The Access Fee Cap Is Not a Ceiling. It Is the Price.

The Cap Is the Price

Rule 610(c) of Regulation NMS caps what a national securities exchange may charge to execute against a protected quotation. For NMS stocks priced at or above $1.00, that cap is $0.0030 per share. It has been $0.0030 since 2005.

We read every published US equities fee schedule and pulled out one number per venue: the standard, non-tiered fee to remove displayed liquidity at or above a dollar. That is the access fee in the precise regulatory sense, the figure the cap actually governs. Seventeen of the nineteen registered exchanges yielded a clean answer.

Thirteen of them charge exactly $0.0030. Not $0.00295. Not $0.0029. The legal maximum, to the hundredth of a mil, across three separate corporate families and three independents.

Parentheses mean the member RECEIVES that amount. Rates are the standard, non-tiered figure for displayed liquidity in securities at or above $1.00, read from each venue's own published schedule on August 19 and 20, 2026. Two exchanges are not shown because we could not extract a verified standard rate; they are listed in section 07.

How to Read a Fee Schedule

A short detour, because it is the reason most published commentary on this topic is wrong. US exchange fee schedules mark a rebate two different ways, and neither is a minus sign.

The first is parentheses. Cboe's standard rate row reads Securities at or above $1.00 ($0.0016) $0.0030 $0.0030. The first figure is in parentheses, so the member is paid $0.0016 to add. The second is bare, so the member pays $0.0030 to remove.

The second convention is a trailing word. NYSE Texas writes $0.0029/share credit for providing displayed liquidity. No parentheses. The word "credit" is doing the entire job of the sign.

Get this backwards and a venue inverts. In building this dataset we produced exactly that error twice before catching it: Cboe BYX first parsed as a conventional maker-taker venue when it is the opposite, and NYSE Texas first showed its $0.0029 maker credit as a charge. Both were caught only because the resulting economics looked implausible. If you take one operational point from this piece, take that one.

The Four Exceptions

IEX charges $0.0024. It is the only venue in the set that charges to remove and prices below the cap, a fifth under the maximum. Whatever the reasoning, it is the one venue whose schedule declines the ceiling everyone else is sitting on.

Cboe BYX and Nasdaq Texas pay you to remove. These are inverted, or taker-maker, venues. BYX charges $0.0020 to add and pays $0.0002 to take. Nasdaq Texas, the former Nasdaq BX, pays $0.0007 at its base tier. On an inverted venue the access fee is not merely low, it is negative, which means the Rule 610(c) cap does not bind at all. A cap on what you may charge says nothing about what you may pay.

NYSE National charges nothing to remove. Its schedule lists the Removing Liquidity column as "No charge" and the adding column at $0.0029. That $0.0029 is a fee, not a credit: NYSE National states its own convention on the same page, "Rebates indicated by parentheses," and the figure has none. So the venue charges the liquidity provider and lets the taker in free. Its access fee is zero.

That is worth sitting with. Of the seventeen venues we can price, the cap is a live constraint on thirteen, a non-binding ceiling for one, and an irrelevance to three. The rule that supposedly governs access fee competition is doing real work on roughly three quarters of the measurable market, and on that three quarters it has produced exactly one price.

Deferred Twice

In September 2024 the SEC adopted amendments cutting the cap from $0.0030 to $0.0010, a reduction of two thirds. Nasdaq and Cboe challenged the package. On October 14, 2025 the D.C. Circuit upheld it.

The amendment has still not taken effect. On October 31, 2025 the Commission granted temporary exemptive relief pushing compliance to the first business day of November 2026. Then on June 11, 2026 it pushed it again, to the first business day of November 2027, citing the cumulative burden of the market-structure initiatives already landing in 2026.

The same day, the Commission proposed rescinding Rule 611 and Rule 610(e) outright. So in a single sitting the SEC moved to eliminate the trade-through rule and deferred the fee cap by another year. One rule is being dismantled at speed; the other has been postponed twice and has never been enforced in its amended form.

