ESG investing has gone through a full cycle in less than a decade. The Financial Planning Association says planner usage of ESG strategies slid from 38% in 2020 to 34% in 2022 as rate hikes and political backlash hit the category. Some firms have quietly dropped the "ESG" label while keeping similar strategies in place; others have doubled down. Either way, the category is now settling into a more mature, uneven phase of growth.
That volatility raises an obvious question for anyone building distribution strategy around ESG and impact strategies today: where does adoption actually stand now, and where is it concentrated? FINTRX answers that across two parts of the private wealth channel: independent RIAs and family offices.
FINTRX analyzed 12,895 independent RIAs to see where ESG adoption stands and found 932 are flagged as active ESG investors, a firm-level classification based on ADV language and platform data indicating the firm actively considers environmental, social, and governance factors in its investment process. That puts the national rate at 7.2%. These figures are based on each firm's headquarters location. Independent RIAs domiciled outside the U.S., or those without a headquarters state on file in FINTRX, were excluded from this analysis.
Worth noting: this is a different measure than the FPA's 38% figure above. FINTRX's flag identifies firms that explicitly position themselves as ESG investors in their disclosures, not the share of advisors who use any ESG fund with any client. The two numbers aren't directly comparable, but the FPA trend is useful context for how the category's popularity has moved over time, and the FINTRX figure shows how many firms have built ESG into their identity today.
Vermont leads the country at 20.6%, though with only 34 Independent RIAs in the state, that's seven firms driving the number. Hawaii follows at 16.7% on a similarly small base. Among states with a meaningful firm count, Colorado stands out at 12.0%, followed by Massachusetts (11.7%), Minnesota (11.3%), New Hampshire (11.0%), and Pennsylvania (10.6%). New York, despite having the second-largest Independent RIA population in the country, comes in at 9.6%.
The pattern skews Northeast, Rocky Mountain, and upper Midwest. California, the single largest state by firm count at 1,780, sits at a more modest 6.3%.
Mississippi, North Dakota, and West Virginia each show 0% ESG concentration, meaning not a single Independent RIA in FINTRX's database in those states says it is an active ESG investor. Arkansas (1.5%) and Montana (2.9%) round out the bottom. These are lower-population states for RIAs generally, so small changes in raw counts move the percentage significantly.
RIA data only covers part of the private wealth channel. Family offices, which manage concentrated capital for a single family or small group of families rather than diversified client bases, show a very different adoption pattern for values-driven investing.
FINTRX tracks a separate classification for family offices: active impact investor, indicating the firm considers ESG factors as part of its investment strategy. Looking at the full family office universe of 4,602 firms globally, split by domicile:
Two things stand out. First, non-US family offices show meaningfully higher impact investing adoption than US-based firms, a 7.8-point gap. This tracks with the broader ESG data. According to Morningstar, Europe held 83% of global sustainable fund assets at the end of 2022 and continued attracting inflows, while the U.S. saw nearly $6.2 billion in outflows that same quarter. US family offices are operating in a market where ESG and impact investing have faced more public pushback recently, which likely explains some of the gap.
Second, and more strikingly, impact investing adoption among family offices (26.6% to 34.4%) runs four to five times higher than ESG flagging among Independent RIAs (7.2% nationally). That gap makes sense directionally. Family offices are deploying concentrated, mission-driven capital for one family, so values alignment and legacy considerations carry more weight than they do for an RIA managing diversified assets across hundreds or thousands of client relationships. But the scale of the difference is worth calling out on its own.
One caveat: For the RIAs in the FINTRX database, the flag is "active ESG investor". For family offices, the flag is "active impact investor". They are two distinct FINTRX classifications with different underlying definitions. Impact investing typically implies more direct, mission-driven capital deployment (which includes ESG), while ESG investing tends to describe a screening or integration approach layered onto a more traditional portfolio. These numbers are directionally comparable but shouldn't be blended into a single stat.
Europe accounts for most global ESG fund assets and has continued seeing inflows, while the U.S. share is smaller and has seen more outflows during periods of political scrutiny. According to Cerulli, a majority of advisors in 2020 cited lack of client demand as the main reason they hadn't built out ESG offerings, even though close to half of retail households surveyed said they'd prefer to invest in a way that reflects their values. That gap between advisor perception and client interest is one possible factor behind why ESG concentration remains in the single digits nationally for RIAs, while family offices show adoption several multiples higher.
What the FINTRX data shows across both channels is that values-driven investing today is real but unevenly distributed, both geographically among RIAs and structurally between RIAs and family offices. For asset managers and ETF issuers building distribution strategies with an ESG or impact lens, understanding where that concentration actually sits, by state, by domicile, and by channel, is more useful than any single national average.