Lightyear vs Trade Republic (2026):
Full Comparison for EU Investors
Scope: Lightyear Europe AS (EU accounts) vs Trade Republic Bank GmbH. Lightyear’s UK personal and business pricing is a different, separately regulated schedule — covered briefly further down, not blended into the comparison above.
Both brokers are near-identical on headline cost. The real differences are in execution mechanics — how a recurring order actually settles, and what each broker will and won’t put in writing. Trade Republic states hard savings-plan limits and a €1 settlement flat rate most competitor content mislabels as a commission. Lightyear publishes almost everything, but splits it across three separate pricing blocks that most comparisons wrongly treat as one.
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Side-by-side at a glance
Every figure below is sourced from each broker’s own fee schedule. Fields with no published figure on either side are handled in the sections below, not compressed into a row here.
| Feature | Lightyear [EU] | Trade Republic |
|---|---|---|
| ETF trading cost | €0 always | €0 commission + €1 settlement flat rate (manual); €0 total via savings plan |
| EU/EUR stock trading | €1 per order | €0 commission + €1 settlement flat rate per trade |
| US stock trading | 0.10% per order (min $0.10, max $1) | €0 commission + €1 settlement flat rate per trade |
| Custody / account fee | €0 | €0 |
| Savings plan execution cost | €0 (Plans / Repeat Orders) | €0 (Sparplan) |
| Savings plan investment range | No stated ceiling; €2 fractional minimum applies | €10 to €10,000 per execution (stated floor and ceiling) |
| Fractional order minimum | €2 / £2 / $2 | Not separately stated outside savings plans |
| Crypto trading | EU only, at 0.45% per order | €1 settlement flat rate + unquantified spread |
| FX conversion (investing) | 0.35% published, flat | No percentage published — absolute per-currency margins on income conversion; purchase FX not stated |
| Card FX (spend & foreign ATM) | No debit card offered | €0 on both |
| Debit card | None | Virtual free; Classic €5 one-off; Mirror €50 one-off |
| Currencies held | EUR, GBP, USD (HUF account in Hungary) | Not stated — no multi-currency account appears in Trade Republic’s published pricing or customer agreement |
| Regulator / entity type | Estonian FSA — investment firm | BaFin — CRR credit institution |
| Investor protection (published figure) | €20,000 — Estonian Investor Protection Sectoral Fund | No figure published — statutory EU scheme, no scheme name or limit stated |
Lightyear charges no ETF execution or custody fee; fund manager fees apply. Figures sourced from each broker’s own fee schedule and pricing pages, verified August 2026.
What you actually pay on each broker
The two schedules look similar until you look at how each one labels its charges.
- ETFs: €0 always (fund manager fees apply). No conditions, no savings-plan requirement.
- EUR-denominated stocks, bonds, ETNs, ETCs: €1 per order.
- US shares: 0.10% per order (min $0.10, max $1).
- UK shares: £1 per order.
- HU/CH/DK/SE/NO/PL shares: 0.10% per order, per-market minimums, uncapped.
- Crypto: EU only, at 0.45% per order.
- FX conversion: 0.35%, added on top of the live interbank rate.
- Custody / platform: €0.
- Card top-up: 0.6% of the amount.
- Fractional minimum: €2 per order, stocks and ETFs.
- Order commission: €0, stated zero on every trade.
- Settlement flat rate: €1 per trade on standard orders — a separate settlement charge, not a commission. Excludes savings plans and Crypto Spending. Charged once per trading day even if the order fills in several partial executions.
- Rights trading: €1 per transaction, including partial rights and fractional sell-off.
- FX: not a percentage — absolute currency-denominated margins (e.g. USD 0.0014, GBP 0.0011) applied to foreign dividends and corporate-action proceeds converted to EUR. Whether a separate FX cost applies to buying a non-EUR asset is not stated in any source we have for this broker.
- Custody / platform: €0.
- Card top-up (after the first deposit): 1% of the amount paid in. First instant deposit is free.
- Card FX: €0 on card payments and foreign ATM withdrawals.
Break-even: when does Trade Republic’s €1 settlement fee matter?
