Trading Fees in Canada: What It Really Costs to Buy a Stock
Commission-free trading is real, and it is not the same thing as free trading. Most Canadian investors now pay nothing to place an order, and then pay several other trading fees that nobody advertises: the gap between the buying price and the selling price, a percentage on every dollar they move into US dollars, a fee for leaving, and an annual deduction from every fund they own that never appears on a statement as a number. Some of those cost pennies. One of them routinely costs hundreds of dollars on a single transaction.
This guide prices all of them, using each firm’s own published schedule rather than a summary of one. Every rate below was read off the source on September 21, 2026, and every calculation is made by a tool that refuses to run if a rate has moved.
There is one idea underneath the whole subject, and it is worth having before the numbers start:
Every investing fee is one of three shapes. It is a flat amount, a percentage of your money, or a charge per share. Which shape you are paying decides entirely whether the fee matters.
A $9.99 commission is brutal on a $250 purchase and irrelevant on a $50,000 one. A 1.5% currency conversion is the reverse: barely noticeable on $250, and $750 on $50,000. A per-share charge ignores both and follows the share count, which means it punishes cheap stock and vanishes on expensive stock. Nobody tells you which shape you are about to pay, and the answer changes with every order you place.
The three shapes, side by side
| Shape | What it is charged on | Examples in Canada | Who it hurts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flat | Per transaction, regardless of size | TD Direct Investing $9.99 a trade, Questrade $9.95 per journalling request, a $150 transfer-out fee | Small orders and frequent contributions |
| Percentage | Per dollar moved or held | 1.5% currency conversion, a 2.00% mutual fund management expense ratio | Large amounts and long holding periods |
| Per share | Per share or unit traded | ECN fees of $0.004 a share, the exchange’s own $0.0015 a share | Low-priced shares, whatever the dollar amount |
The rest of this guide takes them in the order a Canadian investor meets them.
The commission, and what “zero” leaves out
The commission is the charge for placing the order. It is the one fee everybody knows about, and for Canadian and US listed stocks it has largely gone to zero at the independent platforms while the bank-owned brokerages still charge it.
As published on September 21, 2026:
| Broker | Online Canadian or US stock trade | Notable extras |
|---|---|---|
| Questrade | $0 to buy and $0 to sell | $9.95 a mutual fund trade; $9.95 per journalling request; no inactivity fee |
| Wealthsimple | $0 | USD accounts $10 CAD a month after a 30-day trial, or free at Premium or Generation status |
| CIBC Investor’s Edge | $6.95 ($4.95 on the active plan, $5.95 for students) | Over 180 ETFs commission-free; $100 annual fee when the total market balance is $10,000 or less |
| TD Direct Investing | $9.99 ($7.00 at 150 or more trades a quarter) | Select ETFs $0; partial shares $1.99; $25 quarterly maintenance fee below $15,000 |
Figures from each firm’s own pricing page, captured September 21, 2026, and worth reading in full at the source: Questrade’s transaction fee schedule and TD Direct Investing’s pricing page are the two that carry the most detail. Confirm before you act on them; fee schedules change without notice.
A flat commission behaves in a way that is obvious once you see it drawn and almost invisible in a table. As a share of the amount invested, it is enormous on small orders and rounds to nothing on large ones.
The numbers behind the curves:
| Amount invested in one order | $9.99 commission | $6.95 commission |
|---|---|---|
| $500 | 2.00% | 1.39% |
| $1,000 | 1.00% | 0.70% |
| $5,000 | 0.20% | 0.14% |
| $50,000 | 0.020% | 0.014% |
The crossing point in the chart is the part worth remembering. A $9.99 commission equals a 1.5% currency conversion at an order of $666.00. A $6.95 commission equals it at $463.33. Below those amounts the flat fee is the more expensive of the two, and above them the percentage takes over and never stops growing.
This is why the same broker can be the right and the wrong answer for two people with the same portfolio. Somebody contributing $200 a month is paying a flat fee twenty-four times a year on a small base. Somebody moving $60,000 into US dollars once is paying a percentage once, on a large base. They should not choose the same way, and a guide that says “the cheapest broker is X” has skipped the question.
What it costs to reinvest a dividend by hand
Here is the flat-fee shape doing real damage to something that looks harmless.
