Robinhood fees explained

Overview of Robinhood fees and charges

It's safe to say that Robinhood'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 Robinhood even in case you trade frequently like multiple times a week or daily.

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

Robinhood fees
Robinhood 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 Robinhood fees with its closest competitors, Saxo Bank and DEGIRO.

Robinhood fees
Robinhood trading fees

Robinhood'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 Robinhood.

Trading fees

Robinhood's trading fees are low.

Stock fees and ETF fees

Robinhood has high stock trading fees.

Options fees

Robinhood's options fees are low.

Crypto fees

Financing rates

Robinhood financing rates are average.

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

Robinhood fees
Robinhood non-trading fees

When it comes to looking at all the non-trading fees Robinhood 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 Robinhood 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.

Robinhood fees
Robinhood 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 Robinhood is not different: you will see the exact same amount on your brokerage account that you sent by any of the deposit methods Robinhood offers.

Robinhood fees
Robinhood withdrawal fee

Unlike the majority of the online brokers we have reviewed Robinhood 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.

Robinhood fees
Robinhood inactivity fee

Robinhood 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).

AUTHOR

Gergely Korpos

Co-founder, CPO

Gergely's aim is to bring more clarity into personal investing. He has 10 years of experience in financial markets with GE Money, KPMG and MOL. He concluded thousands of trades as a commodity trader and financial portfolio manager

Follow Brokerchooser on Twitter