Robinhood fees: All you need to know about them

Robinhood is one of the best known investment apps out there, attracting plenty of new investors. If you’re thinking of starting to use a Robinhood brokerage account to build your investment portfolio, you’ll probably be wondering: does Robinhood have fees?

This full guide to Robinhood fees has you covered. If you’re new to Robinhood, you can also get our comprehensive Robinhood review to learn more.

We’ll also touch on how you can save money when you fund or withdraw from your investment account to a foreign currency, with a Wise account.

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📝 Table of contents
How does Robinhood make money? Robinhood fees Robinhood transfer fees Robinhood regulatory trading fees Robinhood service fees Other fees Frequently Asked Questions

How does Robinhood make money?

When you use Robinhood, you won’t come across many of the charges you might with a traditional investment account. There are no specific Robinhood selling fees or Robinhood options fees, for example, although there are some costs you’ll need to consider, which we’ll cover later. That begs the question: how does Robinhood make money?

Here’s the answer. Robinhood makes money in a range of ways, most of which don’t have to cost you a cent¹:

• Rebates from market makers when Robinhood customers buy and sell assets
• Robinhood Gold - monthly membership fees and interest on settled margin
• Stock loan interest earned by lending margin securities to other parties
• Income generated from cash held but not invested by customers
• Cash Management account and debit card fees

Basically, most of the money Robinhood makes comes from other financial institutions or customers who choose to trade up their accounts.

So while they’re making money - they’re not necessarily making it from you. The fact that Robinhood offers commission free trading and investments is one of the major selling points of the app. While you can choose to upgrade your Robinhood account to a Gold premium product and pay a fee, you could also get started buying and selling assets with a free Robinhood account.

💡 Keep in mind, just with any brokerage app, your capital is at risk, and you could end up losing money. Always do your research and make sure that you know what's the best decision based on your circumstances.

Robinhood fees

All the fees you might run into when using Robinhood are set out in the Robinhood fee schedule². There’s no commission payable to Robinhood when you trade - but that doesn’t mean there are no fees at all when you use Robinhood’s account services. Fees you may pay can be broken down into a few different types:

• Robinhood fees passed on to regulatory bodies like FINRA³
• Robinhood service fees - for things like some types of withdrawals
• Robinhood Gold membership fees
• Robinhood debit card fees - usually these are third-party charges not collected by Robinhood

The good news is that even though Robinhood investment accounts may not be completely fee free, they’re pretty upfront about the fees they do charge⁴. And in fact, many of the fees which apply are actually third-party charges passed over to other organizations. We’ll break down the charges in detail shortly.

Robinhood transfer fees

When you transfer funds out of your Robinhood account, you may pay a fee depending on the payment type. If you’re withdrawing your investments to cash them in and spend them, there are ways to do that for free. However, if you’re transferring your investments to another broker, a higher fee will apply.

If you’re wiring your balance to a bank account - either locally or domestically - there’s no transfer fee to pay. That makes it pretty easy if you want to withdraw your investments to your regular bank account. You can also choose to get your funds by check. In this case, you’ll pay a delivery fee, but that’s the only charge.

Where the fees go up is if you need to make an ACATS payment. That’s the system used to transfer investments from one broker to another.

If you’re transferring your assets out of Robinhood to another broker, you’ll pay a 75 USD fee⁵.

Here’s the lowdown:

Transfer type	Robinhood fee²
Debit balance	Free
Outgoing ACATS payment	75 USD
Domestic wire	Free
International wire	Free - check exchange rate offered to see if any charge is added here
Check - overnight domestic delivery	20 USD

💡 Learn all about how to withdraw money from Robinhood here.

Withdraw your earnings from Robinhood – And save up to 6x

Part of the appeal of Robinhood accounts is that they’re low cost and easy to use. So is a free Wise account.

Get a Wise account for free and use it to fund your Robinhood account, or withdraw your Robinhood funds to any of 54 different currencies, all with the real mid-market exchange rate.

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Use Robinhood to grow your investments - and keep more of your hard-earned funds when you withdraw and transfer with Wise.