Royal Bank declared dividends of $1.76, $1.64, $1.64 and $1.54 a common share over its four most recent quarters, which is $6.58 a share for the year (Royal Bank of Canada, Q3 2026 Supplementary Financial Information, p.5). A 100-share position therefore produced $658.00 of dividends.
Reinvesting that by hand means placing one buy order a quarter. At TD Direct Investing’s $9.99 that is $39.96 a year, which is 6.07% of the dividends. At CIBC Investor’s Edge’s $6.95 it is $27.80, or 4.22%. Through a brokerage dividend reinvestment plan, which Questrade’s transaction schedule prices at “Free” and most Canadian brokers offer, it is $0.00.
Six percent of your dividend income, given away for the privilege of doing manually what the plan does for free. The mechanics of a reinvestment plan, and the tax record it creates, are covered in our guide to adjusted cost base, because every reinvestment is also a purchase for tax purposes, and the adjusted cost base tracker keeps the running total across them. If you want to see what a given yield actually pays on a position of your size, our dividend income calculator turns a percentage into dollars.
The spread: the cost with no line item
There is a second price on every trade that no broker charges you and every investor pays.
A quote has two prices, not one. The bid is the highest price anyone is currently willing to pay, the ask is the lowest price anyone will currently sell at, and the distance between them is the spread. Buy at the ask and sell at the bid and you have paid that distance, even though no fee appears anywhere. Our guide to reading a stock quote takes every field on a quote in turn, the bid, the ask and the spread included.
On a heavily traded name the spread is typically a single cent, which on a $284.45 share is 0.0035% and not worth a thought. On a thinly traded small company it can be several percent, and it is charged on the way in and again on the way out. That is the real reason Canadian penny stocks are expensive to own even where the commission is zero.
Why the commission went to zero in the first place
The spread is also where the answer to the obvious question lives. If placing an order is free, who is paying for the machinery?
The exchange publishes the answer. Under the TSX Trading Fee Schedule effective August 12, 2026, a broker executing a post-open continuous trade in a displayed order pays or receives, per share per side:
| Trade price per share | Removing liquidity | Providing liquidity |
|---|---|---|
| Under $1.00 | $0.00020 | $0 |
| $1.00 or more, non-interlisted | $0.0015 | Rebate of $0.0011 |
| $1.00 or more, interlisted | $0.0027 | Rebate of $0.0023 |
| $1.00 or more, ETFs | $0.0017 | Rebate of $0.0013 |
Read the second column. An order that sits in the book waiting, which is what a limit order away from the market does, earns the broker money. An order that takes whatever is on offer right now, which is what a market order does, costs the broker money. This is called maker-taker pricing, and it is why “free” trading is commercially possible at all: the firm’s revenue comes from rebates, order flow, interest on cash, currency conversion and lending, rather than from a ticket charge. The queue of orders these rates are paid on is the order book, and our guide to how the stock market works takes it apart.
It also means a market order and a limit order are not equally cheap to execute even when your commission is identical. If you have never placed one deliberately, our guide to buying your first stock works through the order types on a real quote.
ECN fees, and the thing most people get wrong about them
An ECN, or electronic communication network, is a marketplace that matches orders. When your broker routes an order to one, the venue may charge for the execution, and the broker passes that charge on. Questrade’s own description:
“ECNs typically charge fees whenever an order removes liquidity from the market, meaning it’s likely to be filled immediately.”
Now the correction, because the folklore on this is badly out of date. Here is Questrade’s published ECN schedule in full, as of September 21, 2026:
| Order | ECN fee |
|---|---|
| Any Canadian security | None |
| US security, smart routed | None |
| Direct routed to EDGA or IEX, adding liquidity | $0.004 and $0.0012 a share |
| Direct routed to NASDAQ, removing liquidity | $0.003 a share |
| Direct routed to BATS, ARCA, NYSE or EDGX, removing liquidity | $0.004 a share |
| Any US OTC security | $0.000005 a share |
| Filled in the overnight session, 8pm to 2am ET | $0.003 a share |
Under that schedule, ECN fees apply to a very small subset of trades. They do not touch Canadian orders at all, and they do not touch a normal US order either, because direct routing means choosing the execution venue yourself rather than letting the platform’s smart router choose. That is a deliberate setting on a professional platform, not something a beginner does by accident.
