Your parents may be planning to sell the business you expect to inherit.

Of the adult children whose parents own a business, 67% said they expect that company to pass to them or a sibling. Of the owners, 19% said they expect to hand ownership to their children.

Wells Fargo Wealth & Investment Management, the bank's wealth arm, released those figures on October 20 inside its 2026 Wealth Transfer Study. The parents and adult children were surveyed separately, so the 67 and the 19 are not one family's argument written down twice.

24% of the owners expect to sell to someone outside the family. 36% expect a gradual close. Passing the company to a child was the least common of the three paths they named.

The child can still be arranging a life around a handoff. Turning down a city transfer. Staying near the store so weekends stay free. Keeping a softer job so they can come home when a parent is ready. A parent who is quietly shopping a sale is building a retirement check. Those are different calendars for the same building.

Lorne Maltenfort, national director of private wealth planning for the wealth arm, said many children assume they are preparing to inherit a business, and many parents have entirely different plans. "Neither perspective is necessarily wrong," he said, "but surprise is not a good succession strategy." For a lot of households, that surprise shows up first as lost career years.

Five years of staying local for a promise that was never made is five years of raises and resumes that went elsewhere. The child is budgeting against a plan nobody said out loud.

The company questions came from a small cut of a larger affluent sample. Versta Research, a Chicago market-research firm, interviewed 817 parents ages 61 to 79 and 787 adult children ages 29 to 60 online from May 11 to June 10. Households needed at least $1 million in investable assets; participating families averaged $3.7 million. Among them, Wells Fargo heard from 65 owners and 181 children of owners. That is enough to show two pictures of the future. It is too small to treat 67 and 19 as the odds for any one motel or dry cleaner.

Only 21% of parents in the full study said they have had a detailed talk about the estate plan with their children. A finished will can still leave the shop blank: whether the lease stays in the family name, whether one sibling gets cash instead of shares, or whether a buyer is already circling.

The Wells Fargo release does not break the business answers out by race. Asian American and immigrant households still feel the gap because so much of what they own sits in an operating business.

The Census Bureau's Annual Business Survey counted about 650,680 Asian-owned employer firms in 2022, with roughly $1.2 trillion in receipts, and about 22% of those firms in Accommodation and Food Services. A restaurant, motel, or grocery is often the largest asset a first-generation household owns, and the one a child grew up working.

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association, a hospitality trade group whose members are largely Indian American owners, says its members own about 60% of hotels in the United States. In that corridor, kids and parents are often weighing keep, sell, or walk away without putting the same answer on the table.

Ask owners alone, and a family handoff can sound like the default. Exit Planning Institute's 2025 Generational State of Owner Readiness report found that about 57% of Boomer owners planned to leave within five years, with passing the business to family and selling to a third party nearly even, at about 26% and 25%. Selling can be the plan even when the kids still love the place.

Kai and Elaine Chan sold the Golden Star Café in Stockton, California, after three generations behind the counter; their sons had left for office careers. Paul and Nancy Fong listed Chicago Cafe in Woodland, California, long counted among the oldest Chinese restaurants in the country, after their children became doctors and engineers. Filmmaker So Yun Um's 2022 documentary Liquor Store Dreams follows Korean American liquor-store families in Los Angeles whose parents told the kids not to take over, then put the store up for sale.

In the Wells Fargo sample, owners aiming for a sale or a wind-down may be protecting children who already have careers. Children counting on the company may be reading every weekend shift as a promise.

Ask three things while everyone can still answer. Is the plan a handoff, a sale, or a close? If a child is staying near home or holding back a move for that plan, does the owner know? If a loan still needs a personal guarantee, whose name is on it?

For the shop itself, Succession and Exit Planning for Immigrant-Owned Family Shops walks through what the business is worth, how a sibling buys the others out, and what happens to the lease. If a child has already been asked to back a loan, When Adult Children Co-Sign or Guarantee a Family Business Loan covers what that signature does. The same Wells Fargo study's wider inheritance fight is in 61% of adult children say inherited wealth hurt the family. 29% of parents agree..

Until someone answers the handoff question, the child may keep paying for a succession plan that only exists in their head.