Regulatory Fees

FEE types and effective rates

The following FEEs are applied to options trades.

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

For our current effective rates, please refer to our brokerage fee schedule available here: https://alpaca.markets/disclosures


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, we charge each account the fees for that trading day
  3. We round up total fees based on the currency’s precision to the nearest decimal place. For example, USD has a precision of 0.01. If the total fee is calculated as 0.00083, it will be rounded up to 0.01 (i.e., 1 penny).

Additional resources