Fidelity vs Vanguard vs Schwab vs Robinhood: Which Broker Fits You?

Ask the internet which broker is cheapest and you'll get a thousand articles racing to tell you about commission-free trading, as though it were 2019 and the news had just broken. It isn't news. Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab and Robinhood all charge $0 to buy a US stock or ETF online. That question is settled, and any comparison built around it is comparing four identical numbers and calling it analysis. The interesting differences are the ones that survived the price war — and they're the ones almost nobody puts in a table.

The four big US brokers at a glance

Read that table left to right and the first three columns tell the story of the last five years. The commission column is identical everywhere, which is exactly why it stopped being a differentiator. The two columns beside it are where the money actually moved: a per-contract options fee, and an account fee that most people never notice they're paying.

They all charge $0. So what's left to compare?

Four things, roughly in the order they'll affect a normal investor:

1. 1The options contract fee — irrelevant if you never trade options, and the single biggest cost difference between these four if you do.
2. 2The account service fee — a small annual charge that only one of the four still levies, and which is trivially avoidable if you know it exists.
3. 3The fractional-share minimum — decides whether you can put $20 to work this month or have to save up for a whole share of an expensive stock.
4. 4What happens to your uninvested cash — the quietest difference of the four, and over a long enough period the most expensive one.

Notice what isn't on that list: the trading commission, the account minimum (all four are $0 to open), and the quality of the mobile app, which is a matter of taste rather than money. Let's take the four brokers one at a time, then come back to the fees.

Fidelity: the safe default

Fidelity is the answer most people arrive at eventually, which is a boring thing to say about a broker but a useful one. It charges $0 for online US stock, ETF and options trades, $0.65 per options contract, and states plainly that there are no minimums to open an account. It offers fractional shares across most US stocks and ETFs, so a $20 contribution buys $20 of something rather than sitting in cash until you can afford a whole share. It runs its own index funds, including a set with a 0.00% expense ratio, and it does not charge an annual account fee.

The case against Fidelity is mostly that it's a large, slightly institutional-feeling firm with an interface that prioritises completeness over charm. If you want an account that will still suit you in fifteen years — when you have a retirement account, a taxable account and opinions about tax-lot accounting — that's a feature rather than a flaw.

Vanguard: the fund house with a brokerage attached

Vanguard is best understood as an asset manager that runs a brokerage so you can buy its funds, rather than a brokerage that happens to sell funds. That shapes everything. Online stock and ETF trades are $0, and Vanguard ETFs can be bought from as little as $1. Options, if you trade them, cost $1.00 per contract — comfortably the most expensive of the four, which tells you what Vanguard thinks of options trading.

Vanguard restructured this schedule on 10 July 2026, and the shape of the change is worth understanding because it's unusual. Commissions and fees are now tiered by what Vanguard calls Qualifying Assets — broadly, how much you hold there — and they fall as that balance rises. Under $1 million you pay the $1 per contract above. Between $1 million and $5 million your first 25 options trades a year are free, then the $1 fee resumes. Above $5 million it's the first 100. Broker-assisted trades carry a $25 charge at the lowest tier and none at the higher ones. It is, in other words, a pricing model that quietly assumes you will one day be rich, which is a fairly Vanguard assumption to make.

The detail worth knowing is the one nobody mentions: Vanguard charges a $25 annual account service fee on brokerage accounts. It's waived if you opt into electronic delivery of statements — along with several other conditions, including holding at least $1 million in qualifying assets, which is a less accessible route to the same outcome. Switch on e-delivery when you open the account and the fee disappears. Don't, and you'll pay $25 a year for paper you were going to recycle anyway.

Schwab: the full-service one

Schwab matches Fidelity on the headline numbers — $0 online stock and ETF trades, $0.65 per options contract — and differentiates on breadth. It has a large physical branch network, which sounds quaint until the first time you need to move an inherited account and discover you'd like to speak to a person. It absorbed TD Ameritrade and with it thinkorswim, which is one of the better retail trading platforms in existence and is free to use.

