Aperio Group LLC: BlackRock Aperio direct indexing fees and minimums.

Almost every direct indexing manager tiers its fee by account size. Aperio does something different. There are no breakpoints in the standard schedule at all. What moves the rate is which index you benchmark to, and whether you want values-based screening on top.

Two things worth noticing before you read anything into those numbers. The first is that going international costs a flat five basis points more, and adding a values-aligned screen costs a flat ten, regardless of size. If you are running a $30 million mandate you pay the same 0.35% as a $300,000 one, at least on paper. The second is that Aperio reserves the right to charge more, not just less: accounts "may be charged additional fees for certain customization options, such as pass-through costs of licensing data for specialized indexes or premiums for implementing long/short equity strategies".

And there is a floor. The brochure notes that "a minimum annual fee may be applied in certain cases, which can result in a higher effective fee rate than set forth below", while reserving discretion to waive it. On a small account, a flat dollar minimum is what actually determines your cost, which is one more reason the headline percentage is not the number to negotiate on.

Why you could not find this number anywhere else

Because it is not text. In the Form ADV PDF that Aperio filed with the SEC on March 31st, 2026, the fee table on page six is a raster image pasted into the document, 1160 pixels by 319. Copy and paste it and you get nothing. Run it through the tools that scrape filings at scale and you get nothing. Every automated pipeline that reads adviser brochures skips straight past it, which is a fair explanation for why the reviews you have read all stop at "fees are negotiated with your adviser".

We rendered page six to an image and read it. The numbers above are transcribed from that render, and the filing is public: search CRD 111616 on the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system and pull brochure version 1036178. Check it yourself before you negotiate anything, because fee schedules change with each annual amendment.

This is where most write-ups quietly invent a figure. Here is the entire text of what Aperio actually filed on the subject.

That is all of it. No dollar amount appears anywhere in the brochure, and Item 7 adds only that "Wrap Program accounts are usually subject to minimum account sizes and program fees in addition to Aperio fees, which are outlined in the Wrap Sponsor's ADV, Part 2A, Appendix 1". In other words, the minimum is set by whichever platform your adviser uses, not by Aperio, and it will be different at Morgan Stanley than at a small RIA custodying at Schwab.

So go look at a platform. Morgan Stanley publishes a strategy profile for Aperio ActiveTaxGlobalIndexing in its Select UMA program, and that document does carry hard numbers. It is the closest thing to a verifiable Aperio minimum in public.

Note what the platform layer costs on top. That same profile discloses a "0.50% maximum quarterly (2.0% maximum annual) MS Advisory Fee" plus a separate SMA Manager Fee that ranges "from 0% to 0.1875% per quarter (0% to 0.75% per year)". Aperio's 0.35% is the manager slice of a stack that can reach several times that number by the time it reaches a client. When you compare direct indexing quotes, compare the all-in figure or you are not comparing anything.

You will not own the whole index

Aperio builds portfolios "using optimization techniques with proprietary models" that "generally hold between 50 and 1,000 stocks, depending on the benchmark, strategy, and client constraints". That is sampling, not replication, and it is how the industry works. The Morgan Stanley profile shows what it looks like in practice for the global strategy as of June 30, 2026: 599 holdings against an index carrying 2,461, with a weighted average beta of 1.00 and a dividend yield of 1.7% versus the index's 1.6%. The top five positions were NVIDIA at 4.6%, Apple at 4.2%, Alphabet at 3.6%, Taiwan Semiconductor at 2.9% and Microsoft at 2.6%.

The cost of sampling is tracking error, and Aperio explains it more clearly than most: "if the forecast tracking error of a portfolio is 1% and the benchmark index goes up 10%, there is an approximately 68% chance that the portfolio performance will be between 9% and 11%". Then the part the brochures usually leave out: "there is also the possibility that the account could experience a two-, three-, or higher standard-deviation outcome ... If the deviation is negative versus the benchmark index, the portfolio will underperform, perhaps significantly." Factor tilts and values-aligned constraints both add to that risk.

This is the finding that surprised us. The two managers that dominate adviser-channel direct indexing are priced identically at 35 basis points for U.S. domestic equity, and Vanguard undercuts both. Every figure below is verified from a provider filing or pricing page.

Two honest conclusions come out of that table. If you have an adviser and a portfolio in the hundreds of thousands, the adviser-channel managers are not competing on price with each other, so choose on construction: Parametric will benchmark to "any standard or customized index", Aperio prices values-aligned screening as a first-class product, and Vanguard is simply cheaper if your adviser has scale with them. If you do not have an adviser, none of the top three rows is available to you at all, and the question becomes which retail platform gets closest.

And the row at the bottom is the one to argue with first. An S&P 500 ETF costs 0.03% and needs one share. Aperio through an adviser is 0.35% plus a platform fee plus the adviser's own fee, plausibly 1.2% all in. That gap has to be earned back through harvested losses you can actually use. The published research is far more modest than the marketing: Wealthfront's own whitepaper puts tax loss harvesting at 0.18% to 0.44% a year of account value, against the 1% to 2% that providers often advertise. If you do not have realized gains to offset, you are capped at deducting $3,000 a year against ordinary income under IRS Topic 409, and the math does not work.