Someone has to act when a person no longer can.
Where they live, how they are cared for, what happens to what they spent a lifetime building. Those decisions fall to a guardian, a conservator, a trustee, an agent under power of attorney, a representative payee, an executor. Sometimes that's a professional. Just as often it's a daughter, a brother, a friend.
The work matters enormously, and right now it's largely invisible. Nobody has a current picture of who does it, how much of it there is, or what it takes to do it well. That picture would sharpen how statutes get written, how licensing works, and where training and support get aimed.
We'd like to make this work more visible, and we're asking everyone who does this work to take part:
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Professional fiduciaries: guardians, conservators, trustees, personal representatives, agents under power of attorney, representative payees, VA fiduciaries, public and deputy public guardians, nonprofit agencies, and people working in a fiduciary practice without a credential of their own
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People exploring this work, or partway through getting licensed or certified
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Family members and friends serving someone they care about, not as a business
It takes about ten minutes. Your answers are anonymous. We report totals only, never individuals, and we'll never share or sell your information. Skip anything you'd rather not answer.
We'll publish everything we find in December, free and open to anyone, whether you took part or not.
Why no one has this picture yet
There's no federal job category for this work, so no national count of the people doing it exists. A few regulators count the people they license, and a few publish caseload numbers, but nobody collects the whole picture.
Two serious attempts have said so out loud. The Government Accountability Office looked in 2016 and reported that data on basic questions was limited, including the number of guardians serving older adults.
Massachusetts commissioned a study in November 2025 to size its professional guardian workforce and reported it could not identify an independent data source.
The most recent look at how fiduciaries actually practice covers a single state and is eight years old.
Who's asking, and our interest in it
The Fiduciary Institute is a commercial education company. Its founder is a National Certified Guardian and practicing fiduciary, a volunteer for the Oregon public guardian office, Membership Committee co-chair for the Guardian Conservator Association of Oregon, and is also a subcommittee lead for the Oregon WINGS group. We sell training in this field, so we have an interest in it being better understood.
This survey collects no contact details. No product is mentioned anywhere in the survey, and none will appear in the report. The findings publish free and open to everyone in December, whether you took part or not. We'll publish every question, every number, and the method behind them, so anyone can check the work.
See every question before you decide
You can read the entire instrument, all three tracks, before you answer anything or forward it to anyone.
If you're deciding whether to share this with your members
We're asking state associations, court-convened stakeholder groups, agencies and professional networks to put this in front of the people they reach. If you're weighing that, here's everything that should matter to you:
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It's free and ungated. No membership, purchase or account is needed.
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Nothing in the survey or the report sells anything.
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The findings publish free to everyone in December, including your members, whether they took part or not.
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We're glad to send you your state's own cut of the results before publication.
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If a state returns only a handful of responses, we report that number plainly with no interpretation on top of it.
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You can read every question above before you decide.
Questions, or want your state's survey results?
email info@thefiduciaryinstitute.com
Request for Survey Results
Want us to email survey results to you? Complete the form and we'll send them when published.