ETF calculator
Project an ETF forward with a dealing charge on every order — the charge that comes out of the money going in, and therefore never compounds.
Calculator
What your ETF costs, and the working behind it
What the dealing charge really costs
£9.95 on every order is a charge of
3.98%
on every pound you invest, taken before any of it is invested at all.
The ETF’s own ongoing charge is 0.07% a year, on the value. These are not the same kind of number, and the smaller one is the one everybody shops on.
| Orders over 20 years | 240 |
|---|---|
| Commission paid | £2,388.00 |
| What the commission cost the pot | £3,891.97 |
| What the 0.07% ongoing charge cost, for comparison | £1,108.13 |
| What the 0.25% custody fee cost | £4,014.30 |
| Final value | £118,778.38 |
The commission is a charge on the money going in; the other two are charges on the money already there. That is why a reader with a long term and a small regular purchase can find the cheapest-looking charge on the page is the largest of the three, and why comparing an ETF with a fund on ongoing charges alone answers the wrong question.
This is not a forecast. It is what would happen if a single rate held exactly, every period, for 20 years. Real returns arrive as a sequence and the order changes the answer. The commissions are the part of this page that is not an assumption: they are a price list, and they are charged whatever the market does.
The same money a year, bought at three different intervals
| Order placed | Each order | Orders | Commission paid | Commission per pound | Final value | Against yours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly — yours | £250.00 | 240 | £2,388.00 | 3.98% | £118,778.38 | — |
| Quarterly | £750.00 | 80 | £796.00 | 1.33% | £121,005.82 | £2,227.44 |
| Annually | £3,000.00 | 20 | £199.00 | 0.33% | £120,317.95 | £1,539.57 |
Both sides of this are real. Fewer orders pay fewer commissions, and fewer orders leave the money sitting in cash for longer — up to eleven months of it, on an annual purchase. Which wins depends on your commission against your growth assumption, and this table is the two effects measured together rather than either asserted.
The cash is modelled as earning nothing while it waits. If it is in an account paying interest, buying less often is better than this table shows — so treat the annual row as a floor rather than as the answer. The dollar cost averaging calculator puts a measured ceiling on what waiting cash can be worth.
Many platforms charge nothing for a scheduled regular investment and full commission for an order placed by hand, and some charge nothing for funds while charging commission on ETFs. Both are settings on this page rather than facts about the market: put your own dealing charge in the box, including £0 if that is what you pay. This site names no platform and ranks none.
Accumulating, distributing, and the tax this page does not apply
Accumulating or distributing? Before costs and tax, neither is better. An accumulating class reinvests the income inside the fund; a distributing class pays it out and you buy more with it. Reinvested at the same price those are the same investment, and this calculator models the accumulating case — the growth rate you typed is a total return, income included.
Where they differ on this page is friction. Reinvesting a distribution by hand is another order, and on the figures above another order costs a dealing charge and leaves the cash uninvested until you place it. A reader taking income in cash and spending it is doing something else entirely, and this page does not model that at all — the whole projection assumes everything stays in.
Held outside an ISA or a pension, the income is taxable — including on an accumulating class. That is the part that surprises people: nothing is paid out, and the income arising inside the fund is still taxable in the year it arises. A gain when you sell is separately chargeable to capital gains tax.
This calculator applies no tax at all, so the £118,778.38 above is a gross figure. The stocks and shares ISA calculator prices what the wrapper is worth: the dividend tax year by year and the capital gains tax on disposal, both against rates that have been checked against gov.uk and dated. That is where the numbers for this belong, and it is not duplicated here.
Two further things this page does not know about. A fund that is not a reporting fund for UK purposes is taxed on disposal as income rather than as a gain, which is a materially different outcome and depends on the specific product; and an ETF tracking an index priced in another currency exposes a sterling investor to the exchange rate as well as to the index. The S&P 500 calculator models the currency question. Neither is a rate this site can look up for you.
