KPMG 2026 US Family Business Report: Family Owned, Professionally Run
KPMG’s 2026 survey finds US family businesses preparing for fewer family executives, more holding companies and greater use of outside management. AI adoption is already widespread. Governance has further to go.
Sixty-five percent of the companies in KPMG’s 2026 US Family Business Report are family-run operating businesses today. By 2035, respondents expect the figure to fall to 28 percent.
The ownership is not disappearing with the family executives. Professional management with family board oversight rises from 10 to 21 percent in respondents’ plans. The share operating several businesses through a holding company rises from 4 to 19 percent. Another 17 percent expect to own an operating business alongside a diversified investment portfolio, compared with 11 percent today.
KPMG surveyed 109 US family businesses rather than family offices. Yet the survey describes families taking on many of the jobs a family office exists to handle. They are retaining ownership while management moves outside the family, adding businesses and financial assets, and separating decisions about the company from decisions about family capital.
Family ownership is staying. Family management is not
Only 36 percent expect family members to hold most senior leadership positions over the next decade. Thirty-five percent expect family and non-family executives to share senior management, and 29 percent expect outsiders to hold most of those positions.
KPMG also found high confidence in the next generation among families with an identified succession path. Ninety-one percent said the next generation was ready. Taken together, the figures suggest many families are preparing heirs for ownership rather than for the chief executive’s office.
A shareholder has a different job from a CEO. Once an outside executive runs the company, family members need to know when to intervene and when not to. They vote on matters reserved for owners, appoint directors and decide what level of debt or acquisition risk they will accept. The board assesses management. Executives run the company.
Founders often hold all three roles at once and settle disagreements personally. The arrangement becomes harder to maintain when ownership passes to siblings or cousins and professional executives take over daily management. Families then need written rules for decisions that a founder previously made alone.
The holding company is becoming much more common
KPMG’s numbers for holding companies move faster than almost any other ownership category in the survey: from 4 percent today to 19 percent expected in 2035.
A family with one operating company has one dominant centre of financial information. Add two more businesses, an investment portfolio and several private-market funds and nobody sees the whole position through company accounts alone.
One CEO knows what the manufacturing business plans to spend. A property company has its own borrowing. The private bank sees securities and cash held with that institution. Private-equity managers know when their funds intend to call capital. None of them is responsible for deciding whether the family has enough liquidity across all of those holdings.
The decision appears when cash is available. The original company wants CHF 20 million for an acquisition. A private fund has called CHF 5 million. Family shareholders expect a distribution. Markets have fallen and the investment committee wants to put more money into listed equities. Someone has to decide which claim on the capital comes first.
Families do not need to call the organisation making those decisions a family office. They still need people who know what the family owns, what it owes, when cash will be required and who has authority to commit it.
Growth remains part of the plan
Ninety-three percent of respondents say they have a clear growth strategy for the next five to ten years. Eighty-three percent expect to grow faster than most competitors.
KPMG’s respondents therefore do not describe families retreating from their companies as they professionalise management. Many expect to expand while changing who runs the business and how ownership is organised.
Risk management has not reached the same level of confidence. Forty-nine percent describe their enterprise-risk management framework as comprehensive and well established. Thirty-nine percent say theirs is still developing.
Family businesses also carry dependencies that rarely appear neatly in a risk register. The chief executive may be the controlling shareholder. Two directors may be siblings. A commercial dispute may affect family relationships at the same time as the value of the company. When ownership spreads across more relatives and management moves outside the family, informal arrangements leave more room for disagreement over who was entitled to make a decision.
Cybersecurity, talent, trade and tariffs, customer demand and succession all appear among the pressures respondents expect to manage. A company adding new markets, technologies and executives has more decisions to supervise just as control is moving away from the founder.
AI is already inside the business
Forty-three percent of respondents have deployed AI across multiple functions. Another 43 percent are piloting it in selected areas. Only 4 percent have not started.
Companies report using AI in data analysis, customer service, marketing, sales, finance, product development and risk management. KPMG found the highest adoption in data analytics and business intelligence.
Formal AI governance is far less common. Forty percent have a framework in place. Fifty-six percent expect AI governance and strategy to reach the board agenda within the next 12 months, while 51 percent name AI strategy and deployment as their largest skills gap.