If you have read that every marketable order at a discount broker carries an ECN fee, that was once closer to true and is not true of this schedule now. The useful lesson is narrower and more durable than the fee itself: some charges are per share, and a per-share charge behaves nothing like a percentage.
Ten thousand dollars is ten thousand dollars. What changes is how many shares it buys:
| Stock | Close | Shares in a $10,000 order | At $0.004 a share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organigram | $1.44 | 6,944 | $27.78 |
| Li-FT Power | $2.25 | 4,444 | $17.78 |
| Baytex Energy | $6.75 | 1,481 | $5.93 |
| BCE | $30.90 | 324 | $1.29 |
| Barrick Mining | $60.24 | 166 | $0.66 |
| Royal Bank | $284.45 | 35 | $0.14 |
| Constellation Software | $2,843.09 | 4 | $0.01 |
Closing prices September 19, 2026.
The same order costs $27.78 on the cheapest name and about a cent on the most expensive, a difference of 1,974 times, and not a single dollar of that difference has anything to do with the quality of the two companies. The exchange concedes the point in its own schedule: it charges $0.00020 a share below $1.00 against $0.0015 at or above it, because a flat per-share rate simply does not work on cheap stock.
Two other per-share and per-value charges are worth knowing because they are easy to trip over:
– The SEC fee. The US Securities and Exchange Commission collects 0.0000206 times the value of every sale of a US security, which is 0.00206% of the proceeds. Questrade’s own worked example: selling 100 shares at $25 incurs a fee of $0.05 USD. It is charged on sales only, never on purchases. – Warrants and rights. Removing liquidity in a warrant or right costs 0.025% of the value per fill, with a $0.50 minimum and a $50.00 maximum, and Questrade warns that “it is possible to have multiple fills per order and be charged the minimum fee multiple times for the same order.” A single order that fills in twelve pieces pays the minimum twelve times.
Currency conversion: the largest fee most Canadians pay
This is the one that matters. Everything above is measured in dollars and cents. This is measured in hundreds.
Every published Canadian retail schedule charges a percentage to turn Canadian dollars into US dollars, and charges it again to turn them back:
| Firm | Published conversion cost |
|---|---|
| Questrade | 1.5% |
| Wealthsimple | 1.50% under $10,000; 1.00% to $24,999.99; 0.50% to $99,999.99; 0% at $100,000 and over, per transaction |
| CIBC Investor’s Edge | 225 basis points, published as 1.6%, below $25,000 USD; then 130, 75, 40, 35 and 25 basis points, published as 0.9%, 0.5%, 0.3%, 0.3% and 0.2% |
Two things in that table deserve a second look.
Basis points and percentages are not the same number here. CIBC publishes both, and 225 basis points is 1.6%, not 2.25%. The basis points are points of the exchange rate itself, and once the rate is applied to your money the cost lands at 1.6%. A firm quoting you a spread in basis points is quoting a different denominator than a firm quoting you a percentage, and the two are only comparable after someone does the division. CIBC does it for you on its own pricing page. Not everyone does.
The published percentage is a floor, not the total. The percentage sits on top of a rate the firm sets, and that rate carries its own margin. Wealthsimple says so plainly in its help centre article on converting funds: the corporate exchange rate is “a live rate including a spread which may vary due to market conditions.” CIBC’s disclosure is more explicit still:
“we and the parties related to us will earn spread-based revenue, in addition to the commission or fees applicable to such a trade, based on the difference between the rate we and our affiliates obtain and the rate you receive”
That is worth reading twice, because it is the answer to why a 0% conversion tier can exist at all. The stated fee going to zero does not mean the conversion is free. It means the disclosed part of it is zero.
The yardstick for all of this is the Bank of Canada’s daily exchange rates, which are indicative mid-market rates that nobody transacts at. The gap between that published rate and the rate you are offered is the part of the cost that never appears as a fee.
