T. Rowe Price’s Parent rating drops one notch to Above Average from High given a reduced view of the firm’s strength and stability, though it still possesses many appealing traits.
The firm has endured a performance slump and an uptick in investment professional departures. Performance has been particularly challenged at T. Rowe Price Investment Management, the unit created in 2022 to boost capacity with a focus on small- and mid-cap strategies. More broadly, moderate yet persistent outflows from the firm’s active equity division have continued to pressure the business, resulting in cost-cutting measures—including layoffs to investment personnel—while pushing the firm to explore new frontiers. T. Rowe was slow to launch fully transparent active exchange-traded funds, though it has had some success with a suite built around key manager David Giroux. And as part of an effort to diversify away from its concentration in public-equity funds, the firm collaborated with Goldman Sachs in 2025 to leverage that firm’s private asset capabilities in the creation of new model portfolios and multi-asset products. That move came on the heels of the firm’s first major acquisition in 2021 of private credit shop Oak Hill Advisors, which spawned T. Rowe’s first semiliquid offerings.
T. Rowe’s investment roster has similarly seen change. Since the start of 2022, more than 30 portfolio managers have left or announced intentions to leave the firm, including retirements and performance-related removals across a number of fixed-income and equity funds. This turnover is partly reflected in People and Process Pillar rating downgrades that have outnumbered upgrades by a factor of over three from mid-2024 to mid-2026, including some important downgrades of strategies featured in the firm’s target-date series—one of the industry’s largest.
The firm is settled following a 2022 split of its public-equities division into two distinct research units (T. Rowe Price Investment Management and T. Rowe Price Associates), though a weak start following the reorganization highlights the difficulty of such an undertaking, which coincided with a bear market and the onset of outflows that diminished the capacity constraints that the separation was designed to solve.
Despite some challenges, T. Rowe Price continues to boast many strengths. The firm can recruit well, and its attention to talent development and research culture remains topnotch. It has one of the best multi-asset franchises around, a large and skilled roster of analysts, and the scale few others can match at USD 1.8 trillion in assets under management. While some strategies have struggled, most T. Rowe offerings feature positive ratings from Morningstar analysts. Competitive fees and an investor-friendly ethos remain key positives. For all these reasons, T. Rowe Price still stands apart from most peers.
Note: This share class' Parent Pillar rating is analyst-driven, as its Branding Name, T. Rowe Price (Branding Name ID: BN00000A4H), is covered by Morningstar Manager Research.
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