What an Execution Costs

Knowable Is Not Findable

Since February 2026 an exchange fee has had to be determinable at the time of execution. That made the fee knowable. It did not make it findable. Seventeen US equity exchanges publish seventeen fee schedules, as web tables, PDFs and price lists, each with its own tier rules and footnotes. Cboe prices by fee code; IEX by a base code plus suffixes; NYSE by order type and tape. ATSs disclose their fees in Form ATS-N, usually as a range. The regulatory fees on top come from three more sources: the SEC, FINRA and the CAT plan. We found no public tool that puts them side by side.

What the Fee Finder Does

Pick a venue, say what happened (added liquidity, removed it, executed in the opening or closing auction, was routed out, or carried a particular fee code) and enter the size, price, side and trade date. The Fee Finder returns the rate per share, the venue fee, the regulatory fees and the total, in dollars and basis points, at the venue's base, mid and top tier side by side. Every rate shows where it came from: the venue's own fee schedule with its effective date, or, where a schedule does not publish a ladder, a labelled reference.

It covers 17 exchanges and 13 ATSs. Cboe fees can be looked up by the exchange's own fee code; where a code could be one of several that carry different rates, the tool says so rather than picking one. ATSs that publish a standard rate are priced; ATSs whose fee is negotiated show the range they disclose and are not priced. The underlying fee documents were collected on October 30, 2026, and each file's checksum is recorded, so any rate can be traced to the exact document it came from.

Five Things the Schedules Show

1. The take fee sits at the cap almost everywhere

Fourteen of seventeen exchanges charge $0.0030 a share to remove liquidity, the Rule 610 cap. The three that do not are the inverted venues: Cboe BYX pays $0.0002 to take, NYSE National takes for free, and Nasdaq Texas charges $0.0007. The cap falls to $0.0010 from the first business day of November 2027, which compresses that column for every venue at once.

2. Adding liquidity spans $0.0061 a share

The same act, posting a displayed order that gets hit, earns a $0.0031 rebate at the Texas Stock Exchange and costs a $0.0030 fee at Nasdaq Texas. Three exchanges charge to add (Cboe BYX $0.0020, NYSE National $0.0029, Nasdaq Texas $0.0030); IEX charges nothing for a displayed add at its base tier.

3. Tiers move the rebate by half or more

Where a venue publishes its ladder, volume changes the answer materially. Nasdaq PSX pays $0.0020 to add at its base tier and $0.0033 at its top. NYSE American runs from $0.0016 to $0.0026. IEX goes from free to a $0.0023 credit. The same execution can be a cost for one member and a rebate for another, which is why the Fee Finder shows all three tiers rather than one.

4. Auctions are not free

A flow that leans on the open and close pays a per-share fee on every auction print, with no rebate to offset it. Nasdaq's closing cross runs from $0.0016 at its base tier to $0.0008 at its top.

5. On expensive stocks, Section 31 is the biggest fee

Since April 4, 2026 the SEC's Section 31 fee is $20.60 per $1 million sold. FINRA's Trading Activity Fee adds $0.000195 a share sold, capped at $9.79 a trade, and the CAT fee $0.000001 a share. Selling 1,000 shares of a $50 stock carries $1.23 of regulatory fees against a $3.00 take fee. At $146 a share the Section 31 fee on a sale matches the $0.0030 take fee, and above that it is larger. Brokers usually pass these fees to the seller, so they rarely appear in a venue comparison; for a seller of high-priced stock they are the larger number.

ATS Fees Are a Range

Form ATS-N requires every NMS stock ATS to describe its fees. Of the 46 ATSs in our October collection, 35 had a fee disclosure on file, and all 35 describe fees that are negotiated or vary by client. The ranges are wide: up to $0.03 a share at Sigma X2 and Instinct X, $0.05 at LeveL, $0.20 for orders arriving through Barclays' algorithms, and up to 5% of the trade's value at MS Pool. A few publish a standard rate: IntelligentCross $0.0008 a share per side in its main books, OneChronos $0.0010. The Fee Finder prices the published rates and shows the ranges as disclosed. What a given client pays at most ATSs is in its agreement, not in any public document.

Method and Limits

Rates come from each venue's published fee schedule, collected October 30, 2026 and archived with a SHA-256 checksum per file (181 of 181 indexed files verified). Where a schedule does not publish a tier ladder, the base rate applies at every tier, or a reference ladder is used and labelled as unverified. Re-checking every exchange against the October schedules changed rates at five venues in our own dataset, including one whose $0.0007 charge to take we had recorded as a rebate. Fee schedules change often; check the cited document before relying on a rate.

Fees are modeled at published rates, not billed amounts. The tool does not model sub-dollar pricing (most venues charge a percent of dollar value below $1.00), negotiated ATS fees, broker commissions or clearing charges. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation.