker    | You                 | No published data        |
| Single  | One family, own staff | Staff you employ    | $900k to $6.6m a year    |
| Multi   | Many client families  | The firm            | 0.10% to 1.00% of assets |
| Virtual | No in-house team      | Whoever coordinates | No published data        |

## What a fractional family office actually is

Fractional is not a separate model. It is a way of paying for people.

You buy a senior person part-time. A CIO three days a month, a CFO one day a week, a tax or cybersecurity specialist when something comes up. Plenty of family offices work this way now, and it gets packaged and sold under a few names: fractional family office, lean, sometimes virtual. Same idea underneath.

It can work well. One $200m office built its investment policy and its reporting with a part-time CIO before hiring anybody permanent, which is a sensible order to do things in. A good part-time person beats a full-time hire you can't really justify.

The honest thing is that a part-time person doesn't have skin in the game. They have other clients, they get paid for days rather than results, and if something goes wrong, it isn't their money.

That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to keep the decisions yourself, and to be clear about what you are actually buying: a person for a day a week, a software platform, or a name.

## What a family office costs to run

Single family offices are the only ones anyone surveys properly, so the numbers here are solid.

[J.P. Morgan](https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/insights/reports/2026-family-office-report?ref=capitalfounders.io) asked 333 of them for its 2026 report. An office running $250m or less costs around $900k a year. Above $1bn, it is $6.6m.

Most of that is salaries. Two-thirds of the spending goes on people; the average office employs 12, and on [UBS](https://advisors.ubs.com/mediahandler/media/708880/UBS-Global-Family-Office-Report-2025-Final-Single-Pages.pdf?ref=capitalfounders.io)'s figures, 40% of family office staff do no investment work at all. They are on compliance, reporting, admin and property.

UBS and [Campden](https://www.campdenwealth.com/sites/default/files/FO%5FOp%5FExc%5F2025%5Freport%5Fdigital.pdf?ref=capitalfounders.io) disagree on whether bigger offices cost less as a share of what they run, and by a wide margin. I wouldn't build a plan around either answer.

## Do you need $100m to justify one?

The number you will hear is $100m. Deloitte quotes "a minimum of $100 million of investable assets" as the common benchmark for justifying a staffed office. Deloitte is repeating a figure the industry already uses, and the word is minimum, though most people quote it as a target.

My view: at least $100m, and usually a lot more.

$900k a year against $250m is 0.36%. Against $30m, it is 3% of everything you own, gone before a penny is invested, and you are carrying twelve salaries, several of which never go near your portfolio. The [family office under $100m playbook](https://www.capitalfounders.io/playbooks/running-a-family-office-under-100m/) goes through what each setup costs and who does which job.

That doesn't mean staffed offices are dying out. On Deloitte's count, which is a couple of years old now, they went from just over 6,000 in 2019 to around 8,000 by 2024, and Deloitte expects more by 2030\. Almost all of that growth is above the $100m line.

If you want it all in one place, [*Running a Family Office Under $100M*](https://www.capitalfounders.io/family-office-under-100m-guide/) covers the same ground as a designed guide. 

What any of this should cost you depends on your circumstances, and that needs proper advice.

## What a multi-family office charges

Say you don't want to run it yourself. Then you hire a multi-family office or a good wealth manager, and neither is second-rate. Plenty of founders who could run their own money would rather spend the time on something else.

Getting a price is harder than it should be. Nobody publishes an average. The 0.5%–1.5% range you see quoted everywhere traces back to software vendors.

You can check what firms file publicly in the US. [Ballentine Partners](http://ballentinepartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ADV-Part-2A-Brochure-Final.pdf?ref=capitalfounders.io) charges 0.60% down to 0.10%, with a minimum fee of $180k a year. [Arrowroot Family Office](https://arrowrootfamilyoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/AFO-Form-ADV-Part-2A-2B-4.29.2026-.pdf?ref=capitalfounders.io) charges 1.00% on the first $10m, then 0.90%, then 0.75%. Their minimum client sizes are just as far apart: Ballentine says $4m, Arrowroot says $25k. Two firms in the same category, completely different prices. I am using them as examples of what a published schedule looks like, not as suggestions.

Family Office Exchange says families above $20m "may be best served by a multi-family office". That is a trade body's opinion rather than research, and even they said: "may."

With a wealth manager, ask for the whole bill rather than the headline fee: the advice, the funds underneath it, the platform, custody, and what the firm makes on your cash and your currency conversions. [Build or outsource](https://www.capitalfounders.io/family-office-under-100m-build-or-outsource/) goes through that in detail.

## What virtual and fractional setups cost

Virtual and fractional are trickier, as they can give you the impression of control and that you "own it", but in reality you won't.

Usually, vendors who sell tech solutions promote virtual or fractional models. They say you can run a family office for less, but technology is only part of it. It's more about mindset, framework and what you actually want to do with your money. You may have indirect costs you haven't considered.

Nobody publishes real numbers for any of this, including solo. The figures you do see, $100k to $300k a year, a few thousand a month, a 40% saving on staffing, come from firms selling the setup. Partly because nobody runs surveys on individuals, so it isn't proof the setups don't work. It does mean the only prices on offer are the sellers' own.

So ask for a fee schedule, and compare it to what the same work would cost you if you hired someone, or bought day by day.

Some of these solutions might make sense. A good tech platform, or a fractional CIO who will look after your portfolio. But you need to solve the fundamentals first, then go into the details.

