Fees are the most boring part of investing. They’re also the only part you can control with absolute certainty.
You can’t control whether the FTSE All-Share goes up or down. You can’t control inflation, interest rates, or what an American president decides to post on a Tuesday morning. But you can control, exactly, what your platform charges you. And over a 30-year investing life, that single decision will be worth tens of thousands of pounds.
The trouble is that platforms don’t make this easy. Charges are split across multiple lines, named confusingly, sometimes capped, sometimes tiered, and presented in the gentle, friendly tone of a service provider rather than a deduction from your wealth.
Here’s how to see through it.
The two layers of fees you’re paying
When you invest through a UK platform, you’re nearly always paying two separate sets of charges, taken from different places.
1. The platform fee. This is what the platform charges you for holding your account, executing trades, and providing the website you log into. It’s the number on the platform’s pricing page.
2. The fund fee (the OCF). This is what the fund itself charges, deducted invisibly from the fund’s value. It doesn’t appear on your statement as a deduction — instead, it just makes the fund’s reported performance slightly lower than it otherwise would have been. The number to look for is the Ongoing Charges Figure (OCF) in the fund’s factsheet.
Both come out of your money. Both compound against you. Both matter.
A reasonable target for a long-term investor in a global tracker, in 2026, is a total cost (platform fee + fund OCF combined) of well under 0.5% per year. Many people with default workplace pensions or older platform accounts are paying twice that, and don’t know it.
The two pricing models, and when each one wins
UK platforms charge in one of two main ways.
Percentage-based
You pay a percentage of your portfolio value each year, regardless of what’s in it.
- Hargreaves Lansdown: 0.45% on the first £250,000 (lower bands above).
- Fidelity: 0.35% with various caps and bands.
- Bestinvest: 0.40% on the first £250,000.
This works fine when your portfolio is small. When it grows, it gets expensive. 0.45% on a £200,000 ISA is £900 a year, every year, even if you make no trades and never log in.
Flat-fee
You pay a fixed amount per month or per year, regardless of portfolio size.
- Interactive Investor (ii): from £4.99/month for their smallest plan.
- AJ Bell Dodl: 0.15% with a £1/month minimum (a hybrid leaning flat).
- InvestEngine: free for their DIY ETF portfolios (they make money on managed portfolios and FX).
- Trading 212: free, with FX charges on non-GBP investments.
Flat fees are dramatically cheaper at scale. £60 a year (ii) on a £200,000 ISA is 0.03%, against the percentage platforms’ 0.45%. That difference is roughly £840 a year, every year, and it grows with the portfolio.
The crossover point is usually around £25,000–£40,000 of investments. Below that, percentage platforms can be slightly cheaper. Above it, flat-fee platforms tend to win, often by a lot.
Why a 1% fee is not a “small” fee
The financial industry has trained people to think of percentages under 1% as nothing to worry about. This is one of the most expensive misconceptions in personal finance.
Consider two investors, both putting £500/month into a global tracker for 30 years, both earning a 6% annual real return before fees:
- Investor A pays total fees of 0.25% per year (cheap platform + cheap tracker).
- Investor B pays total fees of 1.25% per year (older percentage platform + actively managed fund).
After 30 years, working from the same contributions and the same gross returns, Investor A’s pot is roughly £475,000. Investor B’s is roughly £395,000. The 1% fee difference has cost Investor B around £80,000 — comfortably more than they put into the account in total.
The thing that makes fees so dangerous over the long term is that the money you pay in fees isn’t just lost — it’s also lost the growth it would have produced. You’re not paying 1% a year. You’re paying 1% a year plus the compounded returns that 1% would have earned for the next three decades.
Where platforms hide the costs
Once you start looking, the same patterns appear across most UK platforms.
The headline fee isn’t the whole fee
Most platforms quote one figure on their pricing page. That’s the platform fee. The fund OCF is separate, and the bid-offer spread (the small gap between the buy price and the sell price) is separate again. You need all of them to know what you’re actually paying.
