What it really costs to buy £1,000 of US shares from the UK: 2026 data across the platforms we score

Diese Bewertung ist noch nicht übersetzt — hier das englische Original.

The short answer

Buying £1,000 of a US share from the UK and selling it a year later at the same price costs £1.19 at Interactive Brokers (Tiered pricing), £2.13 at Interactive Brokers (Fixed), £3.00 at Trading 212, £9.98 at XTB, £14.94 at eToro and £19.70 at Freetrade (free Basic plan), using each platform’s published fees as of 23 October 2026 and a GBP/USD rate of 1.33.

At Trading 212, XTB, eToro and Freetrade, 100% of that cost is currency conversion: none of them charges UK clients commission on US shares. The gap between the cheapest and dearest platform is sixteenfold on £1,000 and more than fiftyfold on £10,000. Inside a stocks and shares ISA, Interactive Brokers’ £3 monthly activity fee moves it from first to last on small amounts, and Trading 212 becomes the cheapest.

Which platforms are in the data?

Every platform we score that sells real US shares to UK retail clients: Trading 212, XTB, eToro, Freetrade and Interactive Brokers. Freetrade is modelled on its free Basic plan, the one most users are on; its paid plans are discussed below. Interactive Brokers appears twice, because its two pricing plans (Fixed and Tiered) give materially different results and you choose between them.

Not included, because they do not sell UK retail clients real US shares:

• Plus500. Its UK entity, Plus500UK Ltd (FCA reference 509909), describes its authorisation as being to offer CFDs. Plus500 Invest, its share-dealing product, is offered only in selected regions, and we found no UK version.
• Pepperstone. Its UK offer is CFDs and spread betting; there is no share-dealing account.
• IC Markets and AvaTrade. Neither holds an FCA licence among the regulators we list, and both offer shares only as CFDs.

A share CFD is a bet on the price with nightly financing; it is not ownership, and it is not comparable on cost over a year.

The fees that went into the model

Sources: Trading 212’s fee schedule, XTB’s UK account and fees page, eToro’s fee schedule and conversion-fee page, eToro’s stocks and shares ISA page, Freetrade’s pricing page (freetrade.io/pricing, checked 23 October 2026), and Interactive Brokers U.K.’s stock commission, spot currency and ISA pages, as summarised and dated in our fee guides for Trading 212, XTB, eToro and Interactive Brokers. Checked between 24 September and 23 October 2026.

How much does £1,000 of US shares cost, there and back?

Scenario (a): one £1,000 purchase by bank transfer, held 12 months, sold at the same price and withdrawn.

General investment account

Stocks and shares ISA

The IBKR ISA figure is the same on both plans because the commission you pay counts towards the £3 monthly minimum, so whichever plan you use, the month is topped up to £3. Ten months with no trade is £30 of the total on its own.

What does £200 a month for a year cost?

Scenario (b): £200 by bank transfer on the same day each month for 12 months, each deposit converted and invested, the whole £2,400 holding sold at the end of month 12 and withdrawn.

General investment account

Stocks and shares ISA

Monthly buying is where IBKR’s Fixed plan stops being cheap. Twelve £200 purchases each hit the $1 minimum, so commission (£9.80) is almost seven times the FX cost. Two caveats: the eToro ISA requires a £500 first deposit, according to its ISA page, so a strict £200-a-month start is not possible there; and eToro’s main fee page says recurring-investment deposits are exempt from the conversion fee, while its conversion page describes that waiver as ending on 31 March 2026. We charged the fee. If the waiver applies to your plan, the buy-side conversion disappears and eToro’s total roughly halves.

What does a £10,000 lump sum cost?

Scenario (c): £10,000 in one go, held 12 months, sold at the same price and withdrawn. At this size Interactive Brokers’ manual FX order (0.2 basis points, $2 minimum, about £1.50 each way) beats its automatic 0.03% (£3), so we used the cheaper route.

General investment account

Stocks and shares ISA

Do Freetrade’s paid plans help? Only at volume. Freetrade’s pricing page cuts the FX fee to 0.59% on Standard (£59.88 a year, billed annually) and 0.39% on Plus (£119.88 a year). On the £10,000 round trip that is £117.65 plus £59.88, or £77.85 plus £119.88: about £178 and £198, against £197 on the free plan. On £1,000 or £200 a month, the subscription costs more than it saves.

The biggest cost is FX, not commission

Across all three scenarios and both account types, currency conversion accounts for 100% of the cost at Trading 212, XTB, eToro and Freetrade, because none of them charges UK clients a dealing commission on US shares. The ranking between those four is simply the ranking of their FX fees: 0.15%, 0.5%, 0.75% and 0.99% each way.