What a round trip costs
Converting into US dollars and back again pays the fee twice. Drawn against the amount converted, the published schedules look like this:
| Amount converted, each way | Flat 1.5% both ways | Wealthsimple tiers, both ways | CIBC published spread, both ways |
|---|---|---|---|
| $5,000 | $150.00 | $150.00 | $160.00 |
| $9,999 | $299.97 | $299.97 | $319.97 |
| $10,000 | $300.00 | $200.00 | $320.00 |
| $25,000 | $750.00 | $250.00 | $450.00 |
| $50,000 | $1,500.00 | $500.00 | $900.00 |
| $100,000 | $3,000.00 | $0.00 | $1,000.00 |
CIBC’s tiers are stated in US dollars, so its row is indicative rather than exactly comparable. The vertical drops are the tier boundaries, and they produce a result worth planning around.
Converting $9,999 at Wealthsimple’s schedule costs $299.97 on a round trip. Converting $10,000 costs $200.00. One extra dollar converted saves $99.97.
The same cliff sits at $25,000 and again at $100,000. If you are anywhere near a boundary, cross it.
There is also a way to never convert at all, which is to buy the US company through a Canadian-listed receipt instead. Our guide to Canadian Depositary Receipts prices that route, and the honest summary is that it replaces a one-time percentage with an annual one: the hedge inside a CDR measured between 2.11% and 2.85% a year across the 64 US CDRs with a full two-year record, so it beats the round trip for roughly the first seventeen months of holding and loses to it after that.
The flat-fee alternative
Because a percentage is the wrong shape for a large conversion, there is a well-known way to replace it with a flat fee. You buy an exchange-traded fund that is listed in both currencies, ask the broker to journal your units from one listing to the other, and sell them on the other side. The units never change; only the currency they are quoted in does. The charge is the journalling request, which Questrade publishes as a “flat rate of $9.95 per online journaling request”, rather than a percentage of the money.
Two journals, one in each direction, is $19.90 whatever the amount. That is the flat grey line in the chart above, and against a 1.5% conversion it breaks even at $663.33. Above that, the flat fee wins, and it keeps winning by more with every additional dollar.
It is not free, and the honest version of the arithmetic includes the parts the $9.95 leaves out. The fund has its own bid-ask spread on both the buy and the sell. The journal takes about two business days, during which the market can move against you. It requires a US dollar account, which is included at Questrade and $10 CAD a month at Wealthsimple after a 30-day trial. Below a few thousand dollars, those frictions swallow the saving and the straightforward conversion is the better answer.
The deeper point is the one the chart makes: when a fee is the wrong shape for the transaction, the fix is to change the shape, not to hunt for a cheaper version of the same shape.
There is a way to avoid the question entirely on the buying side, which is to hold US dollars rather than converting on every order. Both Questrade and Wealthsimple support US dollar balances inside registered accounts, which turns a per-trade conversion into a single conversion when money arrives. Whether that is worth doing also depends on tax, because a US-listed fund held in an RRSP escapes the 15% US dividend withholding that the same fund suffers in a TFSA. Our guide to how investment income is taxed in Canada works that through, and it is a larger number than any conversion fee on this page.
The fees that only appear when you act
Some charges sit dormant for years and then arrive all at once. Questrade’s administrative schedule carries its own warning:
“The following fees are only charged when the specific action is taken. You may not see them on your monthly statement.”
These live on a separate administrative fee schedule, one page over from the transaction schedule linked above, which is most of the reason they surprise people. The ones that catch investors:
| Action | Fee |
|---|---|
| Transfer an account out to another institution | $150.00 |
| Partial transfer out | $150.00 |
| Full plan deregistration from an RRSP, spousal RRSP, LIRA, LRSP or LIF | $100.00 |
| CAD wire transfer | $20.00 |
| USD wire transfer | $30.00 |
| International wire transfer | $40.00 |
| Estate settlement | $200.00 |
| Electronic fund transfer, CAD up to $50,000 | Free |
| Inactivity | Free |
The transfer-out fee is the one to plan for, because it is charged by the firm you are leaving and is therefore entirely outside the control of the firm you are joining. Many brokers will reimburse some or all of it to win the account; ask, in writing, before you initiate the transfer rather than after. Our walkthrough of opening a brokerage account in Canada covers the transfer forms themselves.
The fee you never see, and the statement that will finally show it
Everything above is charged on a transaction. The largest cost most Canadians carry is charged on a balance, every year, forever.
A fund’s management expense ratio is deducted from the fund’s net asset value daily. No bill arrives. No line appears on a statement. The return you see is already net of it, which is precisely why it is so easy to ignore. A trading expense ratio sits alongside it, covering the commissions the fund itself pays when it trades, and the two together are the real cost of ownership.
