Trade Republic review 2026

Hello, fellow investor! Our first-hand review of Trade Republic will help you assess whether it fits your investing needs.

Trade Republic offers an intuitive platform across PC and mobile, and is supervised by top-tier regulators (BaFin and the Bundesbank in Germany, with EEA passporting).

On the downside, it charges a €1 settlement fee per trade and doesn’t offer a demo account. Since the end of June 2026, following the EU-wide ban on payment for order flow (PFOF), Trade Republic executes orders through its own system: by default via Best Price, which aggregates the best available price across several reference exchanges with Trade Republic as counterparty, or via Direct Price, where you pick the venue yourself, including US exchanges such as the NYSE and Nasdaq, for €2 per order. Direct US market access is being rolled out gradually, so some US-only listings may not be available yet.

Trade Republic has expanded significantly into payments and banking through its card product. You can choose between a physical card (a one-time fee of €5 or €50 depending on the variant, “Classic” or “Mirror”) or a virtual card, which is free. Key benefits include:

• 1% Saveback on card payments made from your cash balance, automatically invested into your savings plan (maximum of €15 per month, applicable on up to €1,500 of monthly card spending). To qualify, you need to invest at least €50 per calendar month via Trade Republic’s savings plans;
• 2% Crypto Saveback when you pay directly from your crypto balance, up to a maximum of €30 per month on the same €1,500 of monthly spending;
• Round-up feature: round up your card payments and invest the spare change automatically;
• No monthly subscription fee;
• Unlimited free ATM withdrawals worldwide for withdrawals of €100 or more (smaller withdrawals incur a €1 fee).

Saveback is paid in fractional shares into your savings plan, not as cash, and transfers, ATM withdrawals, top-ups, PayPal transactions, gambling and quasi-cash purchases do not count towards the qualifying spend.

Beyond the card itself, uninvested cash held with Trade Republic earns interest, paid monthly:

• New users: a promotional 3.00% p.a. (3.04% AER with monthly compounding) on balances up to €50,000, for a limited period after account opening;
• Existing users: 2.50% p.a. on EUR cash balances, in line with the ECB deposit facility rate, which rose to 2.50% on 16 September 2026. The same rate applies to any balance above the €50,000 promotional cap, with no upper limit;
• German users: the 3.00% promotional rate is not offered to new clients in Germany, who receive the standard ECB-linked rate from the start.

Cash interest rates are variable and tied to ECB monetary policy, so they can change with central bank rate movements. Trade Republic typically updates its published rates promptly when the ECB adjusts its deposit facility rate.

Overview

Founded in 2015, Trade Republic is a Berlin-based fintech that started as a discount broker and has since evolved into a fully licensed European bank. As of 2026 it serves around 10 million customers across 18 European markets, with more than €150 billion in client assets and cash, and it was valued at €12.5 billion in a €1.2 billion secondary share sale completed in December 2025.

It focuses on five core asset classes: stocks, ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies and derivatives, with private markets added in late 2025. Stocks and ETFs can be traded daily from 7:30 to 23:00 CET, crypto 24/7, and derivatives from 8:00 to 22:00 CET.

Trade Republic uses the motto “Do more with your money” to express its commitment to customers, marketing itself as a “no order fee” platform. In practice, a €1 settlement fee applies to each Best Price trade (except for savings plans, which are entirely free), so a round-trip buy and sell will cost €2 in total. If you use Direct Price to select a specific venue yourself, the fee is €2 per order. This is still competitive compared to traditional brokers but not strictly commission-free.

Trade Republic was one of the first European brokers to materially increase the interest rate paid on uninvested EUR cash after years of zero-to-low rates under European Central Bank (ECB) policy. New users currently earn a promotional 3.00% p.a. (paid monthly) on up to €50,000 for a limited period after account opening, while existing users earn 2.50% p.a. on EUR cash balances, aligned with the current ECB deposit facility rate. New clients in Germany are excluded from the promotional rate. Since most traditional banks still pay materially lower rates on instant-access cash, transferring idle funds to Trade Republic remains an attractive option for earning yield.

Trade Republic was also the first broker in Europe to allow investment in corporate and government bonds for as little as €1 through fractional trading, a meaningful innovation that has since spread across other European platforms.

On the regulatory front, Trade Republic operates through Trade Republic Bank GmbH, regulated by BaFin (Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) and supervised by the Deutsche Bundesbank, and holds a full ECB banking licence obtained in December 2023. In January 2026 a Trade Republic subsidiary also obtained a BaFin licence to operate a multilateral trading facility (MTF), the permission that underpins its current in-house execution model. The firm’s EEA authorisation can be verified through national registers, for example the Banco de Portugal authorised entities register. Investment assets are protected up to €20,000 under the German Investor Compensation Scheme, and cash deposits are protected up to €100,000 under the German Deposit Guarantee Scheme (EdB).

Finally, Trade Republic provides your annual tax statement directly within the app in the first quarter of the following year (for example, the 2025 tax statement was made available by April and May 2026). This should help you fulfil your tax filing requirements with minimal friction.

Highlights

Pros and cons

Products and markets

Trade Republic offers five core asset classes: stocks (9,000+), ETFs (2,000+), bonds (500+), cryptocurrencies (50+) and derivatives (10,000+), plus private markets funds since late 2025. Most of these assets are traded in EUR. You can also check more Trade Republic statistics on our site.

What does the EUR-denomination mean in practice? Let’s use US stocks as an example. Apple, the iPhone manufacturer, is traded on NASDAQ in USD. By default (Best Price), on the Trade Republic platform you buy it in EUR with liquidity aggregated across European reference venues. Since mid 2026 you can also use Direct Price to trade it directly on a US venue in USD for €2 per order. Owning Apple stock priced in EUR or USD should give you the same economic return in EUR terms, but the EUR-denominated version typically has lower liquidity than the US-listed original, so wider bid-ask spreads can apply.

Historically, if a company was only listed on US exchanges and hadn’t been cross-listed in Europe, you couldn’t access it through Trade Republic. Direct Price now lets you route orders directly to US exchanges (NYSE, Nasdaq) in USD for €2 per order, so previously unavailable US-only listings such as Reddit (RDDT) and Robinhood (HOOD) are becoming accessible as the feature rolls out. Coverage is still expanding, so if you want the broadest access to stocks across global exchanges in a single account, we still recommend Interactive Brokers.

You can also buy fractional shares in a selected list of stocks and ETFs (Trade Republic doesn’t publish a comprehensive list of eligible instruments). Fractional trading is only possible with market orders, executed at Best Price with Trade Republic acting as the counterpart.

Bonds

For bonds, you can invest in corporate and government bonds. Starting from €1, you can buy fractions of a bond and receive the proportional interest payments. Whole bonds are traded on the LSX exchange, while fractions are traded with Trade Republic as the counterpart.

Cryptocurrencies

For cryptocurrencies, you trade real digital assets (not derivatives), which means you actually own the underlying cryptocurrencies. Crypto can be traded 24/7, including weekends and holidays. Trade Republic stores crypto holdings in cold wallets, kept offline to protect against cyberattacks, and the assets are segregated from Trade Republic’s own balance sheet in the same way that stocks and ETFs are. Its November 2025 crypto announcement names BitGo Europe GmbH as the custodian holding those cold wallets, replacing the earlier arrangement through Trade Republic Custody GmbH in Vienna.

Trade Republic is MiCA-licensed for crypto-asset services since April 2025, meaning its crypto offering operates under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation framework, the same regulatory standard applied to all major regulated EU crypto providers.

On 14 November 2025 Trade Republic announced a Crypto Wallet that changes what you can do with those holdings. According to the announcement, customers can:

• Send and receive around 50 cryptocurrencies to and from external wallets;
• Stake assets such as Solana and Ethereum, with network rewards paid out automatically and shown in real time;
• Pay directly from the crypto balance with the Trade Republic Card and collect the 2% Crypto Saveback.

One caveat worth flagging: as of September 2026, Trade Republic’s own support pages in several markets, including Portugal and Germany, still answer that sending and receiving crypto is not possible. The rollout appears to be phased, so check inside the app for your own market before assuming transfers are live.

Derivatives

For derivatives, these are financial instruments that derive their price from an underlying asset such as stocks, commodities, bonds or indices. Trade Republic offers three types:

• Warrants: similar in concept to options, warrants give you the right (but not the obligation) to buy or sell a financial asset at a specific price before an expiration date;
• Knock-outs: an option-like instrument with a built-in mechanism that causes it to expire worthless if a specified price level in the underlying asset is reached (the “knock-out” trigger). This limits your upside but typically comes at a lower premium than a standard option;
• Factor certificates: instruments replicating a particular security’s price movement with a leverage factor applied (higher potential gains, but equally higher potential losses). Unlike warrants and knock-outs, factor certificates have unlimited duration, though they’re not designed for holding longer than a single trading day due to the compounding effects of daily leverage rebalancing.