Lightyear charges €0 for every ETF trade, always (fund manager fees apply). Trade Republic’s order commission is also €0, but a manual ETF trade carries the €1 settlement flat rate — savings plan executions are exempt from it entirely. At 12 manual ETF purchases a year on Trade Republic, that is €12 you would not pay on Lightyear. At 24, it is €24. This only matters if you buy manually and outside a savings plan; for Sparplan-only investors, both brokers cost the same on this line.
| Manual ETF trades / year | Lightyear cost | Trade Republic cost | Lightyear saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | €0 | €6 | €6 |
| 12 | €0 | €12 | €12 |
| 24 | €0 | €24 | €24 |
The Lightyear column above is free of execution and custody fees; fund manager fees apply. Figures verified August 2026.
Savings plans: two different sets of rules
Both platforms let you automate buying. The constraints attached to each are where they actually diverge — and neither shows up in most comparison content.
- Cost: €0 per execution for ETFs, on every pricing block (fund manager fees apply).
- Constraint that matters: Plans auto-invest works only on fractional instruments. A non-fractional holding added to a Plan appears grouped under “Auto investing unavailable” and has to be bought separately, outside the automated contribution.
- Money market funds: cannot be added to a Plan and have no recurring-order support at all.
- Allocations: must total exactly 100% across the instruments in a Plan.
- Frequency: weekly, fortnightly, or monthly for Plans; daily, weekly, or monthly for Repeat Orders.
- Repeat Orders are a separate product: one instrument at a time, funded from your Lightyear cash balance or by standing order from your bank, and placed as market orders. If the money isn’t there at the scheduled time the order is skipped silently, and you can opt out at any point.
- Minimum per contribution: the standard €2 / £2 / $2 fractional minimum applies. No stated ceiling.
- Cost: €0 per execution — the €1 settlement flat rate does not apply to savings plans. Covers ETFs, shares, ELTIFs, and crypto assets.
- Investment range: €10 minimum, €10,000 maximum, per execution — a stated floor and ceiling.
- Average-price pooling: where one instrument is bought for several customers on the same execution date across multiple partial fills at varying prices, Trade Republic sets a single average price and settles every customer at it.
- Rounding: executions round to the fourth decimal place, which can make the actual invested amount slightly smaller than the figure you set.
- Termination: a plan is cancelled after nine months of failed executions from insufficient funds, or after five consecutive failed executions. Instruments already accumulated stay in the account.
Neither broker pays simple interest on EUR cash
Same outcome for EUR-holding investors on both platforms, but the reasons are completely different — and worth understanding before you park cash on either one.
- EUR: no interest row exists for EUR, in any country. Uninvested EUR cash earns nothing.
- GBP: 1.00%, UK residents only.
- HUF: 2.00%, Hungarian residents only.
- USD: 0.00%.
- Dating: the GBP, HUF and USD rates above are accurate as of 05-August-2026 and are variable.
- Mechanics: accrued daily from the day a deposit lands, credited on the first business day of the month. Cash reserved for open orders does not accrue.
- Not the same thing: Lightyear also offers Savings — money market funds — as a separate investment product with a variable, published yield. Capital is at risk in that product; it is not cash interest and the two should never be quoted as one number.
- No rate is published in any source document. The rate is shown only in the app.
- Must be activated: interest is not automatic — it has to be turned on in the app.
- Blocked balances earn nothing: cash tied up by open unexecuted orders or pending card settlement is excluded.
- Structure: funds beyond an undisclosed “Partner Amount” — a threshold Trade Republic sets and can raise or lower at will — are continuously invested in Qualified Money Market Funds, in Trade Republic’s own name for the client.
- Any elevated rate is a Program, not a fixed rate: Trade Republic can grant an eligibility-based interest top-up and end it at any time on two weeks’ notice.
Spending is free on one broker; converting isn’t free on either
Trade Republic charges nothing to convert currency when you spend on its card — the foreign currency translation fee is €0 on both card payments and ATM withdrawals abroad. The withdrawal itself isn’t always free: ATM withdrawals under €100 cost €1, and €0 from €100 upwards. It does take a margin, however, on converting foreign dividends and corporate-action proceeds back to EUR, using absolute currency amounts rather than a clean percentage (for example USD 0.0014, GBP 0.0011). Whether that same margin applies when you buy a non-EUR asset in the first place isn’t stated anywhere in Trade Republic’s own documents.
Lightyear has no debit card at all, so there’s no card-spend comparison to make. What it does have is a published, flat 0.35% FX conversion fee on top of the live interbank rate for [EU] accounts — one rate that covers both automatic and manual conversions. On €10,000 converted, that’s €35.