Percentages here are small and the shape is percentage, which means time does the work. On a $100,000 holding compounding at 7% before costs, a 0.06% fund grows to $535,186 over 25 years and a 2.00% fund to $338,635. The fee takes $196,550, which is more than the amount originally invested. Our mutual fund fee calculator runs that comparison on your own balance and horizon, and our page on Canadian ETFs ranks funds on how much of the index’s return actually reached investors rather than on the advertised fee, which is a different question and a better one. If the compounding half of this is not intuitive yet, compounding explained is the guide for it: fees compound exactly the same way returns do, in the wrong direction.
This is also the one area where the disclosure is about to improve. The Canadian Securities Administrators, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization and the Canadian Council of Insurance Regulators are adding embedded fund costs to the annual report on charges and compensation. In the Ontario Securities Commission’s words:
“Both securities registrants and insurers will have to deliver the first annual reports that incorporate total cost reporting enhancements for the year ending December 31, 2026.”
The OSC’s explanation notes that those reports arrive in mid January 2027. When yours does, read the embedded-cost figure before anything else. It will be the first time most Canadians see what their funds cost them in dollars rather than in a percentage buried in a prospectus.
The mistake people actually make
It is not choosing the wrong broker. It is contributing in amounts that are the wrong size for the fee shape they are paying, month after month, without ever doing the division.
Take $200 a month into a single stock at a broker charging $9.99 a trade. That is 5.00% of every contribution, paid on the way in, before the investment has done anything at all. Over a year it is $119.88 on $2,400 contributed. The market has to return 5% just to get you back to even on the money you put in, and that is before you sell.
Three ways out, in the order that costs least to implement:
1. Contribute at the same rate, invest less often. Four $600 purchases a year at $9.99 is 1.67% instead of 5.00%. Same money, same market, one third of the fee, at the price of a few months of idle cash. 2. Move to a platform where the shape does not apply. At $0 commission the whole calculation disappears. This is the strongest argument for the independent platforms for anyone contributing small amounts frequently, and our roundup of investing apps in Canada compares them on the fees a long-term contributor actually pays. 3. Use the free version of the transaction. The dividend reinvestment plan costs nothing. The commission-free ETF list costs nothing. Both do the same job as the trade you were about to pay for.
The general form of the mistake is worth naming, because it outlives any particular fee schedule. A fee is only expensive relative to the transaction you are putting it on. Nobody is fooled by a large number. People are fooled by a small number sitting on a small base, or by a small percentage sitting on a large one.
What to do about it, in order
1. Read your own broker’s schedule once, properly. Both of them, in fact: the commission page and the administrative page are usually separate documents, and the expensive items live on the second one. 2. Size your contributions to the fee shape. If you pay per trade, trade less often in larger amounts. If you pay per dollar, the frequency does not matter and the total does. 3. Convert currency rarely and in large amounts. The tiers are steep and they are per transaction. Cross the boundary if you are near it. 4. Hold the currency you trade in. One conversion when money arrives beats a conversion on every order. 5. Use limit orders where the spread is wide. You cannot control the spread, but you can decline to cross all of it. 6. Check the all-in fund cost, not the headline fee. Management expense ratio plus trading expense ratio, and from January 2027 the dollar figure will be on your annual report. 7. Ask about the transfer-out fee before you move, not after.
None of this requires a view on markets, which is what makes it the highest return work available to a new investor. You cannot control what a stock does after you buy it. You can control, exactly and in advance, what it costs you to own it.
Where to go next
The two platforms charging $0 are not interchangeable, and the differences that matter are the ones on this page: currency conversion, US dollar accounts and what each charges to leave. Our comparison of Questrade and Wealthsimple puts them side by side on exactly those terms. If you trade often enough that a per-trade cost is the dominant number in your year, the platforms built for that are ranked separately under trading apps in Canada.
There is also a question this guide has deliberately left at the door. Which account you hold an investment in changes its cost more than any fee here does, because a US-listed fund in an RRSP escapes withholding tax that the same fund pays in a TFSA, and that gap is larger than every commission and conversion on this page put together. Our guide to which account to fill first is the one to read next.