The UHNW private hiring market in 2025 and 2026 looks different from the market five years ago. Some shifts are cyclical. Some are structural. Clients who understand which is which make better hiring decisions, particularly for senior roles where mis-timing a hire is expensive.
This article describes the trends we are seeing across our searches. It is written for principals, family office directors, and senior operators who want to understand what is happening in the market as they plan the next twelve to twenty-four months of hiring.
For current opportunities, see our job board. To discuss a search, see our Private Households & Estates page or Family Office recruitment page.
Family offices are growing up. Twenty years ago, most single family offices were three people sitting next to a business. Today, many are structured entities with formal governance, defined mandates, specialist teams, and compliance functions.
What we see in hiring. More formal job specifications. Better-documented authority. Clearer reporting lines. Remuneration frameworks that resemble institutional benchmarks more than principal-discretion approaches.
What it means for candidates. Candidates with institutional backgrounds (banks, asset managers, law firms, large corporates) are more attractive than they were. Family offices want the process discipline that these backgrounds bring, alongside the cultural fit private work requires.
What it means for clients. Investing in structural work (mandate, governance, authority matrix) before the hire pays for itself multiple times over. Principals who expect the hire to "work out the structure" create friction.
Five years ago, Chief of Staff as a title was concentrated in tech founder environments. Today, it is spreading rapidly into family offices, traditional wealth, and even operator-principal households.
Drivers. The complexity of modern private life has grown. Principals with business interests, investment activity, philanthropic programmes, personal commitments, and family responsibilities have outgrown the EA model. The Chief of Staff role sits above the senior EA layer, carrying authority and driving initiatives rather than just coordinating.
Implications. Chief of Staff salaries have risen substantially. Candidate supply is tight. The best candidates for the role often come from consulting, strategy, or founder backgrounds rather than from traditional private office career paths.
Watchout. Not every office needs a Chief of Staff. Some offices title the role Chief of Staff but run it as a senior EA. The wrong title attracts the wrong candidate. Scope before titling.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh have become significant markets for UHNW private staff, particularly at senior level. The drivers are well-documented: relocating principals, tax-efficient structures, expanding wealth, and ambitious family office building in the region.
What we see. UK and European candidates relocating for significantly higher tax-efficient packages. US candidates considering Middle East opportunities more seriously than they were five years ago. Specialist roles (Chief of Staff, CIO, senior EA) filling at London-New York pay levels in net terms, which converts to competitive gross in the UK or US.
Implications for UK-based hiring. UK clients competing for the same candidates as Dubai-based employers face higher retention risk at senior level. Retention packages need to be defensible against tax-adjusted alternatives. The old assumption that a UK candidate would stay in the UK no longer holds.
Implications for candidates. Dubai roles bring specific operational considerations: cultural adjustment, schooling, spouse circumstances, and long-term career positioning. Attractive packages are not free of trade-offs. Candidates should evaluate carefully, not just react to headline numbers.
The corporate shift to hybrid has reached family offices, with important caveats.
What works hybrid. Mid-level support staff (Family Office Assistants, junior Analysts), specific project roles, some back-office investment operations, finance, and compliance functions.
What does not work hybrid. Senior support roles (EA, PA, Chief of Staff) where the principal expects in-person presence. Household staff, by definition. Senior operational roles requiring visible presence.
Where the friction sits. Candidates increasingly expect flexibility. Principals often do not offer it, particularly for senior roles. The mismatch slows senior-role searches and sometimes costs placements. Honest scoping at the start of the search prevents wasted time.
Family office investment teams are becoming more institutional. A decade ago, many offices outsourced investment entirely or relied on a principal-plus-analyst model. Today, offices below £500 million AUM often maintain a dedicated CIO or investment director.
Drivers. Principals are more sophisticated. Capital is larger. Private market allocation has increased, which requires in-house expertise. External manager fees have grown harder to justify at scale.
Candidate market. Demand for experienced family office CIOs outstrips supply. Candidates from institutional backgrounds (endowments, sovereign wealth, large asset managers) are relocating into family office roles, bringing institutional discipline. Compensation has risen sharply at the top of the CIO segment.
Watchout. Hiring a CIO before writing a mandate remains the most common failure. The rise of the CIO role has not fixed the structural problem that most offices under-invest in the mandate phase.
The gap between published salary data and the UHNW reality continues to widen. Aggregator data captures the mid-market. The top of the private market has accelerated faster than the middle, and published data lags by twelve to twenty-four months even when updated.
What clients should do. Benchmark against specialist placement data, not published data. Update annually rather than relying on two-year-old figures.
What candidates should do. Do not anchor on published ranges. Seek specialist recruiter input before accepting or rejecting offers based on headline figures.
