We study maximal subgroups of the free idempotent generated semigroup IG(E), where E is the biordered set of idempotents of the endomorphism monoid End A of an independence algebra A, in the case where A has no constants and has finite rank n. It is shown that when n ≥ 3 the maximal subgroup of IG(E) containing a rank 1 idempotent ε is isomorphic to the corresponding maximal subgroup of End A containing ε. The latter is the group of all unary term operations of A. Note that the class of independence algebras with no constants includes sets, free group acts and affine algebras.