Registered investment advisor M&A has gotten more concentrated in 2026. Using AdvizorPro's M&A Activity dashboard, we dissected 315 acquisitions over the past year and mapped them state by state to see who's buying, where the activity is clustering, and which parts of the country the aggregator wave still hasn't reached.

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The headline: California alone accounts for 44 deals — roughly one in seven of everything we tracked nationally, and more than double the next closest state. The top 10 states combine for 52% of all deal volume, meaning M&A activity is heavily concentrated in a handful of coastal and metro-heavy markets rather than spread evenly across the country.

Top 10 states by deal volume

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Who's buying

No single aggregator dominates the way California dominates the map. The most active acquirer by deal count, Farther, closed 12 deals — spread across six different states rather than piling into one market, which suggests a deliberately national build-out rather than a regional roll-up strategy.

But deal count and dollars tell two different stories. LPL Financial, Mercer Global Advisors, and Waverly Advisors all closed 11 deals apiece, putting them in a statistical tie for second on volume. On the dollar side, the picture flips entirely: 1832 Asset Management acquired more AUM in a single deal ($38.2B) than any of the volume leaders did across their entire run of acquisitions combined.

Top 5 by deal count

Top 5 by AUM acquired

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Where the map is still blank

Nine states recorded zero tracked acquisitions in the trailing 12 months: Arkansas, DC, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Nevada.

North Carolina is the one worth pausing on. It's the ninth-most-populous state in the country and home to a genuinely large advisory market - yet it shows no tracked consolidation activity in this window at all. Whether that reflects fragmented ownership that hasn't found the right buyer yet, or aggregators simply not prioritizing the market, it's a gap worth watching heading into the back half of the year.

Methodology

• Source: AdvizorPro's M&A Activity dashboard, built from SEC ADV-W successor filings.

• Window: July 15, 2025 – July 15, 2026 (trailing 12 months).

• State attribution: based on the acquired firm's filed location. 29 deals had an unresolved locations and are excluded from the state-level map and tables above, though they're included in aggregator-level deal counts where applicable.

• A note on interpretation: ADV-W successor filings capture legal successor relationships, which are typically true acquisitions; a small number may reflect internal restructurings rather than external M&A.

About AdvizorPro

AdvizorPro is the advisor intelligence platform built for asset managers, ETF issuers, wealthtechs, and distribution teams that need to identify, prioritize, and engage financial advisors. With verified data across 750,000+ RIAs, family offices, and broker-dealers, combined with AI-powered lead scoring, TrafficIQ visitor intelligence, native CRM integrations, and now direct connectivity to Claude and ChatGPT, AdvizorPro powers the go-to-market strategies of leading firms across the wealth management ecosystem.

This map only scratches the surface of what's happening in RIA M&A. Book a free demo and see how AdvizorPro's data can sharpen your own deal sourcing and market intelligence.

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