We ran one household through seven free fee calculators. The answers ranged from "an adviser will cost you $175,000" to "an adviser will make you $434,000." None of them is lying. Each one answers the question its builder wanted to answer. Which is rarely the answer to the question you asked.
Every fee calculator is a model, and every model leaves something out. What a calculator leaves out is usually predictable from who built it. Free calculators tend to answer one of three questions: what the fee costs you, how much cheaper the builder of the calculator is than a 1% fee, or how much an adviser earns you. Before you trust the number, figure out which question the tool is answering.
Same couple. Same money. Same 1% fee. The answers were more than $600,000 apart.
The test was deliberately plain: a married couple with $300,000 invested, a 20-year horizon, a 6% annual return, no new contributions, and an adviser charging 1% of assets each year. Those are inputs a real household could plausibly type in.
| Calculator | Built by | What it told the couple |
|---|---|---|
| SmartAsset | Adviser-matching service | An adviser adds $434,036 |
| SLP Wealth | Financial planning firm | An adviser adds $353,936 after fees |
| Domain Money | Flat-fee advisory firm | Its flat fee leaves you $40,565 ahead of 1% |
| Range | Flat-fee advisory firm | A 1% fee costs $2,272 more than its flat fee |
| Schwab MoneyWise | Brokerage-funded foundation | The fee costs $166,151 |
| NerdWallet | Personal finance publisher | The fee costs $175,199 |
| AdviserReport | Us | The fee costs $175,199 (at a flat 1%) |
Read down the right-hand column and the calculators are not even arguing about the same thing. Three report a cost. Two compare a 1% fee against the builder's own price. Two report a gain.
Start with the two calculators that do nothing but subtract a fee. NerdWallet says the 1% fee costs the couple $175,199 over 20 years. Schwab MoneyWise says $166,151. Same inputs, same purpose, $9,048 apart.
Neither is wrong. NerdWallet takes 1% of the account balance each year. Schwab simply lowers the return from 6% to 5%. Both are reasonable ways to model a fee, and they produce different answers.
The same thing happens with "fees paid." Depending on whether a calculator charges the fee at the start or the end of the year, the couple pays somewhere between $98,571 and $104,485 in fees over the same 20 years. If two careful calculators cannot agree on simple subtraction, a single number from any of them deserves a second look.
Sort the seven calculators by the question they were built to answer and a pattern appears. The question a calculator asks tends to match the business of whoever built it.
NerdWallet and Schwab MoneyWise sit here, along with our own calculator. These are the closest to neutral, because they only measure cost. For NerdWallet and Schwab, the blind spot is everything that is not the advisory fee. Neither one asks about the expense ratios on the funds inside your account, platform or program fees, or what your cash is earning while it sits uninvested. For many households those layers add up to a meaningful share of the total.
Range Finance and Domain Money represent a second model. They are advisory firms that charge a flat annual fee, and their calculators compare that flat fee against a 1% assets under management fee. Range's interactive tool deducts Range's own fee and shows the couple close to break-even at $300,000. The worked example on its marketing page is less even-handed. It compares a 1% adviser against Range at a 0% asset fee, without showing Range's membership cost.
Domain Money reported the couple $40,565 ahead. That result depends on which of its three plans you choose. Its own disclosure lists ongoing plan fees from $2,900 to $8,000 a year, against $3,000 for a 1% fee on $300,000. At the top tier, the flat fee costs more than the percentage fee it is being compared to, at least in the early years. Neither firm's calculator includes fund expenses on either side of the comparison.
SmartAsset and SLP Wealth net an assumed benefit against the fee, and the assumptions do nearly all of the work.
SmartAsset is an adviser-matching service, compensated by the advisers it refers. Its calculator credits the hypothetical adviser with a 2.47% annual return premium and adds a yearly "tax savings" equal to about 1.05% of net worth. Its published methodology says the 2.47% comes from averaging 45 stock analysts' one-year calls against the S&P 500. At the end of the couple's 20 years, the gap between its adviser and no-adviser projections is $434,036. That figure implies the adviser lifted the couple's return from 6% to roughly 8% a year, after the 1% fee.
