Competitive Compensation: Understanding Family Office Salaries

The median CEO at an investment-focused family office now earns $825,000 a year. These figures would have been unusual five years ago. Here's what's driving the shift in family office compensation.

The median CEO at an investment-focused family office now earns $825,000 a year. At offices managing more than a billion dollars, that number exceeds $1.2 million. These figures would have been unusual five years ago.

Those numbers come from the 2025 Morgan Stanley and Botoff Consulting Single Family Office Compensation Report. CIOs are keeping pace, with median compensation around $900,000 and averages near $1.8 million.

These are not outliers. They are the market.

I see the drivers of this shift in every retained engagement we run. There are roughly 8,030 single-family offices globally as of 2024, up from 6,130 in 2019, according to Deloitte. In North America, nearly 3,200 offices are now in operation, a number projected to reach 4,200 by 2030. Each one needs a leadership team. Many are building out full investment platforms. And nearly all are competing for the same limited pool of professionals who can operate with the discretion, judgment, and technical range these roles demand.

The talent war extends well beyond other family offices. As more offices bring private equity and direct investing in-house, they find themselves bidding against firms like KKR, Blackstone, and Carlyle for mid-career investment professionals. Some offices now offer carried interest, co-investment rights, phantom equity, and deferred compensation structures that closely mirror what a fund would provide.

Trish Botoff, founder and managing principal of Botoff Consulting, has observed this shift firsthand: "We've seen over the last decade, the professionalization and institutionalization of the family office space. They're building out their investment teams, hiring staff from other investment firms and private equity firms, so that has a huge impact on compensation."

The data bears this out. Long-term incentive plans have gone from uncommon to expected. In the 2023 Botoff Consulting survey, 59% of single-family offices reported using at least one LTI vehicle. By 2025, that figure had climbed to 62% among investment-focused offices. Across the sector, 90% of executives are now eligible for annual incentive plans. The most common structures include deferred incentive compensation, co-investment opportunities (85% funded by the participants themselves), carried interest or phantom carry, and profit sharing.

What has changed most noticeably is the formalization. Where compensation was once set by a principal's discretion, or agreed on with a handshake, it is now benchmarked and measured against performance. Salary increases in family offices continue to outpace the broader U.S. market. In 2023, over 90% of offices granted raises, with the majority exceeding 5%. That momentum carried into 2024, when 57% of offices planned additional hires and nearly half budgeted for raises at the same level or higher.

The competition extends well beyond the C-suite. Executive Assistants now earn a median base of roughly $100,000. At offices with $2.5 billion or more in AUM, that figure runs about 35% higher. In one case Botoff Consulting advised on, a junior analyst asked for $300,000. The family decided to wait a year.

As Botoff has also noted, "In an ever-competitive market for talent, families increasingly are focused on attracting highly skilled and more specialized professionals to execute their vision, mission, and strategy."

For Principals weighing how to structure compensation, specificity matters more than generosity. A CIO running a $3 billion direct investment portfolio has different expectations than a CFO overseeing tax compliance for a $400 million office. The compensation philosophy should reflect the complexity of the mandate, the geography, and the competitive set from which you are drawing.

Offices building or expanding in-house investment teams will pay a premium. That is the cost of competing with institutional capital for institutional-caliber talent. But it is worth remembering what makes a family office attractive to the right candidate: proximity to a decision-maker, and the ability to see a deal from origination through exit without six layers of committee approval.

Compensation in this space is not an administrative exercise. It is a search advantage and a retention strategy. For the families that understand this market, it is also the clearest signal they can send about how seriously they take the people managing their wealth.

Competitive Compensation: Understanding Family Office Salaries

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