Interactive Brokers fees explained

It's safe to say that Interactive Brokers's fees are low in general. They either don't charge a brokerage fee for things other brokers do charge for, or they only charge a small amount. This means that you can use Interactive Brokers even in case you trade frequently like multiple times a week or daily.

Here's a high level overview of Interactive Brokers'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 Interactive Brokers fees with its closest competitors, Saxo Bank and DEGIRO.

Interactive Brokers's trading fees are low which makes it suitable for you even if you trade often (i.e. multiple times a week).

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

Trading fees

Interactive Brokers's trading fees are low.

Stock fees and ETF fees

Interactive Brokers has low stock trading fees.

Forex fees

Interactive Brokers's forex fees are average.

Fund fees

Interactive Brokers fund fees are average.

Bond fees

Interactive Brokers has low bond fees.

Options fees

Interactive Brokers's options fees are average.

Futures fees

Interactive Brokers's futures fees are low.

CFD fees

Interactive Brokers has average CFD trading fees.

Financing rates

Interactive Brokers financing rates are low.

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

Currency conversion fee

Interactive Brokers will charge a Currency Conversion Fee for all trades on instruments denominated in a currency different to the currency of your account. The fee is charged as the following: Trade value less than $1 billion: 0.2 bps * trade value; min. $2.

When it comes to looking at all the non-trading fees Interactive Brokers 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 Interactive Brokers 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 Interactive Brokers is not different: you will see the exact same amount on your brokerage account that you sent by any of the deposit methods Interactive Brokers offers.

Unlike the majority of the online brokers we have reviewed Interactive Brokers 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.

Interactive Brokers 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).