Year by year
| Year | Opening | Commission | Invested | Growth | Custody fee | Closing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £10,000.00 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £556.52 | £28.97 | £13,408.15 |
| 2 | £13,408.15 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £724.22 | £37.73 | £16,975.24 |
| 3 | £16,975.24 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £899.76 | £46.87 | £20,708.73 |
| 4 | £20,708.73 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £1,083.47 | £56.44 | £24,616.36 |
| 5 | £24,616.36 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £1,275.75 | £66.45 | £28,706.26 |
| 6 | £28,706.26 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £1,477.01 | £76.93 | £32,986.94 |
| 7 | £32,986.94 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £1,687.67 | £87.92 | £37,467.29 |
| 8 | £37,467.29 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £1,908.12 | £99.40 | £42,156.61 |
| 9 | £42,156.61 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £2,138.86 | £111.42 | £47,064.65 |
| 10 | £47,064.65 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £2,380.39 | £124.02 | £52,201.62 |
| 11 | £52,201.62 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £2,633.17 | £137.16 | £57,578.23 |
| 12 | £57,578.23 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £2,897.76 | £150.94 | £63,205.65 |
| 13 | £63,205.65 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £3,174.66 | £165.37 | £69,095.54 |
| 14 | £69,095.54 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £3,464.49 | £180.46 | £75,260.17 |
| 15 | £75,260.17 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £3,767.85 | £196.27 | £81,712.35 |
| 16 | £81,712.35 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £4,085.34 | £212.81 | £88,465.48 |
| 17 | £88,465.48 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £4,417.66 | £230.12 | £95,533.62 |
| 18 | £95,533.62 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £4,765.46 | £248.25 | £102,931.43 |
| 19 | £102,931.43 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £5,129.49 | £267.19 | £110,674.33 |
| 20 | £110,674.33 | £119.40 | £2,880.60 | £5,510.51 | £287.06 | £118,778.38 |
20 years, rolled up from monthly orders. The ETF’s own ongoing charge is not in the custody fee column either — it is taken inside the fund, so it is already inside the growth column as a smaller number. The CSV export contains every period.
A worked example you can check
These are the figures the calculator above loads with, so every number in this section can be checked against it without typing anything. £10,000.00 already invested, £250.00 a month bought as a single monthly order, over 20 years, growing at 5.00% a year before charges. The ETF charges 0.07%, the platform charges 0.25%, and each order costs £9.95 in commission.
| Commission as a share of each £250.00 order | 3.98% |
|---|---|
| Commission paid over 240 orders | £2,388.00 |
| What the commission cost the pot | £3,891.97 |
| What the 0.07% ongoing charge cost | £1,108.13 |
| What the 0.25% custody fee cost | £4,014.30 |
| Final value after 20 years | £118,778.38 |
Three things in that table are worth pausing on.
- The commission is 3.98% of every pound invested. The ETF’s ongoing charge is 0.07% a year on the value. These are not the same kind of number and the reader who compared ETFs on the second one was comparing the smaller of the two by a long way.
- £2,388.00 of commission cost £3,891.97. Every pound of it was a pound that never reached the market, so it did not merely leave — it took with it everything it would have compounded into over the rest of the term. That multiple is a function of the term, not of the commission.
- Buying less often is the lever. The same £250.00 a month bought quarterly is £750.00 four times a year rather than £250.00 twelve times, so the commission drops from £2,388.00 to £796.00 — and the pot ends £2,227.44 different, because the money also waits longer to be invested. Annually it is £199.00 of commission and £1,539.57 against the monthly plan. Both effects are in those figures; neither is asserted.
Methodology: exactly what this calculator does
How a per-order commission is modelled
As a smaller contribution. A commission taken out of the money going in is less money going in, so the projection receives order − commission and nothing about the engine changes. The commission is therefore the only charge on this site that never appears in a fee column and never can: it does not come out of the pot, so it cannot appear in a reconciliation of the pot’s own arithmetic. The table shows it in its own column, beside the identity rather than inside it.
Two edge cases are handled explicitly. A period that buys nothing pays no commission — a reader simply holding an existing balance is not charged for the privilege. And a commission larger than the order takes the whole order and no more, so nothing is invested rather than something negative being invested; the page says that in those words rather than showing a flat line and leaving the reader to work out why.
No commission is charged on the opening balance, which is treated as already held. Charging one would raise a question with no right answer — is an opening balance a purchase or a holding? — to move a figure that is a rounding error against twenty years of regular orders.
Why every order lands at the end of its period
Because the comparison between buying monthly, quarterly and annually is only fair if the money that has not been spent yet is not credited with growth. Money destined for a quarterly purchase sits in cash for up to two months first. Under start-of-period timing the quarterly buyer would have been given three months of growth on money they had not yet spent, and the table would have favoured buying less often for a reason that is not true — in the same direction as this page’s own finding, which is the direction an author has to be most careful in.
End-of-period timing makes it exact. A monthly buyer invests each month’s money at that month’s end; a quarterly buyer invests three months’ money at the quarter’s end, which is one period late for the first month’s money and two for the second. The engine prices that automatically. It is fixed rather than offered as a choice, because a reader flipping it would silently rig the comparison.
Cash waiting to be invested is modelled as earning nothing. If it is earning interest, buying less often is better than the table shows, so the less-frequent rows are a floor rather than the answer.
The other two charges
The ongoing charge is levied inside the fund and reduces the return: net = (1 + r) × (1 − ocf) − 1, not r − ocf. It never appears as a deduction, because the unit price is already struck net of it. The custody fee is charged on the value the platform holds and deducted from the pot; it divides nominally across the year’s periods, because a fee schedule is a tariff rather than a compounding return, and an annual cap resets each year and is worth nothing until the pot is large enough for the uncapped fee to exceed it. The investment fee calculator takes those three apart in detail.