Lightyear applies Portuguese stamp duty at 4% of the fees paid to Lightyear — currently calculated from the FX conversion fee, not from trade value. For a Portuguese-resident client that grosses the 0.35% FX fee up to an effective 0.364% (0.35% × 1.04). Written loosely as “4% stamp duty,” it reads as a tax on the trade itself, which overstates the real cost by roughly two orders of magnitude.
How your money is protected
This is not a like-for-like comparison — one broker publishes a figure, the other publishes a mechanism with no number attached.
- EU entity: Lightyear Europe AS, an investment firm regulated by the Estonian Financial Supervision Authority (Finantsinspektsioon).
- Investor protection: €20,000 under the Estonian Investor Protection Sectoral Fund (Tagatisfond), in total across all multi-currency balances.
- Personal and business accounts: covered separately.
- Crypto: excluded from this fund and from any EU compensation scheme.
- Custodians named in Lightyear’s own sources: Erste Bank Hungary, Citibank Europe Plc Germany Branch, the fund managers behind its money market funds, and LHV Bank Estonia.
- Entity: Trade Republic Bank GmbH, a CRR credit institution supervised by BaFin. One single entity serves every market — no branches or subsidiaries appear in its own documents.
- Protection statement: its pricing document states only that “Trade Republic and the trust banks belong to a statutory compensation scheme in the European Union.” No scheme name, no per-bank limit, and no figure is given.
- Client funds: held in omnibus trust accounts, pooled with other clients’ funds; balances above an undisclosed threshold move into Qualified Money Market Funds.
- Execution rights: Trade Republic may execute client orders for its own account (self-entry), and its agreement gives it the contractual right to receive and keep third-party payments for order execution, with no client claim to have them forwarded — disclosed to clients annually.
- Country tie: the client relationship is tied to one country of residence; moving to another country Trade Republic serves is itself grounds for termination of the account without notice.
Trade Republic Bank GmbH is supervised by BaFin and publishes no country availability list in its pricing scheme or customer agreement, so UK readers should confirm eligibility with Trade Republic directly. Lightyear UK Ltd is authorised and regulated by the FCA (FRN 987226) and runs on a separate pricing block that has almost nothing in common with the EU figures above:
- Stocks and ETFs (ISA and GIA): no execution fees at all — free on US, UK, and EU shares, and on ETFs.
- FX: 0.10%, less than a third of the EU 0.35% rate.
- Investor protection: FSCS, up to £85,000. Money held in qualifying money market funds is not FSCS-covered — those are investments, not deposits.
- Multi-currency account: the GIA in the UK and the Personal Account in the EU — not inside the ISA.
- Account types: Stocks and Shares ISA, Cash ISA, and General Investment Account. The Cash ISA tracks the Bank of England base rate — variable, so check the app for the current figure.
- UK business is a third block again: it sits close to the EU schedule, including the same 0.35% FX rate, not the 0.10% personal rate above.
What each broker doesn’t publish
- Cash interest rate (shown only in the app)
- Cash protection scheme name and limit
- Country availability list
- Partner bank identities
- Crypto spread
- Fees and FX exist for three separate pricing blocks — [EU], [UK personal], [UK business] — not one
- Cash interest applies only to GBP (UK) and HUF (Hungary); the higher figure people quote is the separate, at-risk Savings product
- UCITS ETF count is genuinely not published anywhere
Who each broker actually fits
- Investors who buy manually and irregularly — every ETF trade is €0 (fund manager fees apply), with no settlement fee to work around.
- Anyone who wants a fully quantified investor-protection figure (€20,000) rather than a compensation scheme with no published number.
- UK investors — Lightyear UK Ltd is FCA-authorised and its UK personal pricing block is meaningfully cheaper than the EU one; Trade Republic publishes no country availability list, so UK eligibility has to be confirmed with them directly.
- Investors who want multi-currency cash holdings (EUR, GBP, USD) in one account.
- Investors investing in EUR and running everything through a Sparplan — the €1 settlement fee never applies to savings plans.
- Investors who want a full banking licence (CRR credit institution) behind their broker, rather than an investment firm.
- Anyone who wants a debit card with genuinely free currency conversion on spending and foreign ATM withdrawals.
- Investors comfortable with a single-entity, single-country-tied relationship and Trade Republic’s disclosed right to execute against its own book and retain third-party inducements.
