Overview of IG fees and charges
IG'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 IG 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 IG's fees
| Assets | Fee level | Fee terms |
|---|---|---|
| US stock fee | High | $0.02 per share; min $15 |
| EURUSD fee | Low | The fees are built into spread, 0.75 pips is the spread cost |
| US tech fund fee | - | Not available |
| Inactivity fee | Low | £12 per month after 2 years of inactivity |
IG fees
IG fees explained
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 IG fees with its closest competitors, XTB and eToro.
IG fees
IG trading fees
We see IG'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 IG.
Trading fees
IG's trading fees are high.
It is super hard to compare trading fees for CFD brokers. What we did at Brokerchooser? Instead of quoting long fee tables, we compare brokers by calculating all fees of a typical trade for three assets.
For the assets we chose cleverly and arbitrarily:
- Apple, a large US stock
- Vodafone, a large European stock
- EURUSD, a popular currency pair
The typical trade means buying a position, holding for one week, and selling it. For the volume we chose a $2,000 position for the stocks and $20,000 for the EURUSD.
This super catch-all benchmark includes spreads, commissions and financing costs for all brokers.
Here is the verdict.
| IG | XTB | eToro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple benchmark fee | $34.9 | $18.1 | $3.6 |
| Vodafone benchmark fee | $30.5 | $24.4 | $3.6 |
| EURUSD benchmark fee | $12.3 | $17.1 | $19.1 |
Financing rates
IG financing rates are low.
If you want to trade on margin and prefer to hold your positions long, financing costs can be significant.
| IG | XTB | eToro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple financing rate | 5.8% | 6.0% | 8.9% |
| Vodafone financing rate | 4.0% | 3.1% | 8.9% |
| EURUSD financing rate | 2.9% | 4.1% | 3.7% |
| EURGBP financing rate | 2.9% | 1.7% | 2.5% |
IG fees
IG non-trading fees
When it comes to looking at all the non-trading fees IG is an average broker. This means that some of the non-trading fees are high, but the others are low or not charged at all.
Non-trading fees include various brokerage fees and charges at IG 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.
| IG | XTB | eToro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Withdrawal fee | $0 | $0 | $25 |
| Deposit fee | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Inactivity fee | Yes | No | Yes |
| Account fee | No | No | No |
IG fees
IG deposit 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 IG is not different: you will see the exact same amount on your brokerage account that you sent by any of the deposit methods IG offers.
| IG | XTB | eToro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bank transfer | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Credit/Debit card | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Electronic wallets | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Deposit fee | 0 | 0 | 0 |
IG fees
IG withdrawal fee
Unlike the majority of the online brokers we have reviewed IG 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.
| IG | XTB | eToro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bank transfer | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Credit/Debit card | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Electronic wallets | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Withdrawal fee | $0 | $0 | $25 |
IG fees
IG inactivity fee
IG does apply an inactivity fee and it is £12 per month after 2 years of inactivity. This means that you need to be strategic about your trading activity to avoid getting charged after a longer time of no trade. The fact that IG charges an inactivity fee makes it less ideal for you if you are a buy and hold investor.
IG has low inactivity fee.
| IG | XTB | eToro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inactivity fee | Yes | No | Yes |
| Inactivity fee | £12 per month after 2 years of inactivity | No inactivity fee | $5 per month after one year inactivity |
Read more about IG inactivity fee on their own site.
