Broker currency conversion costs 0% if you buy the euro-listed line, 0.15% at Trading 212, 0.5% at XTB, and — the surprise — roughly 0.2% at Interactive Brokers on a €1,000 conversion, because IBKR’s 0.20-basis-point commission carries a USD 2.00 minimum per order that binds at every retail ticket size. An earlier version of this page said IBKR charged 0.03%; that rate belongs to a different IBKR service, and the correction is set out in full below.
Most European investors obsess over the TER of their ETF and never once check what their broker charges to convert euros into dollars. I did the same for years. Then I added up the currency-conversion fees on a decade of monthly buys into a US-listed S&P 500 fund and realised I had quietly handed my broker several hundred euros for the privilege of turning my money into the “wrong” currency and back again. That is the hidden FX fee, and for a lot of people it costs more than the fund itself.
The good news is that this is one of the few investing costs you can drop to almost zero without giving anything up. You do not need a cheaper fund, a riskier strategy or a different tax residency. You mostly just need to understand when the fee is triggered, and then choose the listing that avoids it. Let me walk through exactly how broker currency conversion fees work, when you actually pay them, and how the main European brokers compare.
When is an FX fee actually triggered?
This is the part almost everyone gets wrong, so it is worth being precise. A currency-conversion fee is charged when the currency your account settles in differs from the currency the ETF line you buy is traded in. It has nothing to do with what the fund holds underneath.
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Read that again, because it is the single most valuable idea on this page. A US-focused UCITS ETF holds American companies priced in dollars. But the same fund is often listed on several European exchanges in different trading currencies. On Xetra in Frankfurt you can frequently buy a EUR-denominated line of that fund; on the London Stock Exchange you might buy a USD line of the very same ISIN. The fund’s dollar holdings are identical. The only thing that changes is the currency you transact in.
So if you are a euro investor and you buy the EUR-listed line of a USD-denominated S&P 500 UCITS ETF on Xetra, your broker takes euros from your account and pays euros to the market. No conversion happens, so there is no FX fee. Buy the USD-listed line of the identical fund and your broker must convert your euros into dollars to settle the trade, and that is where the charge appears. Same fund, same performance, same tax treatment, wildly different transaction cost, purely because of the listing you clicked.
What about the fund’s underlying currency risk?
People confuse two separate things. Buying the EUR line does not remove your exposure to the US dollar. If you own S&P 500 companies, your returns still rise and fall with the EUR/USD rate whether you bought the euro line or the dollar line, because the assets themselves are dollar assets. That underlying currency risk is a portfolio question, and if you want to reduce it you look at hedged share classes, which I cover in my guide on how to hedge USD risk in a euro ETF portfolio. The FX conversion fee we are talking about here is a completely different animal: it is a transaction cost on the cash leg of the trade, and it is optional.
How much do brokers charge to convert currency?
Currency-conversion pricing varies enormously between brokers, far more than dealing commissions do these days. The figures below are approximate and 2026-vintage; conversion rates change and some brokers bury them, so always confirm the current number on your broker’s official pricing page before you rely on it. As a European regulator, ESMA has pushed hard on transparent cost disclosure for retail investors, but FX spreads are still one of the least visible line items, so the burden is on you to look.
| Broker | Approx. conversion cost | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Interactive Brokers (manual spot FX) | 0.20 bp (0.002%), minimum USD 2.00 per order — so ~0.2% on €1,000 and ~0.4% on €500 | Near-interbank rate, but the per-order minimum dominates until about €10,000 a conversion. Convert in bulk and hold a multi-currency balance |
| Interactive Brokers (auto conversion) | ~0.03% built into the rate, no commission, no minimum | A separate service that converts automatically at trade time. This is where the “0.03%” figure comes from — it does not apply to a manual conversion |
| Trade Republic / Scalable Capital | Usually none for EUR investors | You trade EUR lines on gettex/Xetra, so no conversion occurs |
| Trading 212 | 0.15% (verified) | Spot rate plus a 0.15% FX fee on any order in another currency, pies included; not charged on dividends or corporate-event payments |
| DEGIRO | ~0.25% (AutoFX), or a flat manual conversion | AutoFX converts automatically; manual conversion can be cheaper for large sums |
| XTB | 0.5% (verified) | A 0.5% margin on the XTB Exchange Rate, applied at the moment of execution on stocks and ETFs; the highest on this table |
Two things jump out, and the first one is a correction to what this page used to say. Interactive Brokers is not in a class of its own at retail ticket sizes. Its published manual spot-FX commission is 0.20 basis point of trade value with a minimum of USD 2.00 per order at Tier I, the tier every retail investor is on (IBKR Ireland spot-currency commissions). Twenty basis points of a hundredth of a percent on €500 is one cent, so what you actually pay is the two-dollar minimum. That is roughly 0.4% on €500 and 0.2% on €1,000 — worse than Trading 212’s 0.15%, and only a little better than a 0.25% auto-conversion rate. The ten-to-fifteen-times advantage is real, but it only appears above roughly €10,000 a conversion, where the minimum stops binding. That is the whole argument for converting in bulk, and it is stronger stated honestly. And the German neobrokers, Trade Republic and Scalable Capital, sidestep the whole problem for euro investors: you buy euro lines, so no conversion happens and no fee arises. The mechanism is worth stating accurately, because both have changed venue arrangements. Trade Republic executes either at “Best Price” across relevant reference exchanges or at “Direct Price” on a venue you pick from its list (Trade Republic on execution venues). Scalable trades on the European Investor Exchange and gettex until 31 August 2026 and moves to Xetra and gettex from 1 September 2026 (Scalable trading costs). Either way the line is priced in euros, which is the point. You can see the full picture across dealing fees, custody and FX in our EU broker fee comparator.
Fee figures in this guide are cross-checked against our EU broker fee benchmarks, reviewed quarterly.
How much does the FX fee really cost you?
Let me put numbers on it, because “0.5%” sounds trivial until you compound it. Say you invest €500 a month and you are unknowingly buying a USD line through a broker charging a 0.5% conversion spread. That is €2.50 a month, €30 a year, on the buy side alone. Over 20 years of contributions that is €600 in raw fees, before you count the returns that money would have earned had it stayed invested. If you also sell and convert back at retirement, the round-trip doubles.
Now compare the extremes, correctly. A previous version of this paragraph said the same investor on Interactive Brokers “pays around 15 cents a month”. On the manual route they do not: a €500 conversion trips the USD 2.00 per-order minimum, so the cost is about €1.70 to €2.00 a month — roughly 0.35% to 0.40%, more than ten times the figure claimed and worse than Trading 212. The 15-cent number was pricing IBKR’s auto-conversion service while the page was advising the manual one.
The investor who really pays nothing is the one buying a EUR line at a German neobroker — and on a €500 monthly buy that is the largest single saving available on this page. Against 0.5% it is €30 a year; against IBKR’s manual route on small tickets it is about €22 a year. On a large portfolio held for decades those gaps run into the low thousands of euros, and unlike market risk, this is a cost you control completely.
Three ways to avoid the fee entirely
1. Buy the local-currency listing
This is the simplest fix and it costs nothing. Before you place an order, check the trading currency of the specific line. On most broker interfaces the EUR line and the USD line of the same fund sit under different tickers with a currency label beside them. Pick the one that matches your account currency. A euro investor buying a EUR line on Xetra pays no conversion fee regardless of what the fund holds. Our UCITS ETF comparison tool is useful for confirming which exchanges and currencies a given fund is listed in.
Worth reading next: xtb fees.
2. Hold a multi-currency account and convert in bulk
If you genuinely need to hold dollars, for example because you buy US-listed instruments that only trade in USD, do the conversion yourself in one large block at a cheap rate rather than letting the broker auto-convert every trade at a fat spread. Interactive Brokers is the standard tool for this; you convert, say, €10,000 to dollars once at near-interbank cost and then trade freely from that dollar balance. Some investors use a separate money-transfer service to build the currency cushion first. The mechanics are the same idea as our look at using Wise for European investors: convert intentionally and in size, never by accident and in dribs.
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3. Use accumulating EUR-listed funds
For a long-term buy-and-hold portfolio, an accumulating EUR-denominated UCITS ETF is the low-maintenance answer. You buy in euros, dividends reinvest inside the fund without ever touching your cash balance, and there is no currency conversion at any point in the normal lifecycle. This is why so many European core portfolios are built on the euro lines of broad funds. If you want the fundamentals first, start with the beginner’s guide to ETFs.
What I’d do
My honest recommendation depends on how you invest. If you are a straightforward monthly-contribution investor who wants to buy broad UCITS funds and forget about them, use a broker that lets you buy EUR lines with no conversion fee and just always pick the euro listing. Trade Republic and Scalable Capital make this effortless, and I explain why in Trade Republic’s case for ETF investors. The FX problem simply never appears.