A EUR-only investor running a simple ETF savings plan on either broker pays €0 in execution fees on both — the €1 settlement fee and the €10–€10,000 Sparplan range on Trade Republic, and the fractional-only constraint on Lightyear’s Plans auto-invest, only start to matter once you step outside a clean, single-instrument, savings-plan-only setup. At that point, decide on what’s actually disclosed: Lightyear if you want a quantified protection figure and multi-currency cash; Trade Republic if you want a banking licence and a free-FX debit card.
Ready to start investing?
Both platforms run €0 custody and platform fees. Lightyear charges €0 on every ETF order (fund manager fees apply); Trade Republic charges €0 commission plus a €1 settlement flat rate, which savings plan executions don’t pay.
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Related guides and comparisons
Lightyear vs Trade Republic — common questions
Is Lightyear or Trade Republic cheaper for EU ETF investors?
On headline cost the two are close. Lightyear charges €0 for every ETF order, always (fund manager fees apply). Trade Republic charges €0 order commission but adds a €1 settlement flat rate per trade — waived entirely inside a savings plan. So for automated, savings-plan-only investors both brokers cost the same: €0. For investors who buy manually and irregularly, Lightyear has no equivalent charge to Trade Republic’s €1 settlement fee, though on partial fills Trade Republic only charges it once per trading day, not per fill. Lightyear publishes a flat 0.35% FX conversion fee for EU accounts; Trade Republic publishes no comparable percentage, so currency costs cannot be compared like for like.
How does the Trade Republic €1 fee actually work?
It is officially a settlement flat rate (Abwicklungskostenpauschale), not a trading commission — Trade Republic’s order commission is separately priced at €0. The €1 applies per trade on standard stock, ETF, and crypto orders. It does not apply to savings plan executions or to order execution under Crypto Spending. If a single order fills in several partial executions on the same trading day, the €1 is charged once for that day, not once per partial fill.
Does either broker pay interest on uninvested EUR cash?
No, for different reasons. Lightyear’s published interest table has no EUR row at all — uninvested EUR cash earns nothing on Lightyear in every country. Only UK residents holding GBP (1.00% APY) and Hungarian residents holding HUF (2.00% APY, both accurate as of 05-August-2026) earn anything, and this is separate from Lightyear’s Savings product, a money market fund where capital is at risk. Trade Republic does publish a mechanism but no rate: interest must be manually activated in the app, balances blocked by open orders or pending card settlement earn nothing, and any rate above the base level is a conditional top-up Program that Trade Republic can end with two weeks’ notice. No document from either broker states a EUR savings rate you can plan around.
What are the savings plan limits on Lightyear and Trade Republic?
Trade Republic states a hard floor and ceiling per execution: €10 minimum, €10,000 maximum. If several customers buy the same instrument on the same execution date across partial fills, Trade Republic settles everyone at a single average price. Lightyear charges €0 per ETF order with no stated ceiling (fund manager fees apply), but Plans auto-invest works only on fractional instruments — a non-fractional holding added to a Plan sits under “Auto investing unavailable” and must be bought separately, and money market funds cannot be added to a Plan at all. Lightyear additionally requires Plan allocations to add up to exactly 100%.
Can UK investors use Trade Republic?
Trade Republic publishes no country availability list in its pricing scheme or customer agreement, so UK eligibility has to be confirmed with Trade Republic directly. UK investors have Lightyear UK Ltd as an FCA-authorised option, which offers a Stocks and Shares ISA and a General Investment Account with no execution fees on stocks or funds, a 0.10% FX rate, and FSCS protection up to £85,000. The multi-currency account is the GIA in the UK and the Personal Account in the EU — not inside the ISA.
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Investing involves risks. Returns are not guaranteed. ISA rules and promotional T&Cs as well as general terms of use apply. With Vaults, your money is invested into money market funds, where the value of investments can go up or down. With Cash ISA, money is held in UK banks and Qualifying Money Market Funds. Lightyear UK Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 987226) Yield (APY) shown is net, variable and correct as of 05-August-2026
Some of the links on this site are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you if you sign up through them. This does not affect our reviews or recommendations — we only feature products we genuinely believe are useful for investors. This site provides educational content only, not personalized investment advice. Investments can lose value and past performance does not guarantee future results. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and for confirming the tax and legal rules that apply in your country.