Trading Fees: Every Cost of a Trade, With the 2026 SEC and FINRA Rates

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-09-14 · Updated 2026-11-02 · Reviewed 2026-11-01

Trading fees are everything it costs to get into and out of a position and to hold it: commission, the spread, the regulatory fees on each sale, interest on borrowed money, slippage, and for funds an annual percentage of the balance. Some appear on a statement and some are hidden in the fill price, and they are charged whether the trade made money or not.

This page prices each one with real numbers: the two fees regulators charge on every US stock sale, read on sec.gov and finra.org on 1 November 2026, and a real SPY round trip from the previous Friday.

How it works: six costs, three ways of charging

Some costs are charged per trade. Commission is the broker’s fee for the order, often $0 on US stock trades today but still common on options, futures and broker-assisted orders. The two regulatory fees are also per trade, and only on the selling side.

Some are hidden in the price. The spread is the gap between the best bid and the best ask: buying at the ask and selling at the bid loses it on every round trip, and no statement shows it as a line. Slippage is the further gap between the price you expected and the price you got, which grows in fast or thin markets and on stop orders.

And some are charged over time. Margin interest is paid every day on borrowed money, on the full loan rather than on your deposit. A fund’s expense ratio is taken from the fund’s assets daily, so it never appears as a charge at all; it simply shows up as a lower price.

The per-trade costs scale with how often you trade; the time costs scale with how long you hold. That is why the same broker can be cheap for one person and expensive for another, and why a list of a broker’s commissions says little on its own.

The two regulatory fees on every US stock sale

The SEC fee comes from Section 31 of the Securities Exchange Act. Exchanges and FINRA pay it to the SEC on covered sales, and brokers pass it on to the seller. Since 4 April 2026 the rate has been $20.60 per million dollars of sales, or about 21 cents on a $10,000 sale. The SEC resets it each fiscal year so that collections match a target set by Congress; as of 1 November 2026 it had published no fiscal 2027 rate, and the current one stays until 60 days after the 2027 appropriation is passed.

FINRA’s trading activity fee (TAF) is charged per share, not per dollar. Its 2026 rate is $0.000195 a share on sales of covered stocks, capped at $9.79 a trade, and $0.00329 a contract on options sales. But FINRA paused it for the last three months of the year: under filing SR-FINRA-2026-021, the TAF is $0.00 on sales from 1 October to 31 December 2026, because 2026 trading volume pushed its revenue past budget. The $0.000195 rate returns on 1 January 2027 and, under a second filing (SR-FINRA-2026-020), stays there through 2028; the increase to $0.000232 once planned for 2027 now starts in 2029. The cap only bites on very large sales: at $0.000195 it is reached past 50,205 shares in one trade.

Two FINRA charges are easy to mix up. The TAF is FINRA’s own fee. Separately, FINRA collects the SEC fee from its members under Section 3 of its fee schedule, at whatever rate the SEC sets, so that charge was not paused: it has been $20.60 per million all autumn.

Neither fee applies to a purchase. A buyer pays only the spread, any commission and any slippage; the regulatory fees arrive when the position is closed. A short sale is a sale, so the short seller pays them at the open instead.

The rate has moved four times since February 2023. It fell from $22.90 to $8.00 per million on 27 February 2023, rose to $27.80 on 22 May 2024, dropped to $0.00 on 14 May 2025 and came back at $20.60 on 4 April 2026. For about eleven months nobody selling US stocks paid it at all. A trade confirmation is the only reliable place to see which rate applied to a given sale.

A worked example: one SPY round trip, every cost

On Friday 30 October 2026 SPY opened at $761.38 and closed at $755.72. Take a trader who bought 100 shares at the open and sold them at the close. Assume no commission, which is common on US stock trades, and a 1-cent spread, an assumption rather than a measured quote: buying at the ask and selling at the bid then costs half a cent a share each way. The FINRA fee was paused that day.