For the nine venues sitting at $0.0030, the amended cap is not a marginal adjustment. It removes 67 percent of the headline take rate. That is not a pricing tweak, it is a revenue line, and it now has a date fourteen months out that has already moved twice.

The Rebate Problem

Here is the structural issue the headline number hides. Rule 610(c) caps the fee. It does not cap the rebate. But on a maker-taker venue the rebate is funded by the fee.

Look at the add column in the table above. NYSE Texas pays $0.0029 to add while charging $0.0030 to take. EDGA pays $0.0027 against the same $0.0030. The spread the venue keeps is a hundredth of a cent or less on those flows. If the take fee falls to $0.0010 and the rebate structure is unchanged, the arithmetic simply does not close.

So a cap on the take side is, in practice, a cap on the make side. The rebate has to compress with it. What that does to displayed liquidity, to quoted depth, and to the economics of professional market making is the actual question in this rulemaking, and it is a question about the add column, not the take column, even though the rule is written entirely about the take column.

The venues' own filings show how little of the headline rate they keep. Two of them disclose the gross and the payout as separate audited line items in their SEC Form 1 annual amendments, which is a cleaner view than a segment aggregate.

MEMX collected $540.6 million in transaction fees and paid out $502.4 million in rebates. It keeps roughly seven cents on the dollar. Its audited figure spans equities and options together, so read it as the shape of a maker-taker book rather than a cash-equities-only number. IEX, the one venue in the set that charges below the cap, collected $256.4 million in matched fees against $120.4 million in liquidity payments and keeps a little over half.

ICE points the same direction on a different measure. It reports cash-equities revenue capture of $0.037 per 100 shares for 2025, down from $0.050 in 2024 even as volume grew. Treat that as a trend rather than a ratio against the take fee: it is net revenue across every share matched on five NYSE Group venues, counting the add side as well as the take side and folding in auction and routing lines, so its denominator is not the same as a per-taking-share fee. What it does show is the direction, and the direction is down.

The newest venue makes the point most bluntly. TXSE, which began trading in July 2026, charges $0.0030 to remove displayed liquidity and pays a rebate of $0.0031 to add it. Its standard displayed book runs at a deliberate loss of a hundredth of a cent a share. That is a launch posture rather than a sustainable one, but it shows what the add side is worth to a venue trying to build a book: more than the take fee it is allowed to charge.

Read the MEMX and IEX figures against the cap debate, because those two are gross and payout measured on the same base. The gross access fee is $0.0030 and it is capped. The net is a fraction of it, because the rebate is where the money goes. Cutting the cap to $0.0010 does not shave a third off a $0.0030 margin. It compresses a spread already running at a fraction of a mil, and the adjustment has to come out of the add side. A venue paying out ninety-three percent of what it collects has very little room to absorb it anywhere else.

The Other Half of the Tape

Rule 610(c) does not reach alternative trading systems. The cap governs fees to execute against a protected quotation, and ATSs do not display protected quotations. An ATS is also not a self-regulatory organisation, so it files no 19b-4 to change a fee. There is no such thing as an ATS access fee in the Reg NMS sense.

What exists instead is Form ATS-N Part III Item 19, a prose disclosure of what the venue charges for use of its services. We pulled Item 19(a) for every one of the 45 NMS Stock ATSs that files it. The distribution is the finding.

Twenty-three of forty-five disclose bilateral pricing rather than a rate. Nine disclose no separate transaction fee at all. Among those that do publish numbers, the range runs from POSIT at $0.0002 per share to Aqua ATS at up to $0.0200, a spread of two orders of magnitude.

Set that against the lit side. One half of the US equity market publishes a single number, identical across nine venues, that cannot be changed without a filing with the SEC. The other half negotiates in private across a two-hundred-fold range. Both halves execute the same securities for the same institutions on the same day.

The overnight venues sit inside that dispersion. Four NMS Stock ATSs match between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. Eastern, and pricing across them is disclosed three different ways. Moon ATS publishes a flat $0.0030. Bruce Markets discloses a negotiated $0.0020 on the taking side. Blue Ocean discloses a negotiated per-share commission or rebate between $0.0020 and $0.0060. IBKR ATS, which matches from 8:00 p.m. to 3:50 a.m., discloses a negotiated range of $0.0005 to $0.0050 across its bundled and unbundled commission models. None of them is capped by anything.

