Half the Advisers Are Gone: Why Access to Quality Advice Is the Real Scarcity for High-Income Australians

There is a number most high-income Australians have never seen, and it quietly shapes the quality of advice they can get. Australia had around 28,900 financial advisers at the end of 2018. By March 2026 that figure had fallen to roughly 15,135, a decline of about 48% in under eight years. Nearly half the profession walked out the door.

At the same time, demand went the other way. An estimated 15.9 million Australian adults have unmet advice needs, and around 1.3 million people plan to see an adviser in the next two years. So the picture is simple and uncomfortable: far fewer advisers, far more people who want advice. For high earners, whose situations are exactly the ones that benefit most from good advice, the scarcity is not money or information. It is access to someone genuinely worth listening to.

This is general information rather than advice for your circumstances. But understanding the shape of this shortage changes how you should think about choosing, and keeping, an adviser.

How the profession lost half its people

The decline was not an accident or a blip. It was structural, driven by a few forces arriving at once.

Regulatory and education reforms after the 2018 Royal Commission raised the bar for who could practise, and a large number of advisers chose to leave rather than meet the new standards. The end of 2025 brought a final education deadline that pushed another wave out, with hundreds dropping off the register in December alone. Underneath all of it sits demographics: a profession whose average age skews older, with experienced advisers retiring faster than new ones arrive. Around 700 to 1,000 advisers leave each year, while only about 569 new entrants joined in 2025. The training pipeline is long, a new adviser takes years to qualify and complete a professional year, so the gap cannot close quickly even with goodwill.

There is a tentative sign that numbers are bottoming out rather than still collapsing. But bottoming out at around 15,000 is not a recovery. Projections suggest the profession may sit in the 15,000 to 18,000 range for the next decade, barely keeping pace with demand at the optimistic end. The shortage is not a passing phase. It is the environment.

Why this matters more for high-income earners

A shortage of advisers does not hit everyone equally. It hits hardest at the two ends: people who cannot afford advice at all, and people whose needs are complex enough that generic advice actively underserves them. High earners sit firmly in the second group.

When advisers are scarce, two things happen to the advice market. The remaining demand gets rationed, so the better advisers fill their books and become harder to access, and a portion of those still practising are coasting toward retirement, offering an annual review and a newsletter and calling it a service. For someone with a straightforward situation, that might be tolerable.

For a high-income professional or business owner juggling tax, super under a changing Division 296 regime, property under shifting negative gearing rules, equity, debt, and a family, “adequate” advice quietly leaves a lot of value on the table and a lot of risk unmanaged.

The uncomfortable truth is that being able to pay for advice does not guarantee getting good advice. In a shortage, the scarcity is quality and attention, not availability of someone with a licence. The work becomes knowing the difference.

What high-income earners should look for in an adviser

If access to genuinely good advice is the real scarcity, then choosing well matters more than it used to. Worth weighing:

Look for someone building, not winding down. An adviser early or mid-career, investing in their practice, has different incentives from one managing a book quietly toward retirement. Ask directly where they see their practice in ten years. The answer tells you whether you are a relationship or a number.

Judge the conversation, not the pitch. Good advice starts with your life, what you are building, what matters, how you actually think about money, not with a product or a portfolio. If the first conversation is about returns and structure, that is the floor, not the work. The adviser who only ever talks performance is offering the easiest part of the job.

Check that the depth matches your complexity. A high-income situation has moving parts that interact: tax, super, debt, structure, estate, business. An adviser who treats these as separate boxes rather than one connected picture is giving you fragments. The value is in how the pieces fit.

Notice whether you feel understood or processed. This sounds soft and it is the most reliable signal there is. After a good meeting you feel clearer, more confident, and more in control. After a transactional one you feel handled. Pay attention to which one you walk away with.

Be wary of “set and forget” dressed up as service. An annual review and a quarterly update is the minimum, not the offering. The question is what happens in between, and whether anyone is actually thinking about your situation when a rate cycle turns or a budget changes the rules.

The Obsidian perspective

The advisers leaving were, for the most part, the product-led and the complacent, people for whom advice was a transaction and a quarterly statement. What that exit reveals is that the transactional model was never the valuable part. Information is free now. Portfolio construction is increasingly commoditised. Performance and structure are table stakes, the price of entry for any serious firm, not the thing worth paying for. If that were all advice was, the shortage would not matter, because software would fill it.

What does not commoditise is the relationship: someone who understands the life you are building, who reads your situation in full rather than in fragments, who is still going to be there in fifteen years because they are building something rather than running it down. The real work of advice was never the numbers. It is the judgement, the accountability, and the understanding of the person behind the portfolio. That is precisely what a shrinking, ageing profession is least able to offer at scale, and exactly what high earners need most.

The half that left took the easy part of the job with them. What remains scarce, and valuable, is the hard part. Choose for that.

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