Day Trading Apps Compared: Fees, Margin Rates and Order-Flow Payments (November 2026)

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-11-08

A day trading app is a broker account opened and run from a phone, and at the large US brokers the stock trade itself now costs nothing. What still differs is the fee on each option contract, the interest on any margin you carry past the close, and how much the broker is paid by the firms that fill your orders. Those three, plus whether the broker has switched off the old day-trade count, are what this page compares, all read from each broker’s own pages and filings on 8 November 2026.

The table: nine accounts on 8 November 2026

Every figure is the broker’s own wording, dated. Webull’s 8.74% is its Standard rate for $0 to $24,999.99. Robinhood includes the first $1,000 of margin for Gold members. tastytrade’s 6.75% applies to new customers whose first account, opened on or after 23 October 2026, has margin, and to existing customers who open a first margin account or bring $25,000 of new assets. Pass-through regulatory and clearing charges of a few cents are left out of every row; they are explained on the trading fees page.

What they are: nine accounts after the count ended

All eight brokers behind the nine accounts are FINRA members, so FINRA’s $2,000 minimum equity for a margin account still applies at every one of them. What changed in 2026 is the rule that sat above that floor. The pattern day trader page explains FINRA’s replacement, an intraday check on exposure rather than a count of round trips.

Seven brokers say plainly that they switched. Robinhood’s help page lists “no more day trade restrictions or day trade calls” from 4 June. Schwab wrote on 6 July that it stopped counting on 8 June, and E*TRADE dates its switch to 9 June. Fidelity, Public and tastytrade each give 4 June; tastytrade calls itself ready for “day-1 implementation”. Webull’s own explainer shows the new column as effective 4 June with “no flag” triggered.

Interactive Brokers is the exception on paper. Its client guide, last updated 3 June 2026, says an account “may still be subject to existing PDT rules” during FINRA’s transition, which ends in October 2027. The same guide sets its own pace for the new deficits: settle them “ideally within 3 business days”, and four misses in 12 months can bring a 90-day restriction. Anyone choosing IBKR for day trading should check the account’s own status screen first.

Where they differ: three charges and one hidden payment

The commission line is nearly flat. Only IBKR Pro charges per share, and its $1.00 minimum means a 100-share order costs $1.00, not 50 cents. IBKR Lite, the commission-free tier of the same broker, charges $0 on US stocks.

Option fees split the field into four groups. Robinhood, Webull and Public charge nothing a contract on stock and ETF options. Schwab, Fidelity and both IBKR tiers charge $0.65. E*TRADE charges $0.65, or $0.50 at 30 or more trades a quarter. tastytrade charges $1 only when you open, nothing when you close, capped at $10 a leg, so a 20-contract order costs the same as a 10-contract one.

Margin rates spread widest. At $10,000 the gap runs from 5.15% at Public to 12.45% at ETRADE, more than double. Robinhood and Public tie their rates to the Fed’s target ceiling (4.00% on 17 September 2026), whereas Schwab, Fidelity and ETRADE set a house base rate above 10% and add a spread. Interest accrues on the balance left at the end of a day, so a position opened and closed inside one session borrows nothing overnight.

The hidden payment is order flow. Brokers that send orders to wholesalers are paid for them, and every quarter they must say how much under SEC Rule 606. That payment does not appear on a trade confirmation, which is why the original-data section below reads the filings instead.

A worked example: one month of a stated routine

Take one labeled routine and price it at every account. Over 20 sessions the trader makes two stock round trips a day of 100 shares each (80 orders), and ten single-leg option round trips of 2 contracts (20 orders, 40 contracts). Everything closes the same day. A second case adds a $10,000 margin debit held for 8 nights in the month, at interest of debit times rate divided by 360, the method Robinhood and Webull both publish.

Three lines carry most of the differences. IBKR Pro’s $80.00 is 80 orders at the $1.00 minimum. tastytrade’s $20.00 is 20 contracts opened at $1, with the 20 closing contracts free. E*TRADE drops to $0.50 here because its tier counts stock, ETF and option trades together, and this routine makes 100 trades a month, far past 30 a quarter. The interest column is arithmetic anyone can redo: $10,000 times 12.45%, divided by 360, times 8 nights, is $27.67.

One listed charge sits outside the table. tastytrade’s fee page adds its own clearing fee of $0.10 on every stock option contract and $0.0008 a share on stock trades. In this routine that is $4.00 on 40 contracts plus $6.40 on 8,000 shares, $10.40 in all, which would put its same-day month at $30.40 and its month with overnight at $45.40, still below E*TRADE’s $47.67.

Notice how the order changes with one habit. Same-day only, Public, Robinhood and Webull tie at $0.00. Hold overnight on margin and Webull’s interest of $19.42 is higher than tastytrade’s $15.00, although tastytrade’s option fees still make its month dearer, while IBKR Pro’s commission keeps it last unless the trader moves far more shares.

