The cheapest broker
depends on how you trade

Not on the headline brokerage alone. Fee structures differ — some brokers charge a flat fee per trade, others a percentage of the trade value — so the cheapest depends on your parcel size: a 0.1% broker beats a $5 flat fee on a $2,000 parcel but loses on a $20,000 one. Layer on how often you trade, the FX spread on any US shares, and any monthly account or market-data fees, and the ranking can flip entirely. We model all of it against your own trading pattern and show a single annual cost.

CHESS-sponsored means your shares are registered on the ASX register under a Holder Identification Number in your own name — you are the legal owner and your holdings are unaffected if the broker fails. Custodian brokers hold the shares through a nominee and record your interest in their own books, which is cheaper and enables fractional shares. Both models are used by ASIC-licensed brokers; it is a trade-off between cost and directness of ownership.

Every US trade needs an AUD to USD conversion, and again back when you sell. Brokers charge for that as a margin on the exchange rate. On a $5,000 trade the difference between a 0.05% and a 0.60% spread is about $27.50 each way — usually far more than the brokerage itself. It is the single most commonly overlooked cost in international investing, so we price it in rather than footnote it.

A recurring buy lets you nominate an amount and a schedule, and the broker places the order for you — dollar-cost averaging without having to remember. Combined with fractional shares it means you can invest a fixed $200 a month regardless of the share price. Not every broker offers either, so if that is how you want to invest it narrows the field quickly.

Not inherently. Every broker listed here holds an Australian Financial Services Licence and is regulated by ASIC, and client money must be held in segregated trust accounts. The meaningful structural difference is CHESS versus custodian holding, which we show on every broker. Beyond that, consider how long the provider has operated here and who owns it — both are on each broker card.

There is no Consumer Data Right feed or regulator dataset for brokerage, so unlike our savings and mortgage data this cannot be pulled from an API. We maintain a registry of the brokers we audit and their pricing pages, and a scheduled job re-reads those pages, extracts the fee schedule and features, and flags anything that changed for review. Each broker card shows when its figures were last checked.