Employees and operating teams are therefore already making decisions about tools and data before many boards have agreed on the rules. Which information may enter an external model? Who checks an AI-generated output before the business acts on it? Which supplier retains company data? Who carries responsibility when staff use tools management has not approved?
A family holding several businesses has to answer those questions more than once. Different companies may use different systems and vendors, while commercially sensitive information sits across the group. Owners do not need to choose every application, but the board needs enough reporting to know where the exposure sits.
Families want outside executives — and struggle to hire them
Attracting high-quality external talent is the most frequently cited talent problem in KPMG’s survey.
The hiring problem sits directly beside the planned fall in family management. A company expecting a professional CEO, finance director or technology leader needs to persuade those people to work inside an organisation where one family still controls the shares.
The job can become difficult when the formal organisation chart says one thing and family behaviour says another. An outside chief executive may have authority over an acquisition on paper while a founder continues negotiating directly with the target. A board may approve a budget while family shareholders expect managers to seek informal consent before spending it.
Professional managers need to know where their authority begins and ends. Owners need information good enough to judge their performance without returning to daily management.
Independent directors become part of the answer for some families. They add experience unavailable inside the family and give the board a voice that does not carry the history of a sibling, parent or cousin relationship.
Recruitment also reaches beyond the operating company once the family owns more assets. Investment professionals, tax advisers, lawyers, reporting specialists and technology providers may sit inside a family office or remain external. Few families need every skill on payroll. They do need to know who is responsible for each part of the work.
Succession is no longer only about finding the next CEO
A founder may pass shares to three children and appoint none of them to management. One might sit on the board. Another may have no role in the company. The third may represent the family in investment decisions made through a holding company.
All three remain owners. Their preparation therefore has to cover more than the operating business. They need to understand the rights attached to their shares, dividend policy, debt, valuation, major investment decisions and the difference between dissatisfaction as an owner and a matter management must fix.
KPMG’s figures make that form of succession easier to see. Respondents expect far fewer family-run businesses by 2035 without expecting family ownership itself to disappear. The family moves out of some executive positions while retaining responsibility for who runs the company and what happens to the capital it produces.
The family-office story sits between the categories
Only 8 percent of respondents currently describe their organisation primarily as an investment portfolio with family governance or a family office. Six percent expect to do so in 2035.
Those figures look modest beside the changes elsewhere in the survey. Holding-company structures rise from 4 to 19 percent. Professional management with family board oversight doubles. More families expect investment portfolios to sit beside operating companies.
A family can therefore become more dependent on family-office infrastructure without becoming a family office in KPMG’s classification.
Consider what the owners need once several companies and investment accounts sit under the same family. They need reporting across entities. They need a record of decisions and ownership rights. They need cash forecasts that include private-market commitments as well as company distributions. They need banks and advisers to work from consistent information. They need someone to notice when several separate investment decisions create one large exposure.
The original operating company cannot provide all of that because its management is responsible for the company, not for every asset belonging to its shareholders.
What the 2035 family enterprise looks like
KPMG’s survey does not point to one dominant replacement for the traditional family business. Respondents are moving in several directions at once.
Some expect professional executives to run the original company while the family remains on the board. Others are building holding companies around several operating businesses. Some are adding diversified portfolios alongside the company that created the wealth. AI is already entering day-to-day operations while boards write the rules around it.
The common thread is narrower: ownership is becoming a separate discipline from management.
A founder often learns both at the same time because the business and the family fortune are largely the same thing. The next generation may inherit a very different job. It has to choose managers, supervise boards and allocate money across assets it does not operate itself.
For many families, the need for a family office begins before anybody puts the words on the door.
KPMG 2026: Six numbers to know from the report
65 percent → 28 percent
Family-run operating businesses today versus respondents’ expectation for 2035.
10 percent → 21 percent
Professional management with family board oversight.
4 percent → 19 percent
Multiple operating businesses held through a holding company.
36 percent
Respondents expecting family members to hold most senior leadership roles over the coming decade.
86 percent
Businesses already piloting AI or using it at scale.
40 percent
Businesses with formal AI governance.
Source: KPMG 2026 US Family Business Report, based on 109 US family businesses surveyed as part of the KPMG Global Family Business Survey 2026.