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Robinhood regulatory trading fees

Robinhood has to pay trading fees to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

Robinhood customers must cover these costs when they buy and sell assets, and Robinhood passes the payment to the correct regulatory body. These costs go to fund regulators who make sure the financial service industry is safe for customers.

The charges Robinhood customers pay are the regulator fees rounded up to the nearest cent. This does technically mean that Robinhood could stand to make money on these fees - but the app is certainly not the main benefactor.

Regulatory trading fee	Robinhood fee²
Regulatory Trading Fee - ultimately paid to the Securities and Exchange Commission	5.10 USD per 1,000,000 USD of principal (sells only), rounded up to the nearest cent.
Trading Activity Fee - paid to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)	0.000119 USD per share (equity sells) and 0.002 USD per contract (options sells). This fee is rounded up to the nearest cent and no greater than 5.95 USD

💡 Customers may also pay American Depositary Receipt Fees (ADR), which are passed to banks issuing ADR certificates.

Robinhood service fees

Finally, let’s look at the service fees for the regular Robinhood brokerage account before we move onto the premium and optional service fees.

Robinhood is set up to be used as an app - and as such there are no extra costs if you choose to access your account documents electronically. Get statements and confirms in digital form, and you won’t pay anything extra.

However, if you’d like to get your documents in hard copy, Robinhood charges some fees - which could work out pretty costly if you trade frequently. You’ll pay for paper statements and confirms, and there’s an additional delivery charge, too.

One exception is Form CRS - the mandatory relationship summary that must be provided to all customers of an investment broker. You can get this in paper copy for free if you’d like. Here’s a rundown.

Service	Robinhood fee²
Electronic statements and confirms	Free
Paper statements	5 USD
Paper confirms	2 USD
Domestic overnight mail	20 USD
International overnight mail	50 USD
Paper Form CRS	Free

Other fees

As well as your standard Robinhood account, you can choose to upgrade your account to a Gold premium membership. That comes with in depth reports and market data, as well as bigger instant deposits. You’ll also be able to access margin - which effectively means you borrow funds from Robinhood to invest, in the hope that the value of your assets will rise to cover the difference.

Upgrading to Robinhood Gold comes with a 5 USD/month fee. For that, you’ll get access to margin of 1,000 USD. You can choose to use further margin, but you’ll have to pay an interest charge of 2.5% on any margin used above the 1,000 USD that comes with the account. This interest rate is variable and can be changed at Robinhood’s discretion.

Let’s look at the fees for this service:

Fee type	Robinhood Gold fee²
Monthly account fee	5 USD
Margin over 1,000 USD	2.5%

Customers can also choose to upgrade their account to a Cash Management account, which means you’ll get a debit card to access and spend your available funds. While there are no direct fees from Robinhood to use this service, you may run into a couple of costs:

Fee type	Robinhood Cash Management fee²
Account opening	Free
Monthly fee	Free
Inactivity fee	Free
Foreign transaction fee	Mastercard may charge a foreign transaction fee when you use your debit card internationally
Out of network ATM fee	ATM operators may charge a fee which Robinhood will not reimburse
Merchant fee	Occasionally merchants may charge a fee which Robinhood will not reimburse

💡 Get your full guide to the Robinhood debit card here.

All in all, the fees that do apply, tend to be ones which are unavoidable because they’re passed to third parties - so you’d pay these when choosing any competitor service, too.

Pair your Robinhood account with a free Wise account if you need to make withdrawals of your assets to a foreign currency, and you could get even better value for money by cutting the costs of currency conversion and international payments.

Learn more about Wise

Frequently asked questions

Does Robinhood charge a monthly fee?

There’s no monthly fee for a standard Robinhood account. You can choose to upgrade to a Gold account for a monthly fee of 5 USD².

Does Robinhood charge to withdraw?

Robinhood withdrawal fees vary depending on the type of payment you’re making. Domestic and international wire transfers of funds to a regular bank account are free. However, if you’re withdrawing your funds to another broker account you’ll pay an ACATS fee of 75 USD⁵. Check out our full section on Robinhood withdrawal costs above.

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1] Robinhood - How Robinhood makes money
2] Robinhood - fee schedule
3] Robinhood - trading fees
4] Robinhood - are there any fees
5] Understanding the ACATS process

All sources checked on 17 November 2021