So, being the geek that I am, the first thing I did at 6:30 this morning, after the cat woke me up at 5:30 wanting to go outside and kill things, was download the NextWealth Financial Advice Business Benchmarks Report 2026.

There are probably more exciting ways to start a Friday, but one figure in the “people and capacity” section really caught my attention.

NextWealth says onboarding a typical client takes around 32 hours of human time across the whole team. Of that, admin accounts for eight hours and paraplanning for seven, so 15 hours combined before adviser and compliance time is added in.

We do exactly that slice of the work for a living, so naturally I wanted to know what our own numbers looked like.

 

What our own data says

Because we track time against the work we do, I was curious to see what our own numbers looked like next to the NextWealth benchmark. Across our casework this year, (631 cases and counting) our average admin and paraplanning time comes out at around 6.8 hours per client.

On the face of it, that’s less than half NextWealth’s 15-hour figure. But it isn’t quite a like-for-like comparison, and that’s actually where it gets interesting.

NextWealth’s figure relates specifically to onboarding a typical new client. Ours is a blended average across the different types of work firms send us, from more straightforward reviews and switches through to much more involved pension and specialist planning cases.

So I wouldn’t use 6.8 hours to claim we’re somehow “twice as fast”.

What I do think is useful is that we know our number at all. Because when you track the time properly, you start to see very quickly which work is taking longer, which types of case use the most capacity and where the hours are actually going.

 

The average hides a lot

That 6.8-hour figure is only useful if you remember it’s an average. Some of the more straightforward work we see can sit around the 4 to 5-hour mark. More complex planning cases, IHT work or pension cases with several moving parts can easily be much higher.

Neither end of that range is “right” or “wrong”. It’s just different work.

That’s probably one of the biggest problems with any single benchmark for paraplanning time. A straightforward review and a complex pension case can both be called a “case”, while the amount of work involved can be completely different. So for me, the more useful question isn’t whether your number is 6.8 hours or 15.

It’s whether you actually know what your own number is, and what sits behind it.

 

Why might our number be lower?

This is the bit I’d be careful not to overstate. I don’t think our data proves that outsourced paraplanning is automatically faster than an in-house team, because it doesn’t.

But specialisation probably plays a part.

Our team spends most of its working week doing this type of work across different firms. Research, suitability reports, reviews, pension cases, investment work. It is the main job rather than one task competing with everything else that lands that day.

One thing we do see is the effect of interrupted work. If someone is researching a case while also dealing with client queries, internal meetings, admin, system issues and whatever else has appeared in the inbox, there is naturally more stopping and starting.

That’s not a criticism of in-house teams at all. There are brilliant internal paraplanning teams that will be every bit as efficient.

It’s simply one possible reason why a dedicated team doing the same type of work repeatedly might see a different average.

 

This is where the operational bit matters

For Heads of Paraplanning and Ops Managers, I think the more useful question is not:

“Should our cases take 6.8 hours or 15?”

It’s:

“Do we actually know how long they take?”

Because if you don’t know that, it becomes very difficult to work out where the pressure is really sitting.

Is a paraplanner spending five hours on technical work and another two on admin?

Is research being redone because information is missing?

Are advisers chasing providers when that work could sit elsewhere?

Is the team genuinely short on capacity, or is too much time disappearing into work that doesn’t need to sit with them?

That’s the sort of thing we end up talking through with firms all the time. And because most of our work is charged hourly, we get a pretty clear view of it.

Our paraplanning and technical support is currently £75 + VAT per hour, while admin support is £55 + VAT per hour.

That means both we and the firms we work with can see what different parts of the process are actually costing in time, rather than just looking at one overall salary or cost figure.

 

Cost to serve is becoming a much bigger conversation

The wider NextWealth report backs that up. 40% of firms have reviewed the cost to serve a typical client in the last 12 months, and another 25% plan to. The report also shows firms making much more deliberate decisions around which clients they serve, how they serve them and what those relationships actually cost.

That’s probably the bit I think is most useful for business owners.

You can know your revenue per client down to the pound, but if you don’t know how many hours of adviser, paraplanning, admin and compliance time sit behind that revenue, the picture is still incomplete. And the same applies to growth.

More clients only works if the delivery model underneath them can actually cope.

 

The bit I’d check in your own numbers

If you head up paraplanning, run operations or own an advice firm, I think this report is a pretty good prompt to pull your own data.

Not because you need to beat 15 hours.

And not because 6.8 is some magic target.

But because your own number tells you something useful about how your business is actually working.

I’d be looking at average research and paraplanning hours by case type, rather than one blended total. I’d also want to know how much technical time is being lost to admin or chasing, and whether the same people are regularly doing work below their skill level because there is nobody else available to pick it up.

That’s where the interesting conversations usually start.

Money Marketing’s coverage of the report picked up on the same wider theme, with firms repricing and segmenting client books as cost-to-serve becomes more important.

And the full NextWealth Financial Advice Business Benchmarks Report is well worth a look if you work in operations, paraplanning or run an advice business.

 

Where I land on it

I’m not the one logging the time against every case. That’s down to the team and the system they use. But I do like being able to put our own numbers next to a national benchmark rather than just saying “we’re efficient” and expecting people to take our word for it.

Our 6.8 hours doesn’t prove we are faster than everyone else. What it does show is that we know what our work takes, we track it properly, and we can see how much the answer changes depending on the type of work involved.

That feels like a much more useful conversation to have with firms.

If you want to see what outsourced research and paraplanning looks like against your own case volumes, we’re always happy to put real numbers on the table.

Ours and yours.