Its fractional-share product, Stock Slices, has historically required $5 and covered S&P 500 companies, though Schwab now advertises investing in most US-listed stocks and ETFs from as little as $1. If you're depositing small amounts frequently, that's the number to check on the day you sign up rather than trust from any article, including this one.

Robinhood: the phone-first one

Robinhood built its business on commission-free trading and a mobile app that made buying a share feel like sending a message — for better and for worse. Stocks, ETFs and options are commission-free, and it offers fractional shares. Robinhood Gold costs $5 per month and buys, among other things, a 3% match on annual IRA contributions versus 1% without it. On a maximum contribution that's a meaningful sum relative to the subscription price, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a subscription.

The genuinely interesting number is the options fee. Robinhood charges $0.04 per standard options contract, against $0.65 at Fidelity and Schwab and $1.00 at Vanguard. Index options are priced separately and vary by symbol, from $0 to $0.75 per contract, with Gold subscribers paying $0.35 where a non-subscriber pays $0.50. For someone trading options in any volume, that gap dwarfs every other cost difference on this page.

The fees that survived the $0 era

Put the surviving costs side by side and the spread is wider than the identical commission column suggests:

Ten options contracts a month costs $7.80 a year at Robinhood, $156 at Fidelity or Schwab, and $240 at Vanguard. Zero options contracts a month costs the same at all four. Which is the whole point: there is no cheapest broker in the abstract, only a cheapest broker for a specific pattern of behaviour, and yours is the variable the listicles can't see.

Where your uninvested cash sits

This is the difference least likely to appear in a comparison table and most likely to cost you real money over a decade. When you deposit money and haven't yet bought anything, it lands in a default holding place — the cash sweep. Brokers differ in what that default is: some sweep uninvested cash into a money market fund that pays close to prevailing short-term rates, while others sweep it into a bank deposit programme paying substantially less, with the higher-yielding option available only if you go and select it.

Sweep rates move with interest rates and change often enough that any figure printed here would be stale before you read it. The durable advice is procedural rather than numerical: when you open an account, find the cash sweep setting, look at what the default pays, and check whether a better option is one click away. On a few hundred dollars it's noise. On an emergency fund parked between investments, the difference between a money market yield and a near-zero bank sweep is the kind of thing that quietly funds the broker rather than you.

Outside the US: the same four jobs, different names

The four US brokers above dominate the search results, but most of the world can't open an account with them. The good news is that the same roles exist in every developed market — a low-cost index shop, a full-service incumbent, a slick mobile app, and a serious multi-market platform. The names change; the decision doesn't.

One thing that does not translate is the tax wrapper. A US Roth IRA, a UK ISA, an Australian superannuation account and a German Depot are governed by entirely different rules, and the account type you choose usually matters more to your long-run outcome than which broker you choose it at. That part is worth reading your own country's rules on, or asking someone qualified in your jurisdiction.

So which one?

Matching the four to the situations they genuinely suit best:

• You want one account, opened once, that still fits in a decade — Fidelity. No account fee, no minimum, fractional shares, and it scales into retirement accounts without a fuss.
• You're buying index funds monthly and holding them for thirty years — Vanguard, with electronic delivery switched on the day you open it so the $25 never applies.
• You want branches, phone support, or a professional-grade platform at no cost — Schwab, which has all three and matches Fidelity on price.
• You're already committed to trading options, or you want the IRA match — Robinhood, whose $0.04 per contract is an order of magnitude below the others.
• You're outside the US — start from the regional table above and check your national regulator's register before anything else.

And if none of that feels decidable yet, that's a reasonable place to be. The broker question is genuinely less important than the questions underneath it — what you're buying, how often, and whether you'll hold through a 30% drawdown without selling. Those are learnable, and they're cheaper to learn before there's money on the line.