LPL Financial has been the largest independent brokerage in wealth management for decades, but the gap between it and everyone else has expanded to an unprecedented girth.
As displayed by the rankings below of the top 15 firms from Financial Planning's 2026 IBD Elite study of the industry's independent brokerages, the firm generated more than double the revenue last year of its perennial nearest competitor, Ameriprise. Rival firms and frequent fellow contenders Osaic, Cetera and Raymond James Financial Services rounded out the top five.
The dominance of LPL as, "by far, the most successful player in this space," reflects its "
"It enabled them to really cater the platform to all types of advisors," Diamond said, citing the firm's Linsco employee unit and the clearing and custody services it provides to registered investment advisory firms alongside its more traditional independent brokerage business. "They have so many different affiliation channels that really allow them to say, 'We're going to be all things to all people.'"
Of course, he pointed out that the rest of the firms in a channel of the industry that collectively boosted its revenue 13% year over year to $56.28 billion in 2025 aren't exactly struggling. But the yawning chasm between LPL and Ameriprise over the past decade offers financial advisors and other wealth management professionals instructive numbers about how the No. 1 IBD is both fueling the industry's growth and its consolidation — even as there are still
In 2016 and 2017, which was the last year that there was a smaller difference than the prior one between the two firms' annual revenue, LPL generated less than 1% more business than Ameriprise. Every year since then, however, the disparity by percentage and raw dollars, to the tune of hundreds of millions in revenue and, in recent years, several billions, has been growing.
Last year, LPL hiked that number to more than $9 billion, or 113% of the size of Ameriprise's business, which itself is at a scale that would be the envy of almost any other firm in the channel. In the past decade, the ravine between the two giants extended to that distance from a mere $32.4 million in 2016. LPL first took over as the No. 1 firm on the IBD Elite in 1996, but it never has created so much space between itself and its nearest competition.
Even so, the team led by CEO Rich Steinmeier may not want to rest on those laurels. For one, the rise of the channel's business to the tune of a 325% surge in combined revenue since 2007 means that the "space as a whole is benefitting"
For advisors, that means that RIAs and other independent brokerages could act as nice landing spots that often look similar in the end to their clients. So recruiting and retaining advisors remains a difficult task for all of them. At the same time, many advisors simply "don't want to affiliate with a firm that's just going to get bought six months to a year from now," Diamond said. LPL can operate with that advantage while it aims to fend off those challenges.
"My general advice with evaluating broker-dealers is, you need to cast a wide net, but not so wide," Diamond said. "Once you start really tiering down in quality or size, for that matter, I think you get into acquisition risk."
Scroll down the page for the top 15 firms on Financial Planning's IBD Elite ranking of the largest independent brokerages in wealth management.
And follow these links to find other features from Financial Planning's 2026 IBD Elite study:
Notes: All of the data points come from year-end 2025, and lines marked as "NA" or "N/A" mean that those particular figures were not available. Outside of certain publicly traded firms that disclose their business metrics and other publicly available information on FINRA BrokerCheck, FP relies on each firm to provide accurate figures that aren't independently verifiable. The "number of producing registered representatives" is a technical term that is usually accepted as the most synonymous with the number of financial advisors.