Read the Costs and Charges disclosure document. Every UK platform must produce one, and it will give you a more honest picture than the marketing pages.
Trading fees on funds vs shares
Some platforms charge per trade. Others charge for share trades but not fund trades. Others have monthly trading credits that look generous but expire if unused. If you’re a regular monthly investor, a £10 trade fee per purchase is brutal — £120 a year on £6,000 invested is an effective 2% drag. Look for free fund dealing or free regular monthly investing.
FX fees on global investments
Most UK investors should hold a global tracker, which means the underlying assets are in dollars, yen, euros, and so on. Whenever you buy, sell, or receive dividends in those currencies, the platform makes a turn on the conversion. Headline FX charges are usually 0.5%–1.5% per transaction.
For a global tracker held within a UK-domiciled fund (with a GBP share class), this is largely invisible to you — the fund manager handles it. But if you’re buying US-listed ETFs directly, the FX cost can be a meaningful additional drag.
Exit fees
Several older platforms used to charge an exit fee for transferring out — sometimes per holding. The FCA banned these in 2022 for the most egregious cases, but always check before you commit to a platform. You should never feel locked in.
Tiered pricing that benefits the platform, not you
Some percentage-based platforms reduce their rate for very large portfolios — but only on the value above a certain threshold. So a 0.45% platform might charge 0.45% on the first £250,000 and 0.25% on amounts above. This sounds generous until you realise that for the vast majority of UK investors, the tier above £250,000 is irrelevant.
How to actually compare two platforms
Forget the marketing. Open a spreadsheet, or use one of the comparison calculators on Boring Money or Monevator. For each platform, work out:
- Annual platform fee on a portfolio your size.
- Cost of buying your chosen fund each month (£0 if free fund dealing).
- Fund OCF for the actual fund you’d hold.
- FX charges, if relevant to your holdings.
- Anything else in the fee schedule — exit, account closure, paper statements.
Add it up. Convert it to a percentage of the portfolio. That’s your true total cost.
If you’re holding a global tracker like the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap (OCF around 0.23%) or the HSBC FTSE All-World Index (OCF around 0.13%), and your platform fee is below 0.20% or so, your total is likely under 0.40%. That’s a competitive number. Anything above 1% all-in deserves a hard look.
When to switch platforms
Switching platforms isn’t dramatic. You can transfer a Stocks and Shares ISA to another provider without losing the tax wrapper — it’s called an in-specie transfer (your investments move across) or a cash transfer (they’re sold, the cash moves, and you reinvest). The first is usually preferable; the second can leave you out of the market for a few days.
Common reasons to switch:
- Your portfolio has grown into the territory where a flat-fee platform is much cheaper.
- You’re paying for features you don’t use (research, analysis, premium tiers).
- You’re holding actively managed funds with high OCFs and want to move to trackers.
- The platform’s pricing changed and is no longer competitive.
It’s not something you need to do every year. But every five years or so, it’s worth running the numbers again. Pricing changes. New platforms launch. The market for UK retail investing in 2026 is far more competitive than it was even a decade ago.
The compounding lesson
The sentence to internalise is this: fees compound just like returns do, but in the opposite direction.
Every pound you don’t pay in fees is a pound that stays invested, and that pound will grow for as long as the rest of your portfolio does. A 0.5% reduction in your annual costs, applied to a 30-year investing life, is not a 15% boost (0.5% × 30). It’s much more, because each year’s saved fee earns its own returns from then on.
Fees are the closest thing to a free lunch in investing. You don’t have to be smarter than anyone else, predict anything, or take on more risk. You just have to keep them low and pay attention to them once a year.
The market gives you a return. The fees decide how much of it you keep.
This article is for information and education only and does not constitute financial advice. Platform pricing changes regularly — always check the platform’s current published fee schedule before deciding. Investments can fall as well as rise in value and you may get back less than you invest.