Free toolsWhat one referral is worth
What one referralis worth to your firm.
How much is a referral worth to a financial advisor? Put in your fee, a typical new household and how long clients stay. You get the lifetime revenue of one referred household, what a year of referrals adds, and what the quiet ones cost. In dollars, and in furlongs.
Fig. 1The ledger. A referred household, Nov. 3. Amount to be figured.
Your numbers
Every field starts with a sourced default or a labeled estimate. Change what you know. Nothing leaves your browser unless you ask for the report.
Kitces Research found the median client from a referral pays about $6,715 a year.1
Your blended rate for a household this size.
Schwab's 2026 study puts yearly client retention at 97%.5 That math says 30 years or more, but households age. 12 is a careful default.
An assumption, so the math isn't frozen in place. Not a forecast of returns. Set it to zero if you'd rather.
Names passed to you, whether or not they call. At the median firm in Schwab's 2025 study, 5% of clients referred someone in a year.6 150 households times 5% is about 8.
Furlong's estimate. 96% of referred prospects research an advisor online first,3 and 44% say they'd move on if they couldn't find what they needed.4 Not every site leaves something out, so we start at 25%. Use your own guess.
Furlong's estimate. Your own close rate on referred prospects beats ours.
One referred household
$0
Lifetime fee revenue.
A year of referrals
$0
Lifetime revenue from the households one year of referrals brings in.
The quiet ones
$0
Lifetime revenue from the ones who looked you up and left, each year.
Your quiet referrals are 0 furlongs of unplowed row a year.
- Plowed: households a year of referrals brings in
- Unplowed: referrals who looked you up and went quiet
- One pass = one furlong = $10,000 of lifetime fee revenue
What moves your number most
Revenue math for your own firm, using your inputs and a few labeled estimates. Not a projection of investment returns, not investment advice, and not a promise of results. A furlong is 660 feet; here one furlong stands for $10,000 of lifetime fee revenue, for fun.
How it works
How much is a referral worth?
Ask most advisors how much a referral is worth and you get a shrug and then a guess based on the first year's fee. That undersells it. A referred household pays you every year it stays, and referred households tend to stay. So the useful number is lifetime fee revenue: the fee in year one, carried forward for as many years as the household is likely to stay.
Here is the math the calculator runs. Year-one revenue is the household's assets times your fee (or your flat fee). Each year after that, the assets move by the growth assumption you set, and the fee moves with them. Add up the years the household stays and you have the lifetime revenue of one referred household. Multiply by the number of referrals that turn into clients in a year and you get the yearly value of referrals. The quiet ones use the same math for the referrals who looked you up and never got in touch.
Why the quiet ones matter
A referral rarely calls first. In Wealthtender's 2025 study, 96% of people referred to an advisor said they research that advisor online before making contact.3 A survey Kitces cited in October 2026 found that 44% of referred prospects would move on if they couldn't find the information they wanted, and only 11% would call to ask.4 You never hear about those people. They don't show up in your CRM, so they don't show up in your numbers. This calculator gives them a line.
A worked example
A household with $750,000 at a 1.00% fee pays $7,500 in year one. With a 2% net growth assumption and a 12-year stay, it pays about $100,600 over its life. That is ten furlongs of row. A firm that gets 8 referrals a year, loses a quarter of them to silence and closes half of the rest, adds 3 households a year, worth about $301,800 in lifetime revenue. The 2 referrals a year who went quiet would have closed at the same rate, so that's about 1 household and $100,600 of lifetime revenue. Ten furlongs. A mile and a quarter of row nobody plowed.
What moves the number
The calculator tries one realistic step on each input: ten fewer points of quiet referrals, ten more points of close rate, two more referrals a year, two more years of retention, a household $100,000 larger, and a fee ten basis points higher. It ranks them by how much each adds to a year of referrals. With the defaults, two more referrals a year comes first, then close rate and retention. The higher you set the quiet share, the more it climbs the list. Growth is left out on purpose. It's an assumption, not a lever.
About the furlong
A furlong is a furrow long: about 660 feet, one eighth of a mile, the length of one straight pass of a plow before the team turned. Furlong, the firm, is named for it. In the result, each pass across the page is one furlong, and one furlong stands for $10,000 of lifetime fee revenue. It's a playful unit. The dollar figures are the real output.
Questions
The fine print, plainly.
Is this a projection of investment returns?
No. It's revenue math for your own business. The growth field is an assumption you set so the math isn't frozen in place, net of withdrawals. It isn't a forecast of what any portfolio will earn, and you can set it to zero. Nothing here is investment advice.
Where do the defaults come from?
The household size sits near the Kitces 2026 median revenue per referred client ($6,715 a year).1 Referrals per year come from Schwab's 2025 benchmarking study, where 5% of clients at the median firm referred someone.6 Years retained is set well below Schwab's 97% yearly retention.5 The quiet share and close rate are Furlong's estimates, and they say so next to the slider.
Does it discount future fees?
No. The totals are plain sums, not present values, so they read like fees on a ledger. If you value your firm on a multiple of revenue, the yearly revenue column in the full report is the one to use.
Can a financial advisor pay a referral fee to a client?
Paying for referrals, in cash or in gifts, brings in the SEC Marketing Rule's promoter requirements and often state rules too.7 That's a question for your compliance reviewer. A thank-you note with nothing attached is the simple version. Plant One Row ends with one you can copy.
Why measure money in furlongs?
Because "$100,600" is easy to scroll past and "10 furlongs of unplowed row" is not. Also, we're named after it. A furlong is 660 feet, one straight pass of a plow.