On one trade, the costs are small next to the market. About $2.56 against a $566.00 move is under half of one percent of the loss. With the FINRA fee back at $0.000195 a share, the same trade would add about two cents. On a quiet day where SPY closes near its open, those few dollars are the whole result.

Frequency is what makes them matter. Repeat that exact round trip on each of the 252 trading days in a year and the costs come to about $644, before a single price move. A trader who cannot point to an edge larger than that, per year, is paying to take part. Expectancy does that arithmetic for a whole strategy.

Financing would come on top for a position held overnight on margin. Interest accrues on the borrowed part of the position for every day it is held, at the broker’s rate, which this page does not quote.

The original data

Share price changes what the regulatory fees cost. The figures below use the $0.000195 TAF, the rate for January to September 2026 and again from January 2027. The SEC fee is a percentage of the sale, so it is the same on $10,000 of any stock. The TAF is a fixed amount per share, so a cheap stock, needing many more shares for the same dollars, pays far more of it. The fee-by-price file holds the figures.

So selling $10,000 of a $1 stock costs about ten times more in regulatory fees than selling $10,000 of a $500 one ($2.156 against $0.210). Amounts are rounded to a tenth of a cent here (the file has them to a hundredth); brokers round on the confirmation.

Annual fees work differently: they take a fixed share regardless of returns. Using SPY’s dividend-adjusted month-end closes from 31 October 1996 to 30 October 2026, $10,000 grew to $178,309.71 with no extra charge. Taking an extra fee off every month, at the same yearly rate, gives this:

The 36.45% is exactly what 98.5% multiplied by itself 30 times leaves missing. The market’s path does not change the share lost, only the dollar amount; a good 30 years makes the same fee cost more dollars. The 30-year file has every month. SPY’s own fund expenses are already inside its price, so these are fees on top.

Zero commission is not zero cost

A broker that charges no commission still gets paid. Common sources are payment for order flow, where a market maker pays the broker to handle customer orders, interest earned on idle cash, and margin lending. Payment for order flow covers how that arrangement works and what it can do to fill prices.

The costs a zero-commission trade still carries are the spread, slippage and the regulatory fees. None of them is optional, and the first two are larger on thinly traded stocks and in the first and last minutes of the session. For an active trader the spread is often the largest of all, which is why the bid-ask spread is worth checking before the commission.

When it fails

The common failure is comparing the cost you can see and ignoring the one you cannot. Commission is printed, so it gets compared; the spread is inside the fill, so it does not. Two brokers with the same $0 commission can still give different fill prices on the same order.

A second is testing a strategy without costs. A backtest with a small edge and no allowance for spread, slippage and fees can be a losing strategy on paper already. Adding the worked example’s $2.56 per round trip to every simulated trade is a quick first check.

A third is forgetting that stops do not cap the cost. A stop that triggers in a fast market fills at the next available price, so the realized loss includes slippage the plan did not.

A fourth is treating a small yearly percentage as harmless. The table above shows 0.5% a year taking 13.96% of the result over 30 years, with no single year ever feeling expensive.

Questions people ask

What is the SEC fee on a stock sale?

It is the Section 31 fee: $20.60 per million dollars of sales since 4 April 2026, about $0.21 on a $10,000 sale. Only the seller pays it.

What is the FINRA TAF?

FINRA’s trading activity fee: $0.000195 per share sold, capped at $9.79 a trade, and $0.00329 per options contract sold. FINRA paused it at $0.00 for sales from 1 October to 31 December 2026; the same rate returns in January 2027 and is set to stay through 2028.

Are zero-commission trades free?

No. The spread, slippage and the two regulatory fees still apply, and the broker earns money in other ways, such as payment for order flow and interest.

Do I pay fees when I buy?

Not the regulatory ones. A purchase pays the spread, any commission and any slippage; the SEC fee and TAF are charged on the sale.

Related

The spread is the largest hidden per-trade cost for most active traders. Expectancy shows where every cost enters a strategy’s arithmetic. And the expense ratio covers the yearly percentage that decides most of a long-term holder’s cost.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.