The lang cat's research, reported by Professional Adviser on 1 October 2026, counts 8.6 million UK adults aged 35 to 75 who hold £20,000 or more in investible assets and are not paying for financial advice. Together they hold about £1.61 trillion.
An accountant preparing a Self Assessment return already records the pension contributions, dividend income and interest a client receives each year. The lang cat's research counts how many adults hold those same kinds of assets with no adviser involved in what happens to them.
The lang cat describes an “affluent advice gap”: UK adults aged 35 to 75 who hold £20,000 or more in investible assets but are not paying for financial advice. The research, reported in Professional Adviser on 1 October 2026, puts the number of people in that group at 8.6 million, holding £1.61 trillion between them — £1.21 trillion in investible assets and £329 billion in defined contribution pension wealth.
The lang cat, reported by Professional Adviser, 1 October 2026.
“Everyone in this industry agrees the advice gap is a problem, but the real issue is everyone means something slightly different by it,” said The Lang Cat's chief executive, Mark Polson. “We wanted to put a number on the part of it that commercial businesses could do something about.”
The FCA's Financial Lives 2024 survey measures a different thing: the percentage of UK adults who took regulated financial advice on investments, pensions or retirement planning in the previous twelve months, which it put at 8.6%, and 13% among the self-employed. The lang cat's 8.6 million is a count of people above a wealth threshold who are paying for no advice at all. It is a different kind of measure from a population share. The two figures describe the advice gap from different angles, each with its own source and date, and should not be combined into one statistic.
A self-employed client or a company owner who has built a SIPP or a workplace pension, and holds savings or investments outside it, generates the same kinds of figures the lang cat is counting. The dividend vouchers, the pension contribution certificates and the interest reported on a tax return describe the same assets the research is describing. Whether the client has ever had a conversation about what those figures should do is not something a tax return shows.
Client Watch in the partner portal reads a firm's client list against Companies House and shows new charges, filed accounts and directors' dates of birth. None of that reaches an investible asset held personally or a SIPP value; only the client's own tax return and accounts show the shape of those.
Whether anyone has looked at those figures together, across more than one return, is the question the lang cat's research raises for this group.
Illustration using a made-up individual and made-up figures. A self-employed management consultant, 54, has traded through a personal service company for eighteen years. A SIPP opened in 2009 holds £214,000. A general investment account built from dividends holds £41,000. Pension contributions have been made in six of the last ten tax years, whenever profits allowed it. No conversation with a regulated financial planner has taken place.
Made-up individual and made-up figures
At 54, this consultant sits inside the lang cat's affluent advice gap: above the £20,000 threshold, within the 35 to 75 age range, and without a paying relationship with an adviser. These figures appear every year in the accounts and the tax return this client brings in.
Recording pension contributions, dividend income, interest and other investment income on the tax return, and seeing how those figures have moved over several years, is accountancy work.
Deciding what a SIPP or an investment account should do next, whether that is consolidation, a change of risk, or a pension contribution ahead of the end of the tax year, is regulated advice, and sits with the Equity & General financial planner.
The division is set out in who does what. An accountant who has seen the same uninvested balance recur for several years can ask whether the client would like that conversation; deciding what the money should do next is a different job, set out in what to look for in the accounts.
The lang cat's full report, including its sample size and how it measured concern about commission, sits behind a subscription Professional Adviser did not reproduce in full. The published figures describe the size of the group and the reason given for it; the methodology behind both was not available at the time of writing.
The coverage also does not break the 8.6 million down by employment status, so how much of this group is self-employed or company owners, the clients an accountancy firm sees directly, is not yet known.
It is The Lang Cat's term for UK adults aged 35 to 75 who hold £20,000 or more in investible assets but are not paying for financial advice. Reported in Professional Adviser on 1 October 2026, the research puts 8.6 million people in that group, holding £1.61 trillion between them: £1.21 trillion in investible assets and £329 billion in defined contribution pension wealth. The Lang Cat's chief executive, Mark Polson, said the aim was to size the part of the wider advice gap that commercial businesses could address. It is a different measure from the FCA's Financial Lives survey, which tracks the percentage of adults who took regulated advice in the previous twelve months. The lang cat instead counts a specific group who could pay for advice and have not.
No. The FCA's Financial Lives 2024 survey found that 8.6% of UK adults, and 13% of self-employed adults, had taken regulated financial advice on investments, pensions or retirement planning in the previous twelve months. That is a rate across the whole adult population. The Lang Cat's research, reported on 1 October 2026, counts a specific group: 8.6 million adults aged 35 to 75 with £20,000 or more in investible assets who are not paying for advice at all. The two figures measure different things from different surveys, and each should be cited with its own source and date.
The Lang Cat's research names concern about commission as a reason this group gives for not paying for advice, without setting out, in the part of the article available without a subscription, how that concern was measured or what form it takes. Commission on new investment advice was banned by the Retail Distribution Review, which took effect at the end of 2012, so a concern rooted in how advice used to be charged may not reflect how a regulated financial planner charges today. An accountant is not in a position to explain commission structures to a client; that conversation belongs with a regulated financial planner, who sets out how they are paid before any advice is given.
The profile described, an adult aged 35 to 75 with a pension and investible assets built up over time, is also a description of a self-employed person or a company owner whose tax return and company accounts an accountancy firm already prepares. Dividend income, pension contributions and interest are reported on the tax return each year, which is where a SIPP or an investment account that has not been reviewed would show up. The Lang Cat's research does not identify accountancy clients specifically; it describes the adult population that meets its age and asset criteria. Recognising that pattern in a client's own figures is the accountant's own observation.
State what is visible in the file: a pension or an investment account that has stayed the same size, or grown only through contributions, for several years, with no record of a conversation about it. Naming a product, a provider, a fund or a contribution figure is regulated advice, and an accountancy practice without FCA permissions cannot do it. Asking the client whether they would like to speak to a regulated financial planner, and making the introduction with the client's consent, is within what the accountant can do. The financial planner decides what, if anything, should change.
Equity & General holds the FCA authorisation. There is no charge to your firm, and a named partnership director works with you from the first introduction.