Understanding broker fees: every cost type, broken down

These layers are not equally important. Which one dominates depends entirely on your own pattern — order size, order count, currency, holding period. Without those four numbers, no price list can be read usefully.

Four pricing models are in common use, and they behave in opposite directions as order size changes.

• Flat per order. Trade Republic charges EUR 1.00 as an external settlement cost on its default route and EUR 2.00 if you pick the venue. Since 1 September 2026 Scalable Capital charges up to EUR 1.99 on gettex and Xetra, and EUR 0.99 on EIX. As a percentage a flat fee gets cheaper the larger the order — and brutal the smaller it is.
• Percentage with a floor and a cap. Interactive Brokers Ireland charges 0.05% on its Tiered plan, minimum EUR 1.25 and maximum EUR 29 on Xetra and Euronext. Below roughly EUR 2,500 you pay the minimum; above roughly EUR 58,000 the cap. Only in between do you genuinely pay 0.05%.
• Per share. For US equities Interactive Brokers charges USD 0.0035 per share on Tiered, minimum USD 0.35 per order, capped at 1% of trade value. This punishes low-priced shares: 2,000 shares at USD 3 costs USD 7, while the same money in 30 shares at USD 200 costs the USD 0.35 minimum.
• Zero commission. The cost has not disappeared; it has moved — into the spread, into currency conversion, into interest margin on cash, or into securities lending. Trading 212 says so openly: its investing-side revenue comes from the 0.15% FX fee and from share lending.

Work it through. Three brokers, three sizes, a European share in euros:

What sits inside the number matters as much as the number. DEGIRO's EUR 3.00 is EUR 2.00 of commission plus a EUR 1.00 handling fee, and its German schedule prices most non-Tradegate venues higher. Interactive Brokers passes exchange and clearing fees through separately on Tiered; they are bundled on its Fixed plan and inside Trade Republic's flat charge. Comparing commission columns alone compares different things.

Every quote has two sides. You buy at the offer and sell at the bid; the gap is the spread, and half of it is your cost in each direction. No broker itemises it, because technically it is not a fee — it is the price at which somebody was willing to sell you the security.

Put a number on it. An ETF quoted 100.02 to 100.08 has a six-cent spread, 0.06% of the price. A round trip on EUR 10,000 therefore costs roughly EUR 6 — more than the EUR 2 of commission at a one-euro broker. Trade the same ETF at 22:30 when a single market maker is quoting, and the spread might be 0.30%. The same round trip now costs EUR 30. The broker charged you nothing different. You paid five times as much.

Three consequences follow. Trade liquid instruments during the home market's core hours, not late on a single venue. Compare your broker's quote against the primary exchange's reference price at the same second — the only way to measure the markup at all. And for products with no reference exchange, such as crypto or CFDs, the spread is the entire price: Trade Republic does not publish its crypto spread, so the cost of a crypto trade there cannot be calculated from the fee schedule.

One regulatory note: the EU's MiFIR review, Regulation (EU) 2024/791, prohibits payment for order flow — payments from a venue to a broker for routing client orders — with a transitional period for member states that had permitted it. How your broker is paid today is set out in its order execution policy, not its marketing.

The spread of rates here is the widest in the whole fee landscape: 0.20 basis points at Interactive Brokers, 0.15% at Trading 212, 0.25% at DEGIRO and Saxo, 0.95% at Swissquote, 1% at OANDA and Fidelity — and no itemised line at all at Trade Republic, Scalable Capital and eToro. It is charged on the way in, again on the way out, and again on every dividend. Because it is the largest single item for most European investors, it gets its own guide.

These keep running whether or not you trade, which is exactly why they get overlooked.

• Custody and platform fees. Saxo Bank publishes a monthly holding fee of 0.15% a year on share, ETF and bond positions on Classic (0.12% Platinum, 0.09% VIP), though coverage varies by booking entity and Saxo has waived it in several European markets. Swissquote charges private clients CHF 20 to CHF 50 per quarter on a banded scale — CHF 80 to CHF 200 a year, plus Swiss VAT of 8.1%. Trade Republic, Trading 212 and Lightyear charge nothing.
• Subscriptions. Scalable Capital's PRIME+ costs EUR 4.99 a month, EUR 59.88 a year. Against EUR 0.99 per EIX order it pays for itself from roughly five orders a month; below that you subsidise a plan you do not use.
• Exchange connectivity. DEGIRO charges EUR 2.50 per non-home exchange per year, capped at 0.25% of account value, whichever is lower; US options and futures venues cost EUR 5.00 a month.
• Inactivity. XTB charges EUR 10 a month once 365 days have passed with no trade and 90 with no deposit. IG charges nothing at all — it lists the inactivity fee as free on its investing, spread betting and CFD accounts. eToro dropped its USD 10 charge in 2026.
• Market data. At Interactive Brokers, real-time feeds are paid subscriptions per exchange — USD 20 to 50 a month for an active trader, before a single order.

