Investing involves risk of loss. This is not investment advice. Currency fluctuations can impact your returns. The brokers covered here are execution-only services and provide no investment advice.

A lower execution cost does not make a broker better or safer. Read each broker’s own documentation before acting on anything in this table.

Trading 212 — EUR 0/year

EUR-listed ETF on the Invest account. Trading commission and custody are both priced at zero on all four regional Terms & Fees schedules. Selecting the instrument currency on the order avoids the 0.15% FX fee. Card and wallet deposits are free up to EUR 2,000 cumulative and then cost 0.7% on the excess — avoided here via SEPA bank transfer, which is free with no limit.

Trade Republic — EUR 0/year

Sparplan execution. The price list charges nothing per savings-plan execution, and the EUR 1.00 settlement flat rate that applies to ordinary trades expressly does not apply to savings plans. Two mechanics worth knowing and rarely published: the investment volume per execution is bounded at EUR 10 to EUR 10,000, and where one instrument is bought for several customers on the same date across multiple partial fills, Trade Republic determines a single average price and settles everyone at it. A savings-plan investor does not receive a market price at a point in time.

Scalable Capital — EUR 0/year

FREE plan, ETF savings plan. Savings-plan execution is priced at EUR 0 per plan from EUR 1 across all account tiers, and that line was unaffected by the pricing change that took effect on 1 September 2026, which moved manual orders to a flat EUR 1.99 on both plans. The zero does not extend to crypto products, which carry a separate spread surcharge on every savings-plan execution. Scalable also limits you to one savings plan per security.

Lightyear — EUR 0/year

Lightyear Europe AS, the EU entity. ETF execution is free with no custody fee; fund manager fees still apply. One constraint that belongs on any Lightyear cost page: Lightyear’s auto-invest Plans work only on fractional instruments, and non-fractional holdings added to a Plan must be bought separately outside the recurring contribution. Note also that Lightyear publishes three separate pricing blocks — EU, UK personal and UK business — and a single quoted “Lightyear fee” is wrong for two of the three.

XTB — EUR 0/year

Xetra, 0% commission up to EUR 100,000 cumulative monthly turnover across all registered accounts, then 0.2% with a EUR 10 minimum. Custody is free below EUR 250,000 of average daily portfolio value and 0.02% a year on the excess above it. The inactivity fee needs both no position opened or closed in 365 days and no deposit in 90 days, so a monthly buy plan never triggers it. Entity matters here: this describes XTB S.A. and its EEA branches. Clients served by XTB Limited (Cyprus) are offered no real stocks or ETFs at all, only derivatives, options and spot crypto.

eToro — EUR 0/year

A EUR-priced accumulating UCITS ETF, bought from a EUR local-currency account (eToro Money) funded by SEPA. Real ETFs carry zero commission worldwide, and eToro states that where the asset is euro-based, euro funds are converted to USD, the trade executes, and the proceeds are converted back with no conversion fee on that round trip. The fee is zero; the currency event is not. eToro warns in its own words that changes to the USD rate at the time of conversion may affect the price of the position, and limit or out-of-hours orders are converted to USD at order creation and held there while pending. Buying a USD-priced ETF instead moves this to a 0.75% conversion charge.

Saxo Bank — EUR 0/year on execution, in two markets

Saxo’s Dutch schedule prices AutoInvest at EUR 0 per scheduled purchase, restricted to a selection of investment funds and ETFs on the SaxoInvestor platform and to euro-denominated accounts. The French PEPS plan is priced at zero across a 20-ETF universe, executing on the 5th of the month. Both cover purchases only — every sell order reverts to the entity’s standard commission table.

The cost that does not appear in the ranking is the Dutch service fee: 0.01% a month on portfolio value excluding derivatives, capped at EUR 40, rebated the following month as a transaction credit valid for one month. On the Core profile that is about EUR 1.36 a month; on the Established profile about EUR 5.60. Because an AutoInvest client pays no commission, there is nothing to spend the credit on before it expires. That makes it a recurring charge for precisely the buy-and-hold investor this index models, and it is the single strongest argument against reading Saxo’s zero as a true zero.

For anyone outside those two routes, Saxo prices manual orders as a percentage with a per-exchange minimum, not a flat fee. The entry tier is 0.08% with a EUR 2 minimum on Euronext and a EUR 3 minimum on Deutsche Börse Xetra, and the minimum binds at every realistic monthly contribution size. Saxo publishes separate schedules per entity; the figures here are the Netherlands and France. Italy is served by a separate business and Germany and Spain publish no local schedule at all.

DEGIRO — EUR 12/year

A Core Selection product on Tradegate: EUR 0.00 commission plus the EUR 1.00 handling fee, so EUR 1.00 all-in, twelve times a year. The Core Selection is defined by venue rather than by a product list — everything listed on Tradegate Exchange, over 1,000 ETFs, ETCs and ETNs. There is no downloadable list, so find it in the platform under Products, Trackers, then the Commission type filter set to Core Selection, or the Stock markets filter set to Tradegate AG. Core Selection products carry no connectivity fee. DEGIRO’s order and execution policy describes no recurring order type, which is why this row is priced on manual orders rather than a savings plan. Currency or external product and spread costs may apply.

Interactive Brokers — EUR 36/year

Fixed pricing, manual whole-share order: 0.05% of trade value subject to a EUR 3.00 minimum per order. On a EUR 150 to EUR 500 buy the percentage is EUR 0.08 to EUR 0.25, so the minimum binds on every trade — 12 x EUR 3.00 = EUR 36 a year. That EUR 3.00 is not a European default: it applies in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland in euros. Portugal is EUR 6.00 and the Baltic markets EUR 10.00.

IBKR publishes a lower EUR 1.25 minimum for fractional orders, and states on its Irish entity’s site that the Recurring Investments feature uses fractional share trading — which would put this row at EUR 15 a year. The same page describes the feature as covering US, Canadian and European shares and does not state whether ETFs qualify, so this index uses the conservative figure and names the floor rather than assuming it. One further trap on the cheaper-looking route: Fixed pricing is advertised as carrying no third-party fees, but on Euronext Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris a EUR 0.75 per-execution exchange fee is passed through on ETF products specifically.

Cite this study

You are welcome to reference the EU Broker Cost Index table and findings with attribution and a link to this page.

Suggested citation: QuantRoutine, “EU Broker Cost Index” (Q3 2026 edition, revised September 2026), quantroutine.com/studies/eu-broker-cost-index/