Family Office Services: What a Family Office Does, Outsources and Costs

20 August 2021, updated 8 October 2026

A family office is a private company that handles the assets of a wealthy family. A single family office (SFO) works for one family alone, while a multi-family office (MFO) serves several families and is often not owned by the families whose wealth it manages. Family office services range from strategic asset allocation and financial reporting, which most offices keep in-house, to tax planning, legal services and cybersecurity, which most of them outsource. Many also look after the family's life beyond the portfolio: in the UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, 45 per cent of offices provided lifestyle services themselves and a further 19 per cent bought them in.

What is a family office?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission describes family offices as entities established by wealthy families to manage their money and to provide services such as tax and estate planning. The corporate dynamic of a single family office and a multi-family office is fundamentally different, as one is a uniquely tailored solution whilst the other has to combine and compromise. What is true for both is that the primary objective is to grow the wealth of the family and the secondary objective is to ensure that the assets are transferred across future generations.

A family office is not a wealth manager or a private bank, although it often works with several of them. It sits on the family's side of the table, sets the strategy, chooses the banks and managers that carry it out, and reports on the family's wealth as a whole.

What services does a family office provide?

The core of a family office's work is the capital, which means setting the strategic asset allocation, researching investments and reporting on the results. Around that core sit the family's own affairs, from succession planning and philanthropy to tax, legal matters and cybersecurity. Many offices go further. Citi Private Bank's guide to establishing a family office describes a group of functions it calls family logistics, among them transport, event planning, a health care concierge, aircraft and yacht management, and the management of an art collection.

Which services stay in-house, and which are outsourced?

UBS asked 317 of its family office clients, between January and April 2025, which services they perform in-house, which they outsource and which they do not offer at all; the table shows nine of them.

Offices that keep a service in-house most often say they have the expertise (67 per cent), prefer operational control (63 per cent) or want to protect the family's privacy (63 per cent). Offices that outsource most often say they lack the expertise (64 per cent) or the technical resources (56 per cent), or that outsourcing is more cost-effective (56 per cent).

The 2026 Global Family Office Report of J.P. Morgan Private Bank, based on 333 single family offices in 30 countries, names investment management as the service outsourced most often, followed by legal and tax work and then cybersecurity. That does not contradict the UBS figures, because an office can set the allocation itself and still give the portfolios to outside managers.

Where do lifestyle services sit?

In the UBS survey, 45 per cent of offices provide lifestyle services in-house, 19 per cent outsource them and 36 per cent do not offer them at all. Close to two thirds therefore arrange this part of the family's life in some form, but only about one in five hands it to an outside provider.

As the family officer is a highly trusted person, he or she will often be confronted with wishes that lie outside his or her purview: the table that is not available, the flight that has already gone, the box that was allocated last season. Where the family office ends and the lifestyle manager begins is the subject of our article A Family Office and a Lifestyle Manager Are Not the Same Thing, which also covers the UBS Global Family Office Report 2026.

How much does it cost to run a family office?

UBS puts the average pure cost of running a family office at 41.1 basis points of assets under management in 2024, roughly 4.1 million US dollars a year for every billion managed. That was slightly above the planned 40.3, while offices managing more than 1 billion US dollars came in lower, at 35.1 basis points. Staff are the largest item: they made up two thirds of the pure cost in 2024 (66 per cent), and UBS expects a similar share for 2025 (67 per cent). The average office employs 12 people.

The type of office matters as much as its size. For 2025, offices with an operating business projected 44.9 basis points and those without one 33.0; offices serving the second to seventh generation projected 44.0, against 36.8 for those serving the first. Size only makes a difference at the top. Offices managing 100 to 250 million US dollars projected 41.8 basis points and those managing 251 million to 1 billion 42.4, against 35.5 above that.

Other studies measure the cost on a different basis, so the figures are not directly comparable.

How much wealth does a family office need?

There is no fixed threshold; what decides is whether the family is prepared to carry the cost. According to Citi's guide, family office expenses often come to 1 to 2 per cent of active assets, which for a small office with 200 million US dollars means roughly 2 to 4 million dollars a year. Multi-family offices, certain trust companies, private banks and investment advisory firms offer investment management, accounting, tax and related services for an annual fee of 0.8 to 1 per cent of active assets under management. Citi calls this a useful comparison, while noting that such providers may not offer the privacy and control of an office of one's own.

What is changing for family offices in 2025 and 2026?

The number of family offices keeps growing, and many of them face a change of generation they have not yet planned for. Deloitte estimated in September 2024 that there were 8,030 single family offices worldwide, up from 6,130 in 2019, managing 3.1 trillion US dollars; it expects more than 10,720 offices and 5.4 trillion US dollars by 2030.

The second change is the generational one, which UBS's Global Wealth Report 2026 calls the Great Wealth Transfer. When we first wrote about it in August 2021, we described the coming generation as Generation X, then mostly in their forties, and Generation Y, the Millennials, mostly in their thirties. By the definitions of Pew Research, Generation X was born between 1965 and 1980 and the Millennials between 1981 and 1996, so in 2026 they are roughly 46 to 61 and 30 to 45 years old.

The handover now has a timeframe. In Citi Wealth's 2026 Global Family Office Report, based on 351 family offices in 41 countries, roughly a third of respondents expect a leadership transition in the family, the family office or the family business within five years. In the North America Family Office Report 2025 of RBC Wealth Management and Campden Wealth, 47 per cent of offices expect control to pass to the next generation within the coming decade.

How well prepared the offices are depends on the survey. The UBS Global Family Office Report 2026 found that only 35 per cent have a defined succession plan for the family office itself and only 27 per cent a structured process to prepare the heirs. The RBC report counts 69 per cent with a succession plan in place, up from 53 per cent a year earlier, while J.P. Morgan reports that 86 per cent have no clear succession plan for their decision makers. The samples and the questions differ, so the three figures measure different things.

The third change is internationalisation. In Citi's survey, 38 per cent of respondents expect the globalisation of their family to increase over the next five years. For a family moving to Switzerland, our article on relocating to Switzerland sets out residence, home, schools, private medicine, banking and household in the order they have to happen.

How a lifestyle manager works with a family office

Family offices that would rather delegate the private side of a principal's life than build the function themselves are one of the groups our corporate concierge mandate is for. The request usually comes from an assistant, a chief of staff or the family office itself. You hear straight away whether it can be done and what it depends on, and if it cannot be met, we say so rather than take the mandate and hope. Scope, fee and confidentiality are agreed in writing before anything is committed, and one partner holds the mandate, so the office keeps a single counterpart and a single file.

The mandate is held in Zug, with Düsseldorf, Dubai and Hong Kong holding the hours on either side of it. Where the private side outgrows the corporate one, it continues as a lifestyle management mandate. We call our approach Triple A, though not in the sense of the AAA rating you find on a financial instrument: Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. Most of what we are asked for has no listed price, no public availability and no obvious way in, and that is the part we handle.

The arrangement for family offices is described on our page Concierge for companies and family offices, and the one for private clients under personal concierge. The Secret of Lifestyle Management explains how a lifestyle manager differs from a hotel concierge.