Awards and Recognitions

Third-party rankings and recognition from rating services or publications are no guarantee of future investment success. No fee was paid for participation in the PSBJ ranking survey.

Companies are not required to be headquartered in Washington state and are ranked by their assets under management for Puget Sound region clients. Information was obtained from firm representatives and company websites. Information on The List was supplied by individual companies through questionnaires and could not be independently verified by the Puget Sound Business Journal. Only those that responded to our inquiries were listed. In case of ties, companies are listed alphabetically.

Third-party rankings and recognition from rating services or publications are no guarantee of future investment success. No fee was paid for participation in the Barron’s ranking survey.

Advisors who wish to be ranked fill out a 102-question survey about their practice. Barron’s will verify that data with the advisors’ firms and with regulatory databases and then they apply their rankings formula to the data to generate a ranking. The formula features three major categories of calculations: (1) Assets (2) Revenue (3) Quality of practice. In each of those categories they do multiple sub-calculations. Read more on their methodology on their website.

Third-party rankings and recognition from rating services or publications are no guarantee of future investment success. A $250 entry fee was paid for participation in the PSBJ Best Places to work survey.

Information was obtained from firm representatives and company websites. Quantum’s Best Workplaces score factors in 30 items across six categories including trust in leadership and team dynamics. Companies that made The List had the highest composite scores in an employee survey administered by Quantum Workplaces on behalf of the Puget Sound Business Journal. Information on The List was supplied by individual companies through questionnaires and could not be independently verified by the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Third-party rankings and recognition from rating services or publications are no guarantee of future investment success. No fee was paid for participation in the WSR Wealth Exemplar Awards.

To qualify for the Fee-Based RIA of the Year Award, RIA firms had to be SEC-registered, working through either a W-2 or independent financial advisors, or both. There is a minimum asset level of $250 million. Qualifying RIAs have a primary focus on fee-based solutions for clients.

The ranking of the best registered investment advisory firms (“RIA Firms”) is based on two dimensions: recommendations by financial advisors, clients as well as industry experts and a firm’s development of Assets under Management (AUM). Recommendationswere collected via an independent survey among over 25,000 individuals. Clients, industry experts and financial advisors working for an RIA firm could recommend the RIA firms they find commendable. Self-recommendations were prohibited and were therefore not included in the evaluation.

America’s Top Financial Advisory Firms 2026 recognizes the leading financial advisory firms in the United States based on their performance across multiple key indicators of advisory excellence. The study, conducted by Plant-A Insights Group in partnership with Newsweek, evaluated over 16,000 financial advisories registered with the SEC.

Only firms with more than $20 million in assets under management (AUM), at least three wealth advisers, five individual clients, and a minimum of two years of SEC registration were considered. Firms with disciplinary disclosures were excluded.

Each firm received a composite score out of 100. The top 1,000 firms achieved recognition as America’s Top Financial Advisory Firms 2026. Plant-A Insights Group has a strict no-pay-to-play policy: No sponsorships, applications, or paid placement.