The original data: what brokers were paid for orders, July to September 2026

Rule 606(a) reports are filed every quarter in a fixed XML format, listing each venue a broker routed to and the net payment it received for market, marketable limit, non-marketable limit and other orders. We downloaded the third-quarter 2026 files for six of the eight brokers from FINRA’s 606 database and the brokers’ own report hosts, then added every venue and month. E*TRADE (reported by Morgan Stanley) and tastytrade are not included; their files could not be retrieved on 8 November 2026.

On a 100-share market order in an S&P 500 stock, Robinhood was paid about $1.54 and Webull about $1.51. If the worked month’s 80 stock orders were market orders in S&P 500 stocks, those averages mean the broker would collect about $123.01 at Robinhood and $120.90 at Webull from the venues, against $10.36 at Schwab. The figures rose from the second quarter: our Robinhood vs Webull page measured 136.74 and 125.47 cents for April to June, a rise of 12.4% and 20.4%.

Read the column with two limits in mind. Rule 606 counts net payments from venues, which include exchange rebates and fees as well as payment for order flow, so a broker that refuses wholesaler payments can still show a positive number. And the payment is not the customer’s cost: the price you actually get depends on the spread and any price improvement, which Rule 605 execution reports measure and Rule 606 does not. A negative figure, as at Interactive Brokers, means the broker paid venues more than it received on those orders.

Options are where the money is. Across all six filers, options supplied between 64.8% and 76.3% of reported payments. For a trader whose routine is mostly options, the zero contract fee and the order-flow payment come from the same place.

Choosing by habit: three routines, three price lines

When every position closes the same day, the accounts with no stock or option fee cost least, because in our worked month the fees are the whole bill and three accounts charge $0. Their Rule 606 reports are worth reading if fills matter more than fees, since the two with the highest payments per 100 shares are in that group.

When positions are held overnight on margin, the published rate decides the bill. At $10,000 for a full year, the gap between 5.15% and 12.45% is about $740 of interest, more than twice the worked month’s widest option-fee gap over a year ($26 a month, $312). Public, Robinhood, both IBKR tiers and tastytrade’s new-account rate sit at the low end.

Per-share pricing pays off only when orders are large. IBKR Pro is the costliest account in this routine because of its $1.00 minimum, and the gap narrows only when an order is big enough that $0.005 a share passes that floor, which happens above 200 shares. Its S&P 500 market-order figure in the Rule 606 table was the only negative one among the six filers.

When it fails: the costs the table cannot show

A $0 commission does not make a fast round trip cheap. The spread is paid twice on every in-and-out trade, and on a thin stock it can dwarf every fee in the table. The bid-ask spread page shows how quickly that adds up.

Margin rates move with the Fed, and house base rates move when brokers choose. Every rate here carries its date. Schwab and Fidelity both changed theirs on 18 September 2026 and E*TRADE on 21 September; a rate read today can be wrong next month.

The PDT count ending did not end margin limits. Exposure is now checked during the day, and a deficit left too long still triggers a 90-day restriction. An account that switched in June can still stop you, for a different reason, and an IBKR account may still be on the old count.

Promotional rates have conditions. tastytrade’s 6.75% needs a new margin account or $25,000 of new assets; Webull’s 5.45% needs its Premium plan; Robinhood’s first $1,000 free needs Gold. Price the account you would actually hold, not the headline.

Order-flow figures are averages across millions of orders. One stock, one size and one minute can differ widely from the quarter’s number, which is why the payments column is evidence about the business model, not a quote for your next fill.

Questions people ask

Which day trading apps still use the PDT rule?

Of the eight brokers checked on 8 November 2026, only Interactive Brokers’ guide says an account may stay under the old rule, until FINRA’s transition ends in October 2027. The other seven brokers state they stopped counting in June 2026.

Do day traders pay margin interest?

Only on a debit held past the end of a day. A position bought and sold in the same session leaves no overnight balance, so the margin rate matters to day traders only when they carry positions.

Is a commission-free day trading app really free?

The broker charges $0 to place the order, but it may be paid by the firm that fills it. Robinhood’s Q3 2026 filing shows 153.76 cents per 100 shares on S&P 500 market orders.

Can I day trade in a cash account?

Yes. The PDT rule never covered cash accounts; the limit there is settlement, and buying with money from a sale that has not settled can lead to restrictions.

Related

The rule change behind the first column, and the intraday margin check that replaced it, is worked through on the pattern day trader page. What borrowing does to an account, including how a broker can sell your holdings, is on the margin account page. Before moving money to any of these brokers, the four checks on how to verify a broker take ten minutes. And how to day trade a stock covers what to do once the account is open.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.