The derivative issuers on the platform are Société Générale, HSBC and Vontobel, with Vontobel currently appearing only on warrants.

Be extra careful when trading these products, as they can be hard to fully understand. We had hoped for deeper in-platform explanations for each derivative type, but Trade Republic provides only general guidance (see their support page for more). Most derivatives involve leverage (borrowed exposure), so significant profits or losses can be realised very quickly. They typically suit more experienced investors who intend to hedge specific positions or speculate on short-term price movements.

Private markets

In September 2025 Trade Republic announced a move from brokerage into wealth management, opening private markets to retail investors in partnership with Apollo and EQT, two of the largest private capital managers in the world. The headline terms:

• You can invest from €1, the same fractional logic Trade Republic applied to bonds;
• Liquidity is monthly, through an internal marketplace, rather than daily as with an ETF;
• Trade Republic offered a 1% bonus on every private markets investment made in the first 30 days, with no cap, as a launch incentive.

Treat this as a genuinely different asset class rather than an ETF with a fancier name. Private markets funds are illiquid by design, their valuations are updated periodically rather than continuously, and the monthly window is a marketplace where a buyer has to exist on the other side. Trade Republic has said two further asset classes will follow, each 30 days apart.

Savings plans

Finally, Trade Republic offers savings plans (4,900+) covering stocks, ETFs, bonds and crypto. These let you invest automatically into selected assets, the only context in which the €1 settlement fee does not apply, which makes savings plans Trade Republic’s most cost-efficient way to invest.

Savings plans are executed on the 2nd, 9th, 16th or 23rd of each month, during XETRA opening hours between 9:00 and 17:30 CET. A new plan can only start on the 2nd or the 16th. You can configure:

• Your payment method (direct debit or cash account);
• The execution interval (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly).

Savings plans are well-suited to long-term dollar-cost averaging strategies and are one of Trade Republic’s strongest features for buy-and-hold investors.

Interest on uninvested cash

With Trade Republic, your uninvested cash (money not currently allocated to investments) earns interest paid monthly. The current structure:

Interest is accrued daily, paid every month, and you can withdraw your cash at any time. Cash interest rates are variable and tied to ECB monetary policy, so they can change with central bank rate movements. The rates quoted are nominal, Trade Republic advertises the annual equivalent (3.04% and 2.53% respectively) because interest compounds monthly.

One thing the headline rate doesn’t tell you is what you keep. Withholding tax is deducted at source in some markets and declared by you in others, so the net figure varies. For a German investor, the 25% flat tax plus the 5.5% solidarity surcharge turns a gross 2.50% into roughly 1.84% net before any allowance is applied. Investors in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy should check their own local rate rather than assume the gross figure.

Your cash is protected up to €100,000 per depositor by the German Deposit Guarantee Scheme (EdB):

For more details, please consult the Depositor Information Sheet.

Fees

Trade Republic is quite transparent with the fees. The main fee you will notice is the €1 settlement fee per trade in stocks, ETFs, derivatives, bonds and crypto. This is the rate for Best Price (the default) orders. If you use Direct Price to choose the execution venue yourself, the fee is €2 per order. In the case of partial executions on the same trading day, the settlement fee is charged only once.

There is no withdrawal fee or custody fee. Also, Trade Republic charges no commission on share dividend payments and ETF distributions, but other external fees may apply.

Since your base currency is EUR, you will be charged a currency conversion fee for any earnings (for example dividends) you get from your holdings, since these will immediately be converted to EUR once received.

Their website states that “the selling and buying rates required for currency conversions are calculated on the basis of these rates, taking into account a premium or discount in accordance with the buying and selling margins”. Trade Republic does not publish a single headline percentage, and independent fee trackers put the typical conversion cost at around 0.35%. Card spending abroad is handled differently: Trade Republic passes through the Visa rate and states that it adds no fee of its own.

What the flat fee actually costs you

A flat €1 is cheap on a large order and expensive on a small one. Because Trade Republic’s fee doesn’t scale with trade size, the only number that matters is the fee as a percentage of what you invest. Here is the same fee expressed that way:

The practical takeaway: below roughly €500 per order, the one-off purchase starts to look expensive next to the savings plan, which costs nothing at any size. If you invest small amounts regularly, route them through a savings plan rather than placing manual orders. If you trade US listings via Direct Price, the €2 fee means small orders are rarely worth it.

We advise you to take a look at all its pricing details directly.