Why This Matters Now

Three things are true at once in August 2026, and they point the same direction.

Rule 610(d), the fee-determinability requirement, went operative in February 2026 and was never deferred. It obliges an exchange to make its fee knowable at the moment of execution, inside the fill. Rule 611, the trade-through rule, is now proposed for rescission, with the comment file closed on August 17. And the access fee cap that would reprice all of it has been postponed to November 2027.

Put those together. Order protection is being withdrawn. Fee disclosure at the fill is already mandatory and machine-readable. The cap that would compress the economics is deferred but not dead. In that configuration the execution report stops being a confirmation and becomes the primary evidence of execution quality, per fill, per venue, in real time. We wrote about how the venues encode that in Five Ways US Exchanges Encode Execution Economics.

The honest caveat on this dataset: we hold seventeen of nineteen lit venues at a confidence level we are willing to publish. Two remain open, and neither is an extraction problem. 24X National, cleared to trade overnight from January 2027, and Green Impact, not yet trading, have simply not published a transaction fee schedule. Both gaps are in the public record rather than in our reading of it.

Take It Further

The fee schedule, the code taxonomy and the overnight tape all run on the same pipeline.

Method and Sources

• SEC Release 34-101070: Regulation NMS amendments adopting the $0.0010 access fee cap (Sep 18 2024)
• SEC Release 34-104172: first extension of Rule 610(c) and Rule 612 compliance to Nov 2026 (Oct 31 2025)
• SEC Release 34-105656: second extension to the first business day of Nov 2027 (Jun 11 2026)
• SEC proposal to rescind Rule 611 and Rule 610(e) (Jun 11 2026)
• Cboe US Equities fee schedules (BZX, BYX, EDGA, EDGX)
• NYSE Group equities price lists
• Nasdaq equity trader price list
• IEX fee schedule
• MEMX US equities fee schedule
• Form ATS-N filings, SEC EDGAR full-text search
• Intercontinental Exchange 2025 Form 10-K (cash equities revenue capture)
• MEMX Holdings SEC Form 1 annual amendment 2025 (transaction fees and rebates)
• IEX Group SEC Form 1 annual amendment 2025 (matched fees and liquidity payments)

Everything here is public

Every figure in this piece comes from a document anyone can read. Exchange rates were read from each venue's own published fee schedule. Revenue figures come from SEC filings: 2025 Forms 10-K and, for MEMX and IEX, Form 1 annual amendments, which carry audited exchange-level line items rather than segment aggregates. ATS figures come from Form ATS-N on EDGAR. Rule citations and compliance dates come from SEC releases and the Federal Register.

No confidential, client or non-public information was used. Sapinover maintains a proprietary overnight ATS tape; none of it appears in this article, which is entirely a reading of the public record.

Where fact ends and inference begins

The rates, counts and filing dates are facts, each traceable to a cited document. The arguments built on them are ours. That eleven venues price at the cap is an observation. That the cap therefore functions as the price rather than as a ceiling is an inference from that observation, and we cannot and do not claim to know any venue's pricing intent. That a take-side cap operates in practice as a make-side cap follows from the arithmetic of the disclosed gross and payout figures, not from anything an exchange has told us.

Fee schedules change, frequently and on short notice. Every rate is stated as read on August 19 and 20, 2026, and should be re-checked against the venue's current schedule before it is relied on. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation.

Access fee is defined throughout as the fee to remove a displayed protected quotation in an NMS stock priced at or above $1.00, which is the figure Rule 610(c) governs. Each rate was read from the venue's own published fee schedule using per-venue table specifications, because every venue publishes its standard rate row in a different shape with a different column order. Rates are parsed sign-aware across both rebate conventions found in the corpus. Every figure retains its source snippet for audit, and no rate is published below our highest confidence tier. ATS figures come from the latest Form ATS-N Part III Item 19(a) per venue on EDGAR; nine of those filings predate 2025 and are reported as disclosed rather than as current.