The register is recovering. The profession is not.

The Financial Adviser Register stood at 15,122 for the week ending 6 August, a net gain of 31, with 22 new entrants taking the financial year to date figure to 116 and the register within reach of the 2026 high of 15,170 recorded in May. Five consecutive weekly increases have produced a net gain of 238 since 1 July, with the calendar year now positive at 67. ^{1 2}

This is genuinely good news, and it is reported every week because it is available every week. It also tells us almost nothing about whether the profession can meet demand in 2035.

What the weekly number conceals

Start with the mechanics. Licensees have up to 30 days to notify adviser appointments, so weekly figures are preliminary and the post-June rebound is partly a reporting artefact as advisers who ceased on 30 June reappear under new licensees. In the busiest reporting week of 2026, 265 advisers were affected, four new licensees were established, and seven licensees were left with no advisers at all.³

Much of the register's movement is not entry and exit. It is churn between licensees, consolidation following acquisitions, and advisers returning after breaks. Those are meaningful business stories. They are not workforce growth.

The structural picture is set out in Padua Wealth Data's market report, and it is sobering. The middle-case projection is 14,796 advisers on the register in 2030, below where the profession sits today. Some 39.9 per cent of current advisers have twenty or more years of experience, while only 13 per cent have fewer than five, a workforce the report describes as top-heavy with a replacement cohort less than half the size of its predecessor. Against that, 3.6 million Australian entities are assessed as having a genuine need for advice, 1.8 million of them aged over 60. There are 21,113 people who have passed the adviser exam, of whom 6,220 sit outside the register entirely.⁴

That last figure is the one worth pausing on. More than six thousand people cleared the profession's central competency hurdle and are not practising.

The cohort that left, and the cohort that never arrived

Two separate losses are often reported as one.

The first is the post-royal commission exodus, largely complete. The second is a decade-long failure of replacement, which is ongoing and structurally harder to fix.

The education standard sharpened both. As at the end of September 2025, ASIC reported that almost 3,500 advisers had not completed the qualifications required to keep advising in 2026, with existing providers needing specified commercial law and taxation law study to continue providing tax (financial) advice to retail clients, on top of the twelve-point code of ethics obligations that have applied since 2019. Uptake of the experience pathway was similarly partial: of 9,027 advisers eligible, 4,493 had notified ASIC they would use it.⁵⁶

The profession has spent five years absorbing those deadlines. It has spent considerably less energy on the question of who replaces the 40 per cent of the workforce with twenty years of experience when they retire, which on any reasonable projection begins in earnest within the decade.

Cost is the recruitment problem

New entrants do not read association media releases. They read what it costs to hold an authorisation.

Industry levies covering ASIC and the Compensation Scheme of Last Resort are divided among a workforce that is not growing, which means the per-adviser charge rises even when total scheme costs hold steady. Every adviser who leaves makes the register more expensive for the ones who stay. This is a straightforwardly unstable arrangement, and it is the single most cited grievance in the profession's own commentary.

That grievance has a demand-side mirror. There are roughly 15,000 advisers serving a population in which more than four million people are aged fifty or older, and the reform agenda intended to close that gap includes rules for a new class of adviser and guardrails for superannuation funds providing simple advice.⁷

Which brings us to the reform that has not arrived.

DBFO Tranche 2 and the cost of delay

The first tranche of Delivering Better Financial Outcomes is in place. The second, containing rationalisation of the Statement of Advice, clear rules for collective charging by superannuation funds, and permission for funds to send members targeted prompts, has been in draft since March 2025.⁸

Momentum stalled. The minister walked back a commitment to complete the draft legislation this year when pressed, citing the aftermath of the Shield and First Guardian collapses, to visible frustration from super fund executives and trustee directors who have been asking for the legal parameters of their advice offerings to be defined. UniSuper's chair described the risk of losing momentum on advice reform as disappointing, framing the problem as a substantial missing middle.⁹

The connection between that delay and the workforce numbers is direct. Documentation costs are a principal constraint on how many clients an adviser can serve, and Statement of Advice rationalisation is the measure most likely to lift that constraint. While it waits, the capacity gap is managed by rationing: higher minimum fee thresholds, narrower client segments, and advisers declining work that is genuinely simple because the compliance cost of providing it is not.

The sector's own conferences now frame the challenge as accessibility, affordability and trust in a system facing an ageing population, rising compliance costs and increasingly complex retirement decisions. Correct diagnosis. Slow treatment.¹⁰

What to do with the weekly number

Three suggestions for how the profession discusses its own workforce.

Report the twelve-month and five-year figures alongside the weekly one. A net gain of 31 in a week means very little when the same source projects a smaller register in 2030 than today.

Separate churn from growth. Advisers moving between licensees, and licensees consolidating following acquisition, should not be reported in the same breath as new entrants. Consolidation among the largest licensee groups is a real trend, but it is a story about market structure, not about capacity.¹¹

Track the 6,220. Exam-qualified people sitting outside the register represent the cheapest available capacity in the system, and understanding why they are not practising would tell the profession more than another year of weekly register updates.

The honest position

Financial advice in Australia has stabilised after a severe contraction. That is worth acknowledging, and the recent run of new entrants is a real and welcome improvement on the trajectory of the past five years.

But stability at roughly 15,000 advisers, with four in ten of them two decades into their careers and a replacement cohort less than half the required size, is not a recovery. It is a plateau before a demographic cliff, arriving at the same moment as the largest cohort of Australians ever to approach retirement.

The weekly number will keep going up and down. The 2030 projection is the one that should be shaping licensee strategy, association advocacy and government policy, and it is the one almost nobody leads with.

This article is general commentary for financial services professionals and does not constitute legal, tax or financial advice.