Supported countries

Trade Republic currently accepts clients from 18 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.

Notably, Poland was added in September 2025 as Trade Republic’s first market outside the eurozone, a meaningful step that may signal broader non-eurozone European expansion ahead. The company runs on a German banking licence passported across the EEA, so the regulatory route into the rest of the bloc already exists. Denmark, Sweden and the Czech Republic are frequently asked about and are still not served.

Keep in mind that not all products are offered in all countries, and that the terms themselves differ by market: the promotional cash rate excludes new German clients, while the junior account described below exists only in Germany. You can verify product availability on your region’s Trade Republic website.

Account types

Trade Republic keeps its account structure deliberately simple, which is a limitation as much as a design choice:

Two of these deserve a closer look.

The current account. Since the ECB banking licence, Trade Republic is not only a broker. From mid 2025 customers have had a personal IBAN with standing orders and direct debits, which together with the card and the cash interest makes it usable as a main account rather than a side pot. Whether you want your bank and your broker to be the same institution is a separate question, but the option now exists.

The junior depot. In May 2025 Trade Republic launched a children’s account in Germany, where the child is the legal owner and the parent operates it. It carries no custody fee, savings plans from €1, and Trade Republic reimburses the ongoing fund costs (TER) on three Vanguard ETFs until the child turns 18. It is a well-designed product, and the reason it matters to readers elsewhere is that it is not offered outside Germany. If you are in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy or the Netherlands and want to invest for a child, you still need a different provider. Our guide to the best custodial brokerage accounts for non-US residents covers the alternatives.

Account opening

Opening an account is relatively easy, as you would expect. It usually takes less than 10 minutes. As soon as you click “Open Free Account” on the homepage, the following page will appear:

You will only have to go through each intuitive step and insert all the information related to “Personal Data”, “Identification” and “Experience & Knowledge”. It may take up to 24h to confirm that everything is valid.

As a heads-up, you can only open an account if you meet the following criteria:

• You have a valid identification document (identity card, passport or residence card);
• You are at least 18 years old;
• You are a permanent resident in a supported country (please check the “Supported countries” section);
• You are liable for tax in the same country;
• You have a European mobile phone number;
• You have a SEPA bank account;
• You have a document to confirm your address.

Alternatives

Are you looking for more features? More products? A better trading platform? We have organized some alternatives that might better answer your goals:

Want to know more about these and other Trade Republic alternatives? Feel free to check our Broker Comparison Table, In-depth Broker Reviews and the Broker Matching Tool.

Bottom line

From our analysis, Trade Republic is a strong all-around platform with several distinctive features: a sleek mobile-first experience, competitive interest on uninvested cash, a full ECB banking licence, and unique innovations such as fractional bond trading from €1 and private markets from €1. That said, it still has gaps compared to competitors such as eToro, Interactive Brokers or DEGIRO, particularly in product breadth, account types and platform sophistication.

How it fits different investor profiles:

• Beginners: Trade Republic is one of the most accessible platforms in Europe, with a clean, intuitive interface that makes opening an account and starting to invest simple. The main limitation is the relatively thin educational content, so beginners will likely need to supplement Trade Republic with external learning resources;
• Intermediate and advanced investors: the free Web Terminal launched in 2026 closes part of the gap, with advanced charting, screeners and real-time data, but the platform still lacks the fundamental and technical analysis depth of Interactive Brokers or Saxo. Trade Republic’s value proposition for this group remains cost efficiency and the cash-interest feature rather than analytical depth;
• Active stock traders: Trade Republic now offers direct US market access via Direct Price (€2 per order), but investors who want the broadest access to US-listed stocks, including IPOs, mid-caps and small-caps, alongside global multi-market trading in a single account will likely still prefer Interactive Brokers;
• Long-term buy-and-hold investors: Trade Republic’s savings plans are particularly well-suited. They carry no settlement fee at all, support stocks, ETFs, bonds and crypto, and enable straightforward dollar-cost averaging. Combined with the cash interest feature, the platform is genuinely competitive for this segment;
• Cash savers: the combination of an ECB-linked interest rate, €100,000 deposit protection, instant access and the card with 1% Saveback makes it one of the strongest cash-management options available to European retail customers. Just note the €50,000 cap on the promotional rate for new clients;
• Parents, and anyone needing a joint or business account: this is where Trade Republic still falls short outside Germany. No joint accounts, no business accounts, and a junior depot that exists in Germany only.

We hope you found our review useful. If you’d like to open a Trade Republic account, you can also take advantage of our bonus.