The custody fee scales with wealth rather than activity: 0.15% a year on a EUR 120,000 portfolio is EUR 180 — every year, without a single trade. On a EUR 20,000 portfolio the same rate is EUR 30, and commissions dominate again. The rule of thumb: the larger the portfolio and the rarer the trading, the more a percentage holding fee matters relative to the per-order charge.

The broker passes these on unchanged. They depend on the market, not the provider — but they explain why the same order costs differently in London and Frankfurt.

Both US charges are reset periodically: the Section 31 rate has applied since 4 April 2026 (SEC Fee Rate Advisory), the TAF rate since 1 January 2026 (FINRA Trading Activity Fee). Both bodies publish the rate currently in force.

Then there is withholding tax. US dividends are subject to 30% withholding as standard; with a valid W-8BEN on file and an applicable treaty, many European investors see that reduced to 15%. Check your statement to confirm the form is actually in place. Rates and allowances depend on your residence and change; the binding position comes from your own tax authority, such as HMRC or the Swiss Federal Tax Administration.

Leveraged positions cost financing, charged daily: you are effectively borrowing the notional value of the position and paying a reference rate plus a margin on it. At Capital.com, overnight funding runs at roughly 4% a year over the benchmark; eToro charges nightly at 22:00 UK time and triples the charge over the weekend.

A worked example: a EUR 20,000 CFD position held for 90 days, at a 2% benchmark plus a 4% margin. The arithmetic is 20,000 times 6% times 90/365 = about EUR 296, against a commission of zero at many CFD providers. Cost here is decided by holding period, not by commission — which is precisely why CFDs are structurally the wrong instrument for buy-and-hold.

On the regulatory frame: EEA retail clients are subject to ESMA product intervention limits of 30:1 on major currency pairs, 20:1 on non-major pairs, gold and major indices, 10:1 on other commodities and non-major indices, 5:1 on individual equities and 2:1 on cryptocurrencies, plus a margin close-out at 50% of required margin and negative balance protection. Every provider must also publish the share of its retail accounts that lose money — CMC Markets discloses 68%, IC Markets' EU entity 72.52% — and ESMA cited data showing 74% to 89% of retail accounts were loss-making. The figure that applies to your broker is in its own risk warning and is refreshed regularly.

CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage.

Profile A: EUR 300 a month into a euro-listed UCITS ETF. Twelve executions a year, EUR 3,600 invested. At Trade Republic and Scalable Capital, savings-plan executions are free: EUR 0 a year. At Interactive Brokers the EUR 1.25 minimum applies to every order, so EUR 15 a year — 0.42% of the amount invested. For small, regular euro contributions the savings-plan brokers win outright.

Profile B: EUR 20,000 a year into US-listed shares, in four EUR 5,000 tranches. Now conversion dominates. At Interactive Brokers, on shares priced around USD 200 the commission hits the USD 0.35 minimum and the conversion the USD 2 minimum, four times each — about USD 9.40 for the year. At Trading 212 there is no commission, but 0.15% on EUR 20,000 is EUR 30, or EUR 0 if you hold a USD balance. At Swissquote from a franc balance, the 0.95% conversion alone is about CHF 190, before commissions (CHF 29 on a CHF 10,000 order) and custody.

Same money, same year, an entirely different answer: broker rankings are a property of your pattern, not of the brokers.

Honesty runs in both directions. A one-euro order is worth nothing if the broker has no direct exchange access and you need a limit on a thinly traded small cap at its primary venue — the worse fill costs many times the commission saved. The cheapest custody arrangement sometimes sits under a licence carrying EUR 20,000 of investor compensation, which covers the failure of the firm and not your trading losses. And leaving can have a price: an outgoing transfer costs EUR 20 per position at DEGIRO on the euro schedule and about EUR 50 per ISIN at Saxo, capped per transfer request, while Trade Republic charges nothing for it.

1. 1Write down your real pattern: how many orders a year, at what size, in which currency, held for how long. Without those four numbers, any comparison is guesswork.
2. 2Price your pattern, not the headline: commission times order count, FX markup times conversion volume, holding fee times portfolio value.
3. 3Go looking for the two lines brokers set in small type — currency conversion and the ongoing custody or platform charge.
4. 4Check whether the conversion is itemised at all. If not, treat that broker as unpriceable for foreign-currency assets.
5. 5Establish the exit cost before you enter: outgoing transfer per position, withdrawal fee, minimum withdrawal.
6. 6Re-check annually, and confirm jurisdiction-specific items — stamp duties, VAT on custody, withholding tax — for your residence and your broker's booking entity. Schedules move: Scalable Capital shifted gettex to a flat EUR 1.99 on 1 September 2026 and cut Xetra to the same figure.

This guide is information, not investment advice.