SLP Wealth asks a series of yes-or-no questions about your investing habits, prices the "mistakes" using figures from Vanguard's Advisor's Alpha research, and lets those mistakes compound year after year. The fee does not compound. It is counted only as the dollars paid, with no allowance for the growth those dollars would have earned. Value compounds, cost does not, and the net comes out positive.
A calculator that builds the adviser's value into its default is doing marketing, not arithmetic. Good advice is worth paying for, and sometimes worth a great deal. But that value depends on a specific adviser, a specific household, and specific decisions, often made years apart. It belongs in a conversation with the person you are considering hiring. It does not belong in a default setting on someone else's website.
Our fee calculator answers the first question only: what will this cost? It compares four common ways firms are paid, includes the expense ratios of the funds each type of firm tends to use, adds front-end sales charges where they apply, and grows the portfolio while taking fees out of it. It reports two numbers: what you pay, and what that costs you once the lost growth is counted.
Run our projection at a flat 1% with no fund costs and it lands on NerdWallet's $175,199 to the dollar. That agreement is reassuring. It is also not the same as being right.
Here is what it still leaves out:
We think it is directionally more accurate than most of the tools above, because it measures more of the cost and assumes nothing about the benefit. It is still a model. AdviserReport takes no referral fees, and the calculator does not route you to anyone.
No calculator can tell you what a specific adviser will cost you. Three questions, asked directly, get much closer.
Expect two answers first: "it's all in the agreement," and "I can't say, because fees move with the market." Both are true, and neither prevents a rough estimate. Holding the balance flat for 12 months removes the market from the math. What is left is the advisory fee, plus the expense ratios of the funds you will own, plus any platform, program, or account fees. You are not asking for a guarantee. You are asking for one number you can compare. A percentage is easy to quote and easy to misjudge. A dollar figure that includes every layer is harder to wave away.
Commissions, 12b–1 trails, revenue sharing, and cash sweep income all show up in the firm's Form ADV Part 2A brochure, under Item 5, and in its Form CRS. If the answer is "nothing else," the brochure should agree.
Financial planning, tax work, rebalancing, and how often you will actually talk. A 1% fee at one firm is not the same product as a 1% fee at another, and the difference rarely shows up in a calculator.
Start with our fee calculator for the cost side. Then look up the firm. Every report shows how the firm can be paid, lays out the conflicts of interest disclosed in its Form ADV Part 1A, gives you the questions to ask, and grades the firm on a conflict-of-interest scale. The grade maps loosely to the revenue model:
| Grade | Typical revenue model |
|---|---|
| A | Fee-Only: RIA |
| BCD | Fee-Based: RIA & BD |
| BD | Commission: BD (separate designation, not a grade) |
Because they answer different questions and make different assumptions. Some measure only what the fee costs. Some compare the builder's own pricing against a 1% fee. Some add an assumed benefit from the adviser. Even calculators that only measure cost can disagree by thousands of dollars depending on when in the year the fee is charged.
Fees paid is the dollars that left your account. Total cost adds the growth those dollars would have earned if they had stayed invested. On $300,000 over 20 years at 6%, a 1% fee means roughly $104,000 in fees paid and $175,000 in total cost.
It depends on what the fee buys and what else you pay. On $300,000, 1% is $3,000 a year before fund expenses and any other account costs. Comprehensive planning alone can absolutely justify that. Portfolio management alone rarely does.
Yes, but the value depends on the specific adviser and the specific decisions they help you make. Tax-aware investing, retirement income planning, and keeping you invested through a bad market can all be worth real money. That value is conditional, which is why it should not be built into a calculator's default.
Treat any of them as a rough estimate, and prefer one that measures cost without assuming a benefit. Then ask the adviser to estimate your total annual cost in dollars, assuming your balance stays flat for a year, and check it against the firm's Form ADV Part 2A brochure.
All calculator results on this page were run on October 11, 2026. Calculators are updated over time, and their assumptions and outputs may have changed since.