If you run a larger or more complex portfolio, hold multiple currencies, or want to buy instruments that only trade in dollars, Interactive Brokers is the clear pick on conversion cost, and I go deeper on that in why Interactive Brokers stands out in Europe. The one broker I would watch carefully on FX is XTB; it is excellent on many fronts, as I note in my XTB explainer, but its conversion spread is among the highest, so stick rigidly to EUR lines there. Whichever route you choose, decide deliberately rather than by default; our European ETF broker hub lays out the trade-offs broker by broker.
Ready to open an account? You can open a Interactive Brokers account directly.
Frequently asked questions
Q: How much do FX conversion fees actually add when buying US stocks?
A: On a €1,000 purchase: nothing if you buy a euro-listed line, €1.50 at Trading 212 (0.15%), about €1.75 at Interactive Brokers on the manual route (the USD 2.00 minimum), €2.50 at a broker charging 0.25%, and €5.00 at XTB (0.5%). Buying and selling doubles it. The number that surprises people is IBKR’s, because its headline rate is 0.002% and its minimum is what you actually pay until the ticket passes about €10,000.
Q: Is there a brokerage with no currency conversion fee at all?
A: Not as a blanket promise, but you can get to zero at almost any European broker by never triggering a conversion: fund in euros and buy the euro-listed line of the fund you want. Trade Republic and Scalable Capital make that the default because they trade euro lines on German venues. If you must hold dollars — for US-listed instruments that trade only in USD — then the cheapest route is one large manual conversion at Interactive Brokers rather than a small automatic one at every trade.
Q: Is IBKR’s FX cheaper than converting with Wise first?
A: Above about €10,000 in one go, IBKR is very hard to beat at 0.20 basis point. Below that its USD 2.00 per-order minimum sets the price, so a €500 or €1,000 conversion costs roughly 0.4% or 0.2% — the range where a separate transfer service becomes competitive on the conversion itself. Weigh in the cost and delay of moving the money in and out, and remember that the option that beats both is buying a euro line and converting nothing.
Q: Do I pay a currency-conversion fee if the ETF holds US stocks?
A: Not necessarily. The fee depends on the trading currency of the line you buy, not on what the fund holds underneath. If you buy a EUR-listed line of a US-focused UCITS ETF with a euro account, no conversion happens and there is no FX fee, even though the fund owns dollar assets.
Q: Which European broker has the cheapest currency conversion?
A: It depends on the size of the conversion, which this answer used to ignore. For amounts above roughly €10,000, Interactive Brokers wins decisively: 0.20 basis point of trade value. Below that, IBKR’s USD 2.00 per-order minimum dominates — about 0.2% on €1,000 and 0.4% on €500 — which puts it behind Trading 212’s flat 0.15%. And for a euro investor the cheapest conversion is the one that never happens: buy the EUR-listed line at any broker and pay nothing at all.
Q: Does buying the EUR line remove my dollar currency risk?
A: No. Buying the euro line only avoids the transaction-level conversion fee. Your returns still depend on the EUR/USD exchange rate because the fund’s underlying assets are priced in dollars. To reduce that underlying risk you would need a currency-hedged share class, which is a separate decision with its own cost.
Q: Is DEGIRO’s AutoFX expensive?
A: AutoFX has been around 0.25% per automatic conversion, which is moderate rather than cheap — but this is the one figure on this page that could not be verified against a primary source. Every DEGIRO consumer domain tested answers HTTP 503 to automated requests (bot protection, not a dead site), and DEGIRO publishes the AutoFX rate only in its own fee schedule. Check it in your account before relying on it. For larger sums a manual conversion can work out better, and buying EUR lines avoids the charge entirely.
Q: How can I tell which currency an ETF line trades in?
A: The trading currency is shown next to the ticker on your broker’s order screen and on the exchange listing. The same ISIN can appear as a EUR line on Xetra and a USD line in London. A fund comparison tool can help you confirm which exchanges and currencies a fund is listed in before you buy.
Q: How much can currency-conversion fees cost over time?
A: On a €500 monthly investment at a 0.5% spread you pay about €30 a year on the buy side, roughly €600 over 20 years before lost compounding, and more if you convert back when selling. At 0.03% the same investor pays a few euros in total, and a euro-line buyer pays nothing, so the choice is worth real money.
European UCITS/ETF investor with 11+ years building a global dividend and index portfolio, and founder of Financial Expert Class. I write every guide here from first-hand experience investing across EU brokers and tax regimes — not theory. More about me →