Best Direct Indexing Platforms for Financial Advisors

For most RIAs the shortlist is four names. Aperio charges 0.35% for U.S. domestic benchmarks, Parametric charges 35 bps for Custom Core Domestic Equity, Vanguard Personalized Indexing starts at 0.20% on your firm's aggregate book, and Schwab Personalized Indexing charges 0.40% with a $100,000 minimum. The first three are adviser-only and priced almost identically at the top two; the real differences are benchmark flexibility, values screening, long/short capability and which custodians will support the account. Every figure here comes from a filed document, not a sales deck.

Comparing direct indexing managers is unusually hard, and not because the products are complicated. It is because almost nobody publishes a price. Aperio's marketing pages carry no fee schedule. Parametric's carry none. Vanguard's adviser pages carry none. Ask three consultants and you will get three different numbers, all of them secondhand.

They are all wrong to think it is private. Every one of these managers is a registered investment adviser, and registered investment advisers have to file a fee schedule with the SEC. The numbers below were read out of those filings in August 2026. Educational content for advisers doing vendor diligence, not investment or tax advice.

How much do direct indexing platforms actually charge?

Here is the whole category on one line each. Manager fee means what the SMA manager takes, before your platform and before your own advisory fee.

The first thing that jumps out is that Aperio and Parametric, the two managers that between them dominate the adviser channel, charge exactly the same headline rate for domestic equity. There is no price competition between them at the top of the market. The second is that Vanguard, which most advisers assume is a niche option here, is materially the cheapest of the three at 0.20%, and gets cheaper as your firm places more assets.

The third is the one that catches people out. Those adviser-channel rates are not what your client pays. They are one layer of a stack.

The fee stack is where the real number lives

Take a client in Morgan Stanley's Select UMA program. The strategy profile for the Aperio global strategy discloses a "0.50% maximum quarterly (2.0% maximum annual) MS Advisory Fee", plus an SMA Manager Fee ranging "from 0% to 0.1875% per quarter (0% to 0.75% per year)". Aperio's 0.35% is inside that second number, not on top of the first.

Run the arithmetic on a $500,000 account and the manager fee is rarely the line worth negotiating:

• Manager fee: 0.20% to 0.40%, so $1,000 to $2,000 a year
• Platform or wrap fee: anywhere from nothing on your own custody to 2.0% at the published maximum
• Your advisory fee: typically 0.75% to 1.00% at this account size
• Trading and custody: usually small, but not zero on international sleeves

An all-in 1.2% is a realistic outcome for a well-run direct indexing account at a mid-size RIA. The relevant comparison is not Aperio against Parametric. It is 1.2% against the 0.03% of an S&P 500 ETF, and whether the tax management earns back the 117 basis point difference.

Be careful about how you present that to clients, because the published evidence is much more modest than the marketing. Providers routinely advertise 1% to 2% in annual tax alpha. Wealthfront's own whitepaper, backtesting February 2015 through December 2025, reports a benefit of 0.18% to 0.44% a year of account value depending on the client's marginal rates. J.P. Morgan Asset Management found roughly 30 basis points of additional annualized tax alpha from daily rather than monthly scanning. Elm Wealth's analysis notes that fees "can completely eliminate" the benefit. Use the low end when you model this, and make the client's own gain profile the deciding variable.

Best direct indexing platform for a small account

If the account is under $250,000 the adviser-channel managers are mostly closed to you, and the honest answer changes shape.

Schwab Personalized Indexing takes $100,000 at 0.40% and is the natural fit for advisers already custodying at Schwab, with the caveat that there is no S&P 500 strategy in the lineup. The six options benchmark to the Schwab 1000, two Solactive indexes, the S&P SmallCap 600, MSCI KLD 400 Social and MSCI EAFE. If the client's investment policy statement names the S&P 500, that is a conversation you need to have upfront.

Below that, the retail platforms are genuinely cheaper than anything in the adviser channel. Wealthfront's S&P 500 Direct runs 0.09% at a $5,000 minimum and Frec's Classic S&P 500 strategy runs 0.09% at $20,000. Neither is something you can manage on a client's behalf inside your normal workflow, but for a client's held-away or self-directed money they are a reasonable recommendation, and pretending otherwise damages your credibility.

There is a floor worth remembering on the SMA side. Aperio's 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". On a small mandate, a flat dollar minimum, not the percentage, is what determines the cost.

What actually differentiates the adviser-channel managers

Since Aperio and Parametric are priced the same, price cannot be your selection criterion. Four things can.

Benchmark flexibility. Parametric states that Custom Core "can be benchmarked to any standard or customized index, including but not limited to the S&P 500, the Russell 1000, MSCI EAFE and Bloomberg Barclays Intermediate U.S. Corporate Bond". It also runs fixed income at 15 bps, which the others do not. If a client wants a genuinely bespoke benchmark, this is the strongest offering.

Values-aligned screening. Aperio prices this as a first-class product rather than an accommodation: 0.45% for domestic and 0.50% for foreign, a flat ten basis points over the standard rate. It shows in the client base. Aperio's Form ADV Part 1A reports 800 charitable organizations holding $22.5 billion, close to 15% of its book. For an endowment or foundation with exclusions written into its investment policy, that is the deepest bench in the category.

