Bank of America finds 83% of US family offices have named a successor. Only 27% have a trust distribution policy.

On 20 October 2026, Bank of America Private Bank published its 2026 Family Office Study, Building for Generations. The research firm Escalent ran the online survey in January and February 2026, polling 355 US family office decision makers: principals, C-suite executives, founders and investment professionals. Their offices manage between $25 million and more than $5 billion, most of them above $500 million. Nine qualitative interviews supplement the survey.

The bank sells family office services, including governance, family education, trust and estate planning and credit, which are the areas the study measures. The sample is US only. The figures below come from the bank’s press release and from the report itself as covered by Alternatives Watch, which quotes figures not in the release. All are the study’s own numbers.

A successor, but not the paperwork

A quarter of the offices surveyed have been through a leadership transition in the past decade. Among those, only 37% said the incoming principal was very prepared.

Looking ahead, 83% of offices have identified a successor. Only 27% have a trust distribution policy or written guiding principles. Nine in ten (91%) agree that governance and family education keep a family aligned, yet 40% run a formal family education programme. Nearly nine in ten say governance structures reduce disagreements, and 73% plan to add more of them within three years. According to Alternatives Watch’s reading of the report, 21% of respondents expect their office’s CEO to leave within the same period.

Family dynamics are the most cited governance challenge (45%), ahead of the complexity of shared assets (37%) and undefined family expectations (36%).

What the next generation is expected to change

Among offices with a potential next-generation principal, 79% expect alternatives to take a larger share of the portfolio after the handover and 77% expect philanthropic priorities to shift. Private equity is already the largest alternative holding, at 27% of alternatives portfolios, and 59% of offices plan to increase exposure over the next three years. Four in ten offices hold sports investments, most often where at least one principal is a millennial or from Generation Z.

On borrowing, 92% of offices use credit, but only 27% use leverage consistently as part of a long-term strategy. Seventy-seven per cent expect the next generation to be more interested in using credit to build wealth. Families with an operating business are more than twice as likely to use leverage that way (32% against 14%).

The numbers sit alongside two other studies we have covered this month. The IE University report presented in Madrid on 15 October found private markets allocations rising with the size of the in-house team. In India, Grant Thornton Bharat and Entrust found that only 36% of business families had a documented succession plan.

What it means for family offices

Choosing the next principal is the step most families have taken. The rules that principal will work under are mostly unwritten: how trust distributions are decided, what the family is taught before the handover, and who settles disputes over shared assets. Those are the gaps that turn a planned succession into a contested one, and the study suggests they will be inherited at the same moment the portfolio is expected to move further into illiquid assets and leverage. For advisers, the practical question for a client who has named a successor is what that successor will be bound by. Readers should weigh the findings knowing they come from a provider of those services and describe US offices only.

Sources: Bank of America press release, 20 October 2026; Bank of America Family Office Study: Building for Generations (PDF); Alternatives Watch, 20 October 2026.