Across a changing market, certain role-specific preferences remain consistent. For roles with close personal access, such as a personal housekeeper or butler to a female principal, there is often a gender preference. This is the nature of private household work, not a policy issue. The same pattern applies across many intimate-access roles in private life.
These preferences are not universal, and they are not always arbitrary. They reflect the intimacy of the working relationship and the environment the candidate will operate in daily. Aggregator data does not capture this segmentation, and corporate recruitment frameworks do not accommodate it. Specialist private recruiters work within the preferences clients specify while advising on what each preference means for candidate supply and salary.
AI is reshaping some functions. Candidate sourcing tools now surface profiles faster than a manual search, though the candidates they surface are rarely the senior UHNW pool. Drafting tools accelerate administrative work at the EA layer. Investment research tools automate portions of what a junior analyst used to do.
What AI does not yet do. Senior judgement. Trust assessment. Discretion. Cultural fit. Chemistry with the principal. The parts of private hiring that most determine outcomes are the parts AI is least able to automate.
What this means for hiring. Process work (scheduling, correspondence, simple analysis) is increasingly covered by tools. Candidates at the EA or analyst level need to justify the human cost with judgement and reliability. The high-end roles (PA, Chief of Staff, CIO, senior operational) are unaffected so far and likely to remain so.
What this means for compensation. Salaries at the most automatable end of the market are facing pressure. Salaries at the judgement-heavy end are rising. The market is bifurcating.
Hiring is still important. Retention is now the harder problem. Principals who run a successful search and secure a strong candidate often lose them within two to three years to a peer household, a competing geography, or burnout.
Drivers of attrition. Better offers from peer households. International mobility. Life-stage changes. Cumulative fatigue from long hours and high pressure.
What works for retention. Clear role design. Honest compensation progression. Meaningful development (training, secondments, additional responsibility). Structured breaks. Recognition beyond the financial.
What does not work. One-off retention bonuses without structural change. Counter-offers at the point of resignation. Verbal commitments without written follow-through.
The best-run offices treat retention as a deliberate function, not an afterthought. Some allocate a specific owner for staff development and well-being. Most do not, and the turnover cost is usually invisible in the budget.
Family offices are adopting governance frameworks previously seen only at institutional investors. Investment committees with external members. Family constitutions. Formal family governance. Succession planning documents. Audit and compliance structures.
What this means for hiring. The governance-capable candidate pool is smaller than the pool of general family office operators. Candidates with institutional governance experience (board secretaries, compliance officers, governance specialists) are increasingly valuable.
What this means for principals. Building governance before it is needed is easier than building it under stress. Principals who are thinking about succession, philanthropy at scale, or multi-generation structures are adding governance roles earlier than they used to.
More UHNW principals are building significant philanthropic programmes. Some are standalone. Others sit inside family offices as dedicated teams.
What this means for hiring. Philanthropic programme roles (Executive Director, Programme Officer, Chief Philanthropy Officer) are increasingly on our desks. The candidate pool is specific and draws from foundation, non-profit, and impact investing backgrounds. Compensation sits below corporate or investment equivalents but is rising.
What principals need. Clear philanthropic strategy before hiring. Without it, programme hires end up running personal preferences rather than a deliberate programme.
Families are more internationally distributed. Children living in different countries, businesses in multiple jurisdictions, residences across three or four regions, varying tax residence status. This affects everything: staffing models, authority lines, compensation structures, and communication rhythms.
What this means for hiring. Senior operators need cross-border fluency. Not necessarily specialist tax knowledge, but comfort with multi-jurisdictional coordination, time zone management, and the operational complexity of a distributed family.
Three themes cut across all of the above.
Professionalisation. Private offices are becoming more structured, more governed, and more institutional. This raises the bar for both employers and candidates.
Compensation inflation at the senior end. The premium for senior judgement and specialisation is widening. Mid-market compensation is more stable. Juniors are facing AI pressure.
Global competition for senior talent. Dubai, New York, Singapore, and London now compete openly for the same candidate pool. UK-centric thinking on retention is no longer sufficient.
Clients who adjust to these trends proactively tend to build better teams with lower turnover. Clients who assume the market has not changed tend to find out through attrition, a failed search, or a surprising counter-offer.
Oplu's work continues to focus on the senior end of the private market where judgement, discretion, and institutional knowledge matter. We have expanded our international reach to cover Dubai, the US, Switzerland, and other key UHNW markets as our clients' lives have become more distributed. Our investment work has grown as more family offices build in-house teams.
Our process has stayed the same. Scope first, source selectively, interview in depth, present short, reference honestly, support retention after placement. The market has changed. The discipline of good search has not.
For current opportunities, see our job board. To discuss a search, get in touch.
Professionalisation. Family offices are becoming more structured, more governed, and more formal in their hiring practices. Candidates with institutional backgrounds are in demand, and offices are investing in mandate writing, authority matrices, and formal governance before senior hires.
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