Regulatory Fees

FEE types and effective rates

The following FEEs are applied to options trades.

TypeWhenCharged By
SEC Transaction Fee(REG)Sells onlySEC
Trading Activity Fee(TAF)Sells onlyFINRA
Options Regulatory Fee(ORF)Buys and sellsOptions Exchanges
Options Clearing CorporationBuys and sells up to 2750 contractsOCC
Consolidated Audit Trail(CAT)Buys and sellsFINRA-CAT

The following FEEs are applied to equities.

TypeWhenCharged By
SEC Transaction Fee(REG)Sells onlySEC
Trading Activity Fee(TAF)Sells onlyFINRA
Consolidated Audit Trail(CAT)Buys and sellsFINRA-CAT

See below the details of the effective rates:

TypeSubTypeRate
CAT FEEEES Rate0.000046000
OCC Clearing FeeContract Rate0.020000000
OCC Clearing FeeTrade Cap55.000000000
Options Regulatory FeeContract Rate0.026850000
Options Trading Activity FeeContract Rate0.002790000
SEC Transaction FEERegulatory Fee0.000027800
TAF FeeMin Rate0.000166000
TAF FeeMax Rate8.300000000
TAF FeeQty Limit50,000.000000000

How Fees are charged and reflected in account balances

  1. Alpaca's trading system keeps track of the accrued FEE amounts intraday and deducts the pending amounts from account balances.
  2. At EOD, for each account, we charge the cumulative total for the given trading day.
  3. We round up the cumulative total based on currency precision to the nearest decimal place.
    For example:
    USD precision is 0.01, which means if the total cumulative for TAF came out as 0.00083, that would be
    rounded up to 0.01, i.e., 1 penny.

Additional resources