How Long Does a Financial Plan Take?

If you’re a student, new financial planner, or a career changer, there’s a good chance you’ve heard experts talk about their financial planning process. They have a streamlined workflow from inquiry to final plan delivery, and they know how to support ongoing needs in just a few hours a year.

In school, certification programs, and clean-cut case studies, financial planning often looks tidy. A few meetings, some projections, a polished plan at the end. Experts can also make it look so easy because they’ve been doing it for so long!

But when you enter the profession and start working on your first few plans, you’ll see that the process isn’t as straightforward or fast as you might have been led to believe. When you’re new, the process can take much longer… and that’s OK! It’s one of the most common (and least talked about) realities of early-career financial planning.

That’s why, today, we’re talking about how long a financial plan really takes to build.

What Research and Industry Data Tell Us About Financial Plan Timelines

Many aspiring planners assume a financial plan is a few meetings, some projections (made easier by AI, planning software, and spreadsheets), and a clear deliverable you eventually “finish.” In reality, though, planning is iterative, relationship-driven, and dependent on data quality, client behavior, and complexity.

That mismatch is a huge source of early-career frustration, especially around training, quotas, and hours spent vs. hours paid. It doesn’t help that you might feel like you need to be faster to get a job at a firm or compete in the self-owned RIA space.

According to Kitces Research, the median time to create and deliver an initial financial plan is around 10 hours — and that includes analysis and preparation, not just client meetings. That same survey found that advisors spent an average of 34.5 hours on the entire first-year planning process, including implementation and monitoring.

Of course, that’s just one source. Also, there’s more involved than just the advisor’s time in creating the plan:

Calendar time: weeks or months from first meeting to implementation
Planner/team hours: analysis, prep, coordination, follow-up, meetings
Client time: decision-making, document gathering, emotional processing, personal delays

Basically, we’re trying to remind you that more goes into creating a plan than you might think, and it’s OK if it takes you longer. There’s another element that adds time: plan complexity.

The Spectrum: Simple Plans vs. Complex Plans

There’s another important consideration in how long a financial plan takes, and that’s how complex a client’s situation is.

A Very Simple Plan (Limited Scope)

A limited-scope plan might include:

A single goal (for example, a basic retirement projection)
Clean, organized data
Minimal tradeoffs
Few moving parts

These plans often involve:

High-level cash flow assumptions
One or two scenarios
Limited recommendations
Minimal coordination with outside professionals

Reality check: Even a “simple” plan can take 10–20 planner hours and unfolds over 4–8 weeks. Simple cases still involve:

Preparing for meetings
Getting to know clients
Checking advice/assumptions/projections
Discussing goals or tradeoffs
Adjusting recommendations based on client feedback

A Comprehensive Plan (All CFP® Planning Areas)

Comprehensive plans tend to involve:

Multiple, competing goals
Behavioral and emotional considerations
Constraints that require real tradeoffs
Long-term projections (with uncertainty)

They may include:

Cash flow and behavior patterns
Insurance analysis
Tax considerations
Investment strategy
Retirement planning
Education planning
Estate considerations
College planning or student loan repayment
Coordination with CPAs, attorneys, lenders, or benefits teams

Reality check: Comprehensive plans can often require 40-100+ planner hours, unfold over 3–6 months (or longer), and are rarely ever “done.” They evolve as life changes.

Custom Plans vs. Standard Plans

There’s one more element that adds time: Your ideal client and your workflow.

Many planners have a specific niche they serve, and specific type of plan they deliver. Fro example, a childfree planner who focuses on insurance, retirement, and estate plans for people without children. They have a clear onboarding process, clear deliverables, and have limits around what support they provide.

When you’re first starting out, you likely won’t have such a clear audience or process. And you may not want to “niche down” as clearly as some do.

For example, Hannah’s team at Guiding Wealth adjusts the planning process to the client. While they follow the foundations of financial planning for each client, some may need more support with student loan repayments than on estate planning, while others want to focus on investments rather than cash flow. That customization takes time.

What New Planners Should Know About Time Involved In Planning

Here’s the part we wish more people said out loud: A single client meeting often represents 2 to 3 hours of work when you include:

Preparation & research
The meeting itself
Data entry
Action items and follow-up

Entering data can take hours — and so can fixing mistakes or triple-checking your work. Reviewing estate documents, investment statements, and policies takes time, and you can’t shortcut it by only looking at connected accounts.

In our honest opinion, new planners should expect to take at least twice as long as an experienced planner. That gap closes with time, repetition, and exposure, though!

Think of your financial planning skills like the difference between a custom craftsman home and an express home built in every suburb. Both stand — but the process, care, and durability are different. Mastery matters more than efficiency.

Plus, even the most experienced homebuilder doesn’t always know what’s underground until they start digging. Financial planning works the same way. You can build technical skills and confidence, but you’ll still have to adapt as new information emerges.

If you feel slow, behind, or unsure, that doesn’t mean you’re bad at this. It often means you’re actually doing the work. If your goal is to master financial planning (not just produce plans faster), that’s exactly what we focus on inside Amplified Planning CORE. We’d love to help you practice delivering real plans to clients and creating a process that helps you do the work that matters.