Tax: stated, not applied
Income from an ETF held outside an ISA or a pension is taxable in the year it arises, and that is true of an accumulating share class as well, where nothing is paid out. A gain on disposal is separately chargeable. This page applies none of it, so every figure on it is gross.
That is a decision rather than an omission. The stocks and shares ISA calculator already prices exactly this question — the dividend tax year by year, with the allowance applied as the annual nil-rate band it is, and the capital gains tax on disposal stacked on your income — against rates that have been checked against gov.uk and dated. Building a second copy of that model here would be two implementations of one calculation and two pages answering one question.
Rounding
Every figure is rounded to whole pence at each period boundary, so each row satisfies opening + invested + growth − custody fee = closing exactly rather than approximately. The price is a drift of a pound or two against the textbook formula over a long schedule, which is a much smaller problem than a table a reader can catch out.
Sources, and why there is no rates table
Most calculators on this site cite gov.uk, because they implement statutory rates, bands and thresholds that can be checked against a published source. This one has no statutory figures at all. The charges, the commission, the growth rate and the term are yours. So this page carries no verification stamp and will not borrow one. Its claim is arithmetic only.
What this is not
It is not a forecast. A single path at a constant rate badly understates the spread of real outcomes. It does not model the bid-offer spread, foreign exchange charges on a fund priced in another currency, stamp duty, fund transaction costs, tiered or exit fees, or the tax above. It names no ETF, index provider, fund or broker and recommends none — it is information, not advice, and it knows nothing about your circumstances.
Nothing you type here is transmitted or stored — there is no application server and no database. A share link is the exception: it carries your figures in the URL. What that means.
Frequently asked questions
- How much do ETF dealing charges cost over the long run?
Far more than the commission itself, because money taken before it is invested never compounds. On this calculator's defaults — £250.00 a month bought monthly with a £9.95 commission on each order, over 20 years at 5.00% a year — £2,388.00 of commission costs the pot £3,891.97. As a share of each purchase it is 3.98%, against an ongoing charge of 0.07% a year on the value. The commission is the larger charge by a wide margin and it is the one nobody compares.
- Should I buy an ETF monthly or less often?
It is a genuine trade and the answer depends on your commission. Buying quarterly pays one commission instead of three on three times the purchase, and leaves the money in cash for up to two months longer. On the default figures, buying quarterly instead of monthly cuts the commission from £2,388.00 to £796.00 and changes the final pot by £2,227.44. The table on this page prices all three intervals on your own figures. Note that the waiting cash is modelled as earning nothing, so if yours is earning interest the less frequent options are better than shown.
- Is an accumulating or a distributing ETF better?
Before costs and tax, neither. An accumulating class reinvests income inside the fund and a distributing class pays it out for you to reinvest; reinvested at the same price those are the same investment, and this calculator models the accumulating case with the growth rate treated as a total return. The practical differences are friction and tax. Reinvesting a distribution by hand is another order and, where orders carry commission, another commission. And outside an ISA the income is taxable either way — including on the accumulating class, where nothing is paid out and the income arising inside the fund is still taxable in the year it arises.
- Does this calculator include tax on ETF dividends?
No. Every figure here is gross, and that is a deliberate division of labour rather than an oversight. Income from an ETF held outside an ISA or a pension is taxable in the year it arises, and a gain on disposal is separately chargeable to capital gains tax. The stocks and shares ISA calculator on this site prices both — the dividend tax year by year with the allowance applied as the annual nil-rate band it is, and the capital gains tax stacked on your income — against rates that have been checked against gov.uk and dated. This page has no statutory figures in it at all, which is why it carries no such stamp.
- What is the difference between an ETF and an index fund for costs?
Mostly how you buy it. An ETF trades on an exchange like a share, so a purchase is an order and an order is where a dealing commission, a bid-offer spread and sometimes a foreign exchange charge appear. A fund is bought at a single daily price, and regular investing into one is often free of dealing charges. Ongoing charges can be very similar. That is why comparing the two on ongoing charge alone answers the wrong question for anyone investing a modest amount regularly: put your own dealing charge in the box above, including zero, and the page prices the difference on your figures.
- Why is the commission not in the charges column of the table?
Because it never reaches the pot. Every row of the schedule satisfies opening + invested + growth − custody fee = closing, exactly, in whole pence — that is what makes the table checkable. The commission is taken from the money on its way in, so putting it inside that identity would break every row. It has its own column instead, which is the honest place for it and is also the clearest statement of why it behaves differently from every other charge on this site.
- Is this a forecast of what my ETF will be worth?
No. It computes what would happen if one rate held exactly, every single period, for the whole term. Real returns arrive as a sequence rather than as an average, and the order they arrive in changes the outcome. The charges are the part of this page that is not an assumption — a commission is a price list and it is charged whatever the market does — which is why the cost of the charges is a more robust figure than the pot they are charged on.