The 2026 National Exit Planners Survey – Introduction

According to the Small Business Administration and the US Census Bureau, approximately 50% of the six million private employers in the United States are owned by persons 61 years old or older, with a mean age of 70. They were more numerous, more educated and had higher expectations than any previous generation. Advances in medicine and health awareness have allowed them to work longer than ever before.

Despite their greater numbers, education, and higher expectations, the long-predicted “Silver Tsunami” of business exits has proceeded more slowly than anticipated. In the last 15 years, since the first Boomers began turning 65, only about one-third of the businesses they owned have changed hands. As a result, Boomer business ownership has declined from 3 million to 2 million, with a significant percentage already past traditional retirement age. The Silver Tsunami is not a single event — it is a generational process that will play out over the next decade and beyond.

For our purposes, we focus on businesses with five or more employees, excluding most home-based businesses, real estate holding companies, and solopreneurships. The total of all small private employers remains fairly stable at 6,000,000.

Surveying Professionals

Other organizations regularly survey the business owner community. These surveys indicate that younger business owners, especially Generation X, are adopting plans for the transfer of their businesses at a much earlier age than the Baby Boomers. This trend is driving sustained demand for exit planning, making it an essential skill for professionals across multiple disciplines.

Unlike other advisory specialties, comprehensive exit planning is almost impossible for a single practitioner to handle alone. The complexity — spanning financial, tax, risk management, legal, and operational skills — demands a collaborative team of professionals. This gap led us to launch the National Exit Planners Survey in 2021. Now in its sixth consecutive year, the NEPS has become the profession’s most comprehensive longitudinal study of how practitioners work, earn, price their services, and develop their practices over time.

A Maturing Profession

The 2026 survey documents a profession at an inflection point. After several years of rapid growth driven by new practitioners entering the field, the data now shows meaningful signs of maturation. The proportion of newcomers with fewer than three years of experience dropped from 49.7% to 37.3% in a single survey cycle. The percentage charging fees for exit planning services reached 76.5% — the highest rate in the survey’s six-year history. And for the first time, artificial intelligence features prominently in how advisors work, with 94.8% reporting active use of AI tools — the majority on paid professional platforms.

Unique Characteristics

The NEPS is uniquely positioned in the industry for its ability to cross-reference survey responses, providing deeper, more integrated insights. This approach goes beyond simple data counting to compare answers across professions, certifications, experience levels, and billing outcomes. The 2026 edition includes eleven cross-question insights and ten multi-year trend analyses — the most comprehensive analytical framework in the survey’s history.

Changing Demographics

For the second consecutive year, the survey bifurcates responses between fee-based advisors (76.5% of respondents) and those who do not charge for exit planning services (23.5%). This distinction provides a more balanced picture of the two distinct practitioner profiles operating under the exit planning banner — those building formal, structured advisory practices and those integrating exit planning into broader institutional relationships.

The demographic picture of the profession itself warrants attention. Those under 45 represent just 13.6% of practitioners, while those 55 and older represent 56.5%. At the same time, the Boomer business owners who need exit planning services are aging — the mean age of owners is 70. The profession must actively recruit and develop the next generation of practitioners if it is to serve the largest private wealth transfer in American history.

We hope you find the data interesting, insightful, and useful. Thank you to all 405 participants for being part of the profession that is helping facilitate this historic transition.

Baby Boomers

The first Baby Boomers are now in their late seventies. The youngest are approaching 60. In a mere twenty years, Boomers added 56% to the U.S. population, fueled a forty-year economic expansion, and became entrepreneurs at an unprecedented rate — annual new business formations rose from 350,000 to 550,000 between 1976 and 1988.

Those are the businesses being transferred today. Boomer ownership of the nation’s 6,000,000 small businesses has dropped from about two-thirds to around 50% over the last decade — but that still leaves approximately 3,000,000 companies to be transferred or sold, representing over 800 ownership transitions per day for the next 15 years.

That sustained pipeline is why exit planning has grown so rapidly, and why the advisors building expertise in this specialty today are positioning themselves to lead the largest private wealth transfer in American history.