Is there a financial adviser shortage in Australia?
Yes, and it is structural rather than temporary. s. In its 2025 Financial Advice Report, Investment Trends has found that a massive 15.9 million Australians have unmet advice needs, and 1.3 million are planning to see an adviser in the next two years. The current adviser workforce of 15,012 is serving a fraction of them. The 60-plus age bracket alone accounts for 1.8 million of those entities, the exact cohort making the pension, drawdown, and estate planning decisions that sit at the centre of SMSF advice.
The profession did not shrink evenly to get here. Entry-level advisers collapsed from around 8,400 in 2019 to just 667 by 2023, following the Royal Commission, FASEA reforms, and the exit of the major banks from advice. The banks had quietly served as the industry’s primary recruitment and training engine. When they left, nothing replaced that function, and the cost of training new advisers shifted onto small and mid-sized practices least equipped to absorb it.
The result is a workforce that is historically top-heavy. Close to 40% of advisers now have 20 or more years of experience, while only 13% have fewer than five. The pipeline is recovering; 573 new entrants joined in 2025, with 94% still current a year on, the strongest retention signal on record, but it remains far below what is needed to offset the wave of retirements coming from the other end.
Why this matters more for SMSF advisers
ASIC’s AFSL data tells a story that will feel familiar to most SMSF practices. More than half of all licensees in Australia (54.8%) now operate with one or two advisers. These owner-operated AFSLs carry the market’s most experienced advisers, averaging 19.7 years of experience, and the least operational infrastructure to match. It is exactly the profile of a boutique SMSF advice practice: deep technical expertise, a loyal long-term client base, and a principal adviser who is simultaneously the relationship manager, compliance reviewer, and administrator.
That combination creates real succession and capacity risk. When an experienced sole practitioner eventually steps back, the practice’s compliance obligations, its established client relationships, and often its trust deed and documentation history all rest with one person. Padua’s data shows this cohort has, understandably, been the most reluctant to exit. Many are running valuable, well-established books and have the most to lose by stepping away early. But a finite runway is still finite, and the report is candid that the profession has not built the infrastructure to absorb that transition smoothly.
Layer on the SMSF-specific pressures that have been reshaping compliance workloads this year, Division 296 reporting, TBAR changes, and evolving LRBA rules, and the picture becomes clearer still. Advisers are being asked to do more technical, more time-sensitive, more heavily documented work, with a workforce that is ageing and a pipeline that is still rebuilding.
The constraint is no longer just headcount
Simply adding advisers to the market will not close the gap. Even the most immediately accessible source of supply, the more than 6,220 people who have passed the adviser exam but are not currently practising, would lift capacity by only a few thousand advisers against a need measured in millions of entities.
The answer must be productivity. Not working longer hours, but restructuring how much of an adviser’s time goes into admin, compliance documentation, and fund administration versus strategy and client relationships. Compliance infrastructure costs are largely fixed regardless of practice size, which means the smallest, most senior-heavy practices, the ones carrying the bulk of SMSF expertise in this country, are also the ones absorbing the highest relative cost of standing still.
What this means in practice
For SMSF advisers, the choice increasingly isn’t between growing headcount or not. It’s between building institutional-grade compliance and administration infrastructure in-house, which is rarely economical at boutique scale, or accessing it externally so more of the adviser’s own time goes back into the work only they can do.
This is also playing out on the client side. As adviser capacity tightens and the population searching for advice grows, and grows older, more Australians are actively searching for Australia’s best financial advisers than the profession currently has room to serve well. Practices that free up adviser time now will be better placed to take on the clients this search demand represents, rather than turning them away.
Fund establishment, ongoing administration, SMSF documentation, and paraplanning support are exactly the areas where partnering with an SMSF solution provider lets a practice scale its client capacity without scaling its headcount or its compliance risk. It doesn’t replace the adviser’s expertise. It protects the time that expertise needs to be useful.
The profession’s own data is telling SMSF practices something worth listening to: the workforce isn’t going to grow its way out of this gap any time soon. The practices that come out ahead will be the ones that solved for capacity first.
How WealthRecords can help
WealthRecords works alongside SMSF advisers to take on the fund establishment, administration, documentation, accounting, and paraplanning work that otherwise eats into adviser time, at a fixed rate, with no fees to transfer clients across. Every fund we onboard also receives a complimentary Fund HealthCheck, giving your practice a clear, no-cost view of where existing funds stand before you decide where to focus next. If capacity, not client demand, is what’s holding your practice back from growing, get in touch with our team to see how we can help.