## Running a solo family office

Only go the solo family office route if you want to have an institutional set-up and are prepared to dedicate time and resources to figure things out.

Every family office does the same [five jobs](https://www.capitalfounders.io/minimum-viable-family-office-setup/) whether it has staff or not: purpose and policy, one view of everything you own, a decision rule, a review calendar, and one person accountable. Run solo, and all five are yours. You can hire specialists to do the work, but the deciding stays with you.

The [launch memo](https://www.capitalfounders.io/already-running-solo-family-office/) treats that as a standard to hold yourself to, and [three operating models for sub-$100m](https://www.capitalfounders.io/playbooks/running-a-family-office-under-100m/chapters/three-operating-models/) cover how these setups run day to day.

How I think about it: most of this work happens well before there is anything to manage. How to structure personal holdings for current and new ventures, and what the implications would be in 5-10 years when it is time for an exit. It's not as easy as it sounds. When you start thinking about next steps in practice, things come up that you hadn't considered.

I am also exploring and practising with AI agents that can help with certain parts of the workflow, so I am focused on building a personal operating system: understanding workflows, processes, structures. Agentic AI is still in its early days, so I try to separate noise from substance and focus on what matters. And I think the most important thing is this. Once you have a clear picture in your head, processes mapped, structure and flows clear, it will be easier to add AI to that. Map everything, set up the workflows. And learning and learning.

## Start by pricing what you already pay

Before you compare the models, write these down.

- Write down what the money is for: what it has to pay for, what it must never be risked on, and what return would make the next ten years a good one.
- Decide whether you want to run it yourself, and roughly how many hours a month you would give it.
- Mark which of the five jobs are already being done, and by whom.
- Add up what you already pay, across every adviser, platform and product that touches your money, with the annual figure next to each one.

That last one is the job for this week. List every fee across advisers, funds, platforms, custody, accountancy and legal, then put each line against one of the five jobs. It takes about an hour if the paperwork is in one place. Two things usually come out of it: a total that is bigger than you thought, and a job or two nobody is being paid to do.

That total is the number any model has to beat. It is also the only figure in this piece you can check yourself.

## New on the Site

The Signal, which runs ahead of this piece, addresses the team question behind all four models: when it makes sense to hire someone to coordinate your advisers, and what that person costs at $30m, $50m, and $100m.

Read it: [When to Hire Someone to Run Your Family Office](https://www.capitalfounders.io/when-to-hire-family-office-manager/)

## Common questions

How do you choose a family office model? 

Start with what the money is for and whether you want to run it like a business, because that answer removes most of the options before cost comes into it. If you don't want to run it, a multi-family office or a good wealth manager can be the answer. If you do, the question becomes who is accountable for the decisions, which is what a solo family office settles: it is run by one person, the founder who owns the capital.

What does a fractional family office cost? 

Fractional is a way of paying for people rather than a type of family office, so there is no category price. You are buying a senior person part time, and the cost is whatever that person charges: a CIO three days a month, a CFO one day a week. Nobody publishes an average, and the figures in circulation come from firms selling the setup. Ask a provider for their fee schedule and compare it against what the same work would cost you employed. Worth remembering that a part-time person has other clients and is paid for days rather than results.

What is a virtual family office? 

Usually it means a network of independent specialists, typically investment, tax, legal and insurance, working to one strategy with nobody in-house. The term is used loosely, though: it can also describe a multi-family office whose team works remotely, or a software-led setup staffed by part-time seniors. Lean and micro family office cover overlapping ground without lining up neatly. In every version the work sits outside, so the thing to establish is who is coordinating it, because that is who effectively makes the decisions.

Do you need $100 million to justify a family office? 

Deloitte quotes "a minimum of $100 million of investable assets" as the common benchmark for justifying a staffed single family office, and the word in that sentence is minimum. J.P. Morgan's 2026 survey puts average running costs at around $900k a year for offices of $250m or less. That is 0.36% of $250m and 3% of $30m, which is why the staffed model rarely makes sense lower down. Below the benchmark the question stops being how to staff an office and becomes who is accountable for the decisions.

Is a solo family office the same as a virtual family office? 

No. Virtual is about delivery: who does the work and how it is coordinated. Solo is about governance: who is accountable for the decisions, which is the founder who owns the capital. A solo family office can use a virtual setup or share a part-time CIO and stay solo, because the accountability has not moved.

**Capital Founders OS** is an educational platform for founders with $5M–$100M in assets. Frameworks for thinking about wealth — so you can make better decisions. 

Explore more: [Playbooks](https://www.capitalfounders.io/playbooks/) · [Capital Signals](https://www.capitalfounders.io/tag/capital-signals/) · [Wealth Architecture](https://www.capitalfounders.io/tag/wealth-architect/) · [Investment Strategy](https://www.capitalfounders.io/tag/investment-office/) · [Business Building](https://www.capitalfounders.io/tag/build-mode/) · [Life Design](https://www.capitalfounders.io/tag/life-os/) 

Found this useful? Forward it to a founder who's thinking about this stuff. Got a question or disagree with something? [Get in touch](https://www.capitalfounders.io/contact/). 

New here? [Subscribe](https://www.capitalfounders.io/#/portal) for one email a week. 

⚠️

****Disclaimer:** This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment, legal, or tax advice and should not be relied upon as such. The views expressed are the author's own and do not represent any employer, firm, or institution. All investing carries risk, including loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Nothing here is an offer or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Your circumstances are unique — consult qualified professionals before making financial, legal, or tax decisions. By reading, you accept these terms.