Investment advisers can now charge performance fees to richer clients — thresholds rise with inflation for first time

The Securities and Exchange Commission raised the minimum wealth required to qualify for performance-based investment fees, adjusting dollar amounts upward to account for inflation. This means fewer people will qualify as 'wealthy enough' to pay advisers a cut of their profits instead of flat fees, even if they have the same actual purchasing power as before.

For decades, the wealth thresholds for performance fees stayed frozen in time — meaning inflation gradually made them easier to hit, pulling ordinary affluent people into a fee structure designed for the very wealthy. Raising them resets the bar, but it also signals the SEC is willing to adjust these old rules when numbers stop making sense. The real question is whether this happens once, or whether wealth thresholds now get indexed to inflation automatically instead of waiting for the next regulatory cycle.