That makes the percentage fee, not the headline “commission-free” claim, the number to compare. On £10,000, the difference between a 0.15% and a 0.99% conversion fee is about £167 on one round trip. A £1 commission is noise next to it.

The exception proves the point. Interactive Brokers does charge commission, and on small orders in a general account commission is 50% to 87% of its total. Its Tiered plan still comes first in the general account in every scenario, because its conversion fee is a tenth of Trading 212’s or less. In an IBKR ISA, neither FX nor commission is the main cost; the £3 monthly activity fee is.

How can you cut the FX bill?

• Convert once, not on every trade. Trading 212 and XTB let you hold US dollars: Trading 212 through its multi-currency account, XTB through a second account in USD. Dividends and sale proceeds then stay in dollars until you choose to bring them home.
• Use the GBP route at eToro. Depositing pounds directly into eToro’s USD account costs 150 pips each way plus a $5 withdrawal fee, which our eToro guide calculates at about £27 on £1,000, nearly twice the GBP-account route modelled here.
• Convert manually at IBKR above about £5,000. The $2 minimum on a manual FX order is cheaper than 0.03% from that point.
• Consider a London-listed ETF for index exposure. A sterling share class of a US index fund needs no conversion at the zero-commission platforms, and carries no stamp duty. Our best stocks and shares ISA comparison shows that case.

Methodology

The numbers above come from a short Node.js script that applies each platform’s published fees step by step. In each scenario it converts the GBP deposit to dollars at 1.33 less the platform’s FX fee, deducts any commission, buys fractional shares at $100, sells the whole holding at $100, deducts commission, converts back to pounds less the FX fee, and subtracts any ISA fee. The cost is the money in minus the money out. Each FX fee is charged on the amount actually converted, so the sell-side fee is levied on slightly less than the buy side.

Assumptions

• GBP/USD of 1.33 throughout, and a share price of $100 that does not move, so only fees show.
• Funding and withdrawal by UK bank transfer in pounds. Card deposits, which cost 0.7% at Trading 212 after the first €2,000, are excluded.
• Fractional shares at every platform; no dividends paid.
• Interactive Brokers: a cash account with automatic conversion at 0.03%, or a manual FX order where cheaper; Tiered venue fees approximated at $0.03 per order; US regulatory fees on sales approximated at $0.03. The ISA is held for 12 calendar months with the £3 minimum applied each month, net of commission paid that month.
• XTB: below the €100,000 monthly turnover and €250,000 custody thresholds; no inactivity fee applies while positions are held.
• eToro: Bronze Club tier (no FX discount), GBP account route, UK commission of $0.
• Freetrade: free Basic plan, 0.99% FX each way, £0 commission and no ISA fee. Its pricing page lists no deposit or standard withdrawal fee, so we charged none.

What is excluded

• Market spreads and execution price. The gap between bid and ask on the share, and how well each platform fills your order, are real costs but not published fees. On a large US share they are usually a few cents.
• Stamp duty. Not applicable: HMRC’s 0.5% Stamp Duty Reserve Tax applies to UK-incorporated shares, not US ones.
• US dividend withholding. With a W-8BEN form on file, which platforms normally ask you to complete when you open an account, US dividends normally have 15% withheld under the UK-US tax treaty. Our model share pays no dividend, so this is left out. Inside an ISA the withholding still applies.
• Interest on cash, currency movements, tax on gains, and Club or loyalty discounts.

Fee schedules change. If any figure here no longer matches a platform’s price list, the platform’s price list is right.

To cite this study: WhichBroker, “What it really costs to buy £1,000 of US shares from the UK”, 23 October 2026, licensed CC BY 4.0, with a link to this page.

Verdict

For a general investment account, Interactive Brokers is the cheapest way to buy US shares from the UK at every size we tested, provided you pick Tiered pricing for small monthly purchases. For an ISA, or for anyone who wants a simple app, Trading 212’s 0.15% FX fee makes it the cheapest of the zero-commission platforms by a wide margin: about a third of XTB’s cost, a fifth of eToro’s and under a sixth of Freetrade’s free plan. Freetrade’s strength is UK shares, funds and a free SIPP, not dollars. Line-by-line comparisons are in Trading 212 vs Interactive Brokers, XTB vs Trading 212 and Trading 212 vs Freetrade.

For how UK tax applies to dividends from US shares held outside an ISA, see dividend tax in the UK.