How much do day trading commissions cost? Four US brokers, 36,947 real trades

Short answer: on a $1,000 order, the same day trade costs about 3 cents at a commission-free US broker and about $2.37 on the Interactive Brokers Pro Fixed plan. As a share of the trade that is 0.35 basis points versus 24.04 — roughly 69 times more. That gap is not really about which broker is better. It is about one line in the fee schedule: a $1.00 minimum per order. If your orders are small, that minimum decides your cost. If your orders are large, it almost disappears. We took 36,947 real round trips from our own recorded US market data and priced every one of them at four US brokers, using the fee schedule that was actually in force on that date. Here is what day trading commissions really cost.

1. What we priced, and what we did not

The sample is 36,947 round trips across 310 recorded sessions from 2024-10-29 to 2026-01-26, in the kind of intraday movers a day trader actually trades. Median stock price was $25.84. For each round trip we know the date, the price, and therefore the share count for a given order size. That is everything a fee schedule needs. Commissions do not care whether the trade won or lost. To make that literal, we set the exit price equal to the entry price. Nothing about profit or loss enters this calculation at any point, so nothing about our strategies can distort the cost numbers below. What you are reading is purely the cost of putting an order in and taking it out. For each trade we computed, in dollars: commission per the published schedule on both sides, the SEC Section 31 fee charged on sale proceeds at the rate in force on that date, and the FINRA Trading Activity Fee charged per share sold and capped per order at that year rate. Regulatory fees are rounded up to the nearest cent, which is what brokers actually do and which matters more than it sounds for small orders.

2. A commission-free broker still costs 0.35bp

Alpaca, Schwab, the Interactive Brokers Lite plan, and moomoo for US residents all charge $0.00 commission on US stocks. But commission-free is not fee-free — the regulatory fees are passed through. On a $1,000 order, median 38 shares: That is 0.35 basis points. In practical terms it is a rounding error next to the spread. You can ignore it.

3. The same trades on IBKR Pro Fixed

The Interactive Brokers Pro account on the Fixed pricing plan charges $0.005 per share, with a $1.00 minimum per order and a cap of 1% of trade value. Same 36,947 trades, three order sizes: Average commission paid per round trip was $2.34 on the $1,000 order, $2.95 on the $2,000 order and $5.34 on the $5,000 order. Read the middle column again. On a $1,000 order you pay 24 basis points in commission alone. That means the stock has to move 0.24% in your favour before you break even on commission — before the spread, before being right about direction.

4. The $1.00 per-order minimum is the whole story

Look at the arithmetic on a $1,000 order. The median trade is 38 shares. At $0.005 per share that is 19 cents. But the minimum is $1.00, so you pay $1.00. Both sides, so $2.00. You are being charged five times the stated per-share rate, because the stated rate never applies at that size. This is why the ratio falls as orders grow. At $5,000 the median is 193 shares, $0.005 per share is $0.965, and the minimum has almost stopped binding. The per-share rate is finally close to what you actually pay. So the honest version of this finding is not that Interactive Brokers is expensive. It is that a per-order minimum is a fixed cost, and fixed costs are brutal on small orders. The same schedule that costs 24bp on $1,000 costs 11bp on $5,000. And the Interactive Brokers Lite plan charges nothing at all — the difference here is the plan, not the broker. The same logic applies to moomoo, which charges $0 for US residents but $0.005 per share with a $1.00 minimum for non-residents. Same schedule, same result: the minimum decides.

5. SEC and FINRA fees, and the dates that matter

Most articles quote one rate. These rates change, and one of them was zero for most of a year — which is exactly the period a lot of recent backtests cover. SEC Section 31, charged on sale proceeds: FINRA TAF, charged per share sold, capped per order: 57.2% of our trades fell inside the window where the SEC fee was zero. If you are testing a strategy on data from that period and you applied a flat SEC fee, you charged yourself for something nobody collected. If you are trading now, the fee is back at $20.60 per $1M. Neither of these is large. The point is that a fee model with a single hardcoded number is wrong in both directions depending on when you run it.

6. What this means when you choose a broker

If you trade small size, a per-order minimum is the single most important line in the fee schedule. At $1,000 per order it costs more than 24 basis points, which is comparable to what you pay the spread. We measured what a US stock actually costs to trade at about 38bp one way for a $5,000 market order in a $5 to $20 stock, roughly 0.75% round trip. Adding 24bp of commission on top of that is not a detail. If you trade larger size, the minimum stops mattering and you should compare per-share rates, routing and rebates instead. At $5,000 per order the gap has already fallen from 69x to 38x, and it keeps shrinking. And if you are choosing a broker to test a strategy that is close to breakeven, understand that the choice can decide the outcome. Costs of this size do not merely reduce an edge, they can remove it. That is the same conclusion we reached measuring order book depth and slippage: the cost side of a strategy deserves as much attention as the signal.

7. What we did not measure

Being clear about the edges of this. Routing rebates and price improvement. Some brokers pass back price improvement that offsets part of the cost. We did not model it. That works in favour of the brokers we priced as more expensive. The Interactive Brokers Tiered plan. We modelled the Fixed plan. Tiered has a different structure with exchange fees and rebates passed through, and can work out cheaper for some traders. Platform, data and inactivity fees. Market data subscriptions and account fees are real costs and are not in these numbers. Promotions. The moomoo zero-commission schedule for US residents reflects a promotion, and promotions change. CAT fees. The Consolidated Audit Trail fee is set to be passed through from 2026-05-01. Our sample ends 2026-01-26, so it is zero here. It is small but it is not nothing going forward. The numbers in this article come from pricing real trades against published schedules, not from a calculator with a single assumed rate. If you want to check your own costs, the arithmetic that matters is short: take your typical order size, divide by your typical share price to get the share count, multiply by the per-share rate, then check whether the per-order minimum is larger. If it is, that minimum is your real commission rate.