Halifax fees explained

Halifax's fees are considered to be high. This is usually a result of high fees across multiple fee types. It's important to be aware of this and to decide whether other advantages of Halifax can still make it a good choice for you. These deciding features can be its research options, its education section or the general user experience you get on its trading platforms.

Here's a high level overview of Halifax's fees

Online brokerages in general charge much lower brokerage fees than traditional brokerages do - this is largely due to the fact that online brokerages' businesses can be much better scaled: From a purely technical standpoint it doesn't make that much of a difference for them if they have 100 or 5000 clients.

This is not to say however that they don't have any fees at all. They make money by charging you at various events for various rates. Usually you need to keep an eye on these 3 types of fees:

• Trading fees - these are brokerage fees that you pay when you actually do a trade, i.e. buying an Apple stock or an ETF. What you pay is either a commission, a spread or financing rate. Some brokers apply all of these.
  • A commission is either based on the traded volume or it is fixed.
  • A spread is the difference between the buy price and the sell price
  • Financing rate or overnight rate is charged when you hold your leveraged positions for more than one day.
• Non-trading fees. These occur related to some operations you make in your account, i.e. depositing money to your account, withdrawing money from it or not trading for an extended amount of time.

We compare Halifax fees with its closest competitors, Hargreaves Lansdown and Interactive Investor.

We see Halifax's trading fees to be high because they charge more than most of its competitors.

Let's break down the trading fees into the different asset classes available at Halifax.

Trading fees

Halifax's trading fees are high.

Stock fees and ETF fees

Halifax has high stock trading fees.

Fund fees

Halifax fund fees are average.

Financing rates

Halifax financing rates are .

If you want to trade on margin and prefer to hold your positions long, financing costs can be significant.

When it comes to looking at all the non-trading fees Halifax is a cheap broker. This means that they don't charge you a lot for non-trading related activities on your trading account, like withdrawal fee.

Non-trading fees include various brokerage fees and charges at Halifax that you pay not related to buying and selling assets. Among some others, typical non trading fees are withdrawal fee, deposit fee, inactivity fee and account fee.

Deposit fees are applied when you send money to your trading account from your bank account. Usually brokers don't charge money for that and Halifax is not different: you will see the exact same amount on your brokerage account that you sent by any of the deposit methods Halifax offers.

Unlike the majority of the online brokers we have reviewed Halifax does not charge a withdrawal fee. This means that you'll see the same amount of money on your bank account that you transferred from your brokerage account.

Halifax does not apply an inactivity fee which is great because your account will not be charged even if you do not trade for a longer time period (months or years).