Long/short capability. This is the fastest-growing corner of the market because shorting keeps producing harvestable losses long after a long-only portfolio has stopped. Aperio charges an additional Short Advisory Fee of 0.20% up to 200% gross exposure and 0.40% between 200% and 300%, or a flat 0.45% and 0.90% for factor-tilted long/short strategies. Note its own warning about "limited custodian availability and custodian-specific requirements". Confirm your custodian supports it before you promise a client anything.

How your firm is priced. Vanguard is the outlier structurally. Its first-tier 0.20% is assessed on your firm's aggregate book with them, not on the individual account, stepping to 0.18% above $50 million and 0.15% above $100 million. Two clients with identical $400,000 accounts at two different RIAs can be paying different rates for the same service. If you can concentrate mandates with one manager, that structure rewards it, and none of the others do.

The operational detail that quietly breaks tax management

This is the paragraph to take into your onboarding checklist, because it is the failure mode nobody markets.

Aperio's brochure puts the tax lot relief burden on the client. Clients "are responsible for ensuring that their custodian implements a default tax lot relief methodology of High Cost In, First-Out ('HICO')", the strategies are "dependent on the custodian implementing HICO as the default", and Aperio "has no responsibility to ensure that the custodian correctly implements the appropriate tax lot relief method".

Most custodians default to FIFO, which sells the oldest and usually lowest-basis shares first. That is exactly backwards for loss harvesting, which wants to sell the highest-cost lots. Leave the account on FIFO and the optimizer will keep issuing sell instructions while the custodian fills them from the wrong lots, generating gains where the strategy intended losses. It is one line on an account application and it is your job, not the manager's. Confirm it in writing before the first trade and check it against the first quarterly statement.

Two related items belong on the same checklist. Wash sales are not guaranteed away: Aperio says one "may be triggered by Aperio under a number of conditions including, but not limited to, managing tracking error and client requests such as deposits or withdrawals". Schwab is blunter still, disclosing that it monitors for wash sales inside a Personalized Indexing account but "does not monitor for wash sales in other accounts held by a client". So if a client or their spouse buys the same security elsewhere inside the 61-day window, the loss is disallowed. The version that costs the most is a replacement purchased in an IRA, because IRS Revenue Ruling 2008-5 disallows the loss permanently and does not step up basis in the IRA to compensate. That loss is gone for good.

Do not forget the exit

Direct indexing is easy to start and hard to stop, and advisers underweight this at the proposal stage. After several years of harvesting, the portfolio holds hundreds of positions with very low basis and a very large number of tax lots. Aperio says so directly: "over time, the ability of an investor in a tax-managed strategy to harvest losses may decrease and gains may build up in a securities portfolio."

At that point the client owns something they cannot liquidate without a large realized gain, and cannot easily move either, because fractional shares cannot travel through ACATS and get sold by the delivering firm instead. Model the unwind before you recommend the wrapper, and make sure the client understands that the tax benefit is a deferral that eventually needs a plan, whether that is charitable gifting, an exchange fund, or a step-up at death.

How to verify any of this yourself

You do not have to take a manager's word, or ours. Every SEC-registered adviser files its fee schedule in Form ADV Part 2A, and it is public.

1. Look up the firm's CRD number at the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system. Aperio Group, LLC is 111616; Vanguard Personalized Indexing Management is 285366.
2. Pull the firm's current brochure and read Item 5, "Fees and Compensation". The standard schedule is there.
3. Read Item 7 for account minimums and Item 8 for the tax and tracking error disclosures.
4. Check Part 1A Item 5.D and 5.F for assets under management and client mix, which tells you who the manager actually serves.

One warning from doing this in practice: Aperio's fee table is filed as a raster image pasted into the PDF, so copying the text returns nothing at all. That is very likely why no third-party review quotes the numbers. You have to render the page and read it.

Do it again each year. These schedules change with every annual amendment, and vendor terms are the kind of thing that is easy to verify once at onboarding and then never revisit, which is why firms that treat them as a standing obligation to re-check rather than a one-time diligence step tend to be the ones that catch a repricing, and it is worth having something that tracks obligations and maps them to controls rather than relying on somebody's memory of a 2024 conversation.

The short version

If your client has an adviser relationship and $250,000 or more, the choice is between three managers priced within 15 basis points of each other, and you should pick on benchmark flexibility (Parametric), values screening (Aperio), or aggregate-book pricing (Vanguard). If the account is $100,000 to $250,000, Schwab Personalized Indexing is the practical option, subject to its benchmark lineup. Below $100,000, the retail direct indexers are cheaper than anything you can access professionally, and the honest recommendation may be an index fund plus a plan for realized gains.

Whichever you choose, decide the construction before you hire someone to run it. Which benchmark, which exclusions, which weighting, and what tracking error you will tolerate are your decisions, not the manager's, and they are much easier to have opinions about once you have built and tested the index yourself against real market history.

Full filed fee schedules and client-mix data for each manager: Aperio direct indexing fees and minimums, Parametric Custom Core fees, and Vanguard Personalized Indexing fees. For the category overview see direct indexing platforms compared, and for what the tax benefit is actually worth, direct indexing tax loss harvesting.