Family-office pay is formalizing from the top of the org chart

Botoff Consulting's twin pay surveys capture a family-office payroll that is professionalizing from the investment committee downward and improvising everywhere else. Forty-five per cent of participating offices now run a compensation strategy of some kind, up from 38 per cent in the 2024-25 cycle, while a majority still set pay without a documented framework. That is where the hiring problem sits.

The firm's 2026 Estate & Household Staff Compensation Report drew 417 UHNW families and family offices, a 37 per cent rise in participation, plus 1,651 incumbents reporting on their own pay, up 47 per cent. Its benchmarks now span 48 roles, 50 per cent more than a year ago, and more than half of all estate and household staff took a salary increase in this year's first quarter.

The scarcity is easy to size. Fifty-two per cent of participants told the firm recruiting talent is a challenge, while Deloitte counts more than 8,000 family offices, nearly a third more than in 2019. Each new office needs its own investment lead, controller and house manager, and the supply of people who have held those jobs appears not to have moved at that pace.

Botoff's second report, an inaugural look at benefits, fills in the other half of the payroll: 79 per cent of participants offer health insurance, and 86 per cent of respondents cover at least 70 per cent of the cost. Family leave is thinner, with 46 per cent offering maternity leave and 32 per cent paternity.

Read together, the two documents describe different layers of the same organization. Family offices have spent recent years importing private-market pay tools—long-term incentive plans and co-investment among them—for the investment staff who sit closest to the portfolio, a practice this publication has traced to the 2011 registration carve-out. That carve-out was meant to keep offices outside the Advisers Act and has instead become a way to pay employees in deal economics. The new data shows no sign of that thinking reaching the estate and household side, where headcount is heaviest and where a maternity policy still differentiates one office from the next. The 52 per cent who cannot hire are most likely competing on salary for roles their peers have not begun to structure.

Earlier this year Botoff opened a survey for multi-family offices and RIAs that serve UHNW clients. When it lands, the household-staff benchmarks should sit beside an RIA pay table from the same firm, letting an office check its recruiting complaint against the wealth managers bidding from the same pool.