HIGH NET WORTH

Most people asking about a family office don't need one yet.

The term gets thrown around loosely by anyone selling wealth services. The real thing has a real cost, and for most affluent families, a strong external team does the same job for a fraction of the price.

"Family office" has become marketing language — plenty of advisors and insurance brokers now call themselves one. The actual thing is a dedicated, in-house team working for a single family (or a shared team working for several), and it costs real money to run.

What it actually is

Single-family office (SFO): a dedicated team — often including a CIO, tax professionals, legal counsel, and administrative staff — employed exclusively by one family. Total control, absolute privacy, and a real payroll: typically $2–5 million a year in compensation alone, before office space and technology.
Multi-family office (MFO): the same range of services, shared and cost-split across several families — meaningfully more accessible than building a dedicated team from scratch.

The honest range on net worth thresholds

You'll see genuinely different numbers depending on the source, and that's not sloppy research — there just isn't one agreed line. Industry estimates for a standalone single-family office generally run from $50 million to $500 million, with the wide range reflecting how much the family wants the office to actually do. A narrower, single-focus office might work starting around $50–100 million; a fully staffed one with investment management, legal, tax, and family governance typically wants closer to $500 million to justify its cost as a share of assets.

Structure	Typical threshold
Multi-family office	$25M–$50M+
Narrower single-family office	$50M–$100M+
Full-service single-family office	$500M+

Cost typically runs 1–3% of total assets annually for a full single-family office — a real number worth sitting next to whatever your actual assets are before getting attached to the idea.

The more useful framing than a net worth number: build versus buy

Almost every service a family office provides — tax planning, estate work, investment management, trustee services — is genuinely buyable from external professionals: a strong accountant, an estate lawyer, a wealth manager, a trust company. For most families, even quite affluent ones, that external team costs a fraction of a captive structure and delivers most of the same value.

Building a dedicated office starts to make sense specifically when:

Wealth spans multiple branches of the family and multiple generations, not just one household
An operating business is throwing off enough cash flow that deploying it needs deliberate, ongoing attention
Coordinating across several external advisors has become a real, recurring headache in itself
The family genuinely wants the structure to outlast any single person — a governance goal, not just a service level

None of those are strictly a dollar figure. A first-generation family still concentrated in one primary business, however large, is usually a poor fit for a captive office — the complexity that justifies one hasn't developed yet, regardless of the balance.

The honest bottom line: if you're reading this because a net worth milestone made you wonder about a family office, the more useful question is probably "is my current team of advisors actually coordinated, or am I doing that coordination myself?" That specific pain — not a dollar figure — is usually the real signal, and a multi-family office or a better-coordinated external team solves it for most people long before a dedicated single-family office would.

See your full financial picture in one place — often the first real step toward better-coordinated planning, office or no office.

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