Beginning October 1, Certified Financial Planner professionals will pay $100 more for the annual certification fee, the CFP Board announced in a memorandum to its members on Tuesday.

The increase is the first since 2017, when the board hiked fees by $30. The new annual CFP certification fee will cost $455 and will affect new and renewing members. The board has nearly 92,000 members.

In the notice to members, the board cited its framework for a five-year strategic plan to guide the organization’s operations and advance its mission, including its goals of increasing awareness of planning, diversifying the workforce, promoting planning as a career choice among young people and giving clients greater access to financial services.

“After careful review of the work needed to accomplish CFP Board’s important mission and our new strategic priorities, we explored the investment required to achieve these. The board of directors committed significant funding from CFP Board’s reserves. For additional investment funds, we made changes to the fee structure associated with the value that the CFP certification brand delivers to CFP professionals and to CFP Board’s partners in its certification program,” the board said in the notice from Kamila Elliott, the board of directors’ chair, and Kevin Keller, the CFP Board’s CEO.

In a detailed list, the board cited the programs that will benefit from the fee increase. The programs, it said, “ensure the long-term relevance and sustainability of the financial planning profession and the value and importance that your CFP certification communicates to your clients and prospects.”

The board said the fee increase will be invested as follows. Of the $100:

• $15 will go to a public awareness campaign to increase consumer awareness of, and preference for, working with CFP professionals (it also takes into account the higher costs of media);

• $35 will go to workforce development. This means supporting a national initiative to promote financial planning as an attractive career choice among college-bound high school students, as well as a baccalaureate program expansion;

• $10 will go to the Center for Financial Planning to support initiatives that advance diversity and inclusion in the financial planning profession, to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population, and to support development of new research and resources to support the practice of financial planners;

• $20 will go to client impact research/practice resources to support the development of empirical, longitudinal research studies that assess the impact financial planning has on clients’ well-being. It will also go to other new research and resources for practitioners and help expand clients’ access to pro bono services;

• $20 will go to enforcement of the board’s code of ethics and standards of conduct, which the board says is necessary to safeguard the integrity of the CFP certification marks.

Following the notice to members, Elliott, Keller and Dan Moisand, the board’s chair-elect, joined in a webinar to elaborate on the aim of the board’s new strategic priorities and the new annual certification fee. Keller noted that he will join Moisand in Florida today and Thursday to do a similar outreach with the CFP professional community.

One member inquired about whether the board looked at options other than raising the certificate fee for funding the new strategic plan.

“Of course, nobody likes the increase,” Moisand responded. “It’s a wholly unpopular thing, but it’s a reality that it has to happen from time to time, particularly when you are in the mode of investing in the future. It’s just like we do in our own businesses. We have to invest for the future.”

Keller added that it wasn’t just CFP professionals bearing the burden, but that the organization is using funds too. “We took money out of the reserves, and also we are asking our registered certificate programs that benefit from [continuing education] certification to pay more, as well as some of the CE providers,” he said.

The fee increase drew the attention of XY Planning Network co-founder Michael Kitces, who scrutinized and opined on the board’s goals in a lengthy Twitter thread.

“In the end, a $100 fee increase from [CFP Board] is not trivial. And it will be interesting to see if that impacts other membership organizations like [the Financial Planning Association] and [the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors], as advisors will only spend so much on ‘the profession’ in the aggregate,” he wrote.

He added: “To its credit, [the CFP Board] and [CEO Keller] do have a good track record for deploying dollars for impact. So biggest issue to me is just: SHOW US the results that our dollars are generating real outcomes. Enforcement. Public Awareness. Talent Retention. Diversity.”