How much it costs to trade options: $0.65 a contract is 0.7% of a $2 option and 26% of a five-cent one

Per-contract commissions at Interactive Brokers and Schwab, read from each firm's own pricing page, and the arithmetic that decides whether they matter. On one contract IBKR's order minimum makes it dearer; from two contracts the schedules match to the cent.

Last verified 16 September 2026 · how we check

An options commission is quoted per contract, and a contract controls 100 units of the underlying. That makes the same fee trivial on one option and punishing on another, and the difference is not the broker. It is the premium.

What the two schedules say

Read from each firm’s own pricing page on 16 September 2026, US-listed options, online orders:

IBKR’s rates above apply up to 10,000 contracts a month. Above that they fall: $0.25 or $0.50 between 10,001 and 50,000 depending on premium, $0.25 on everything between 50,001 and 100,000, and $0.15 beyond that. Orders routed directly to a chosen exchange rather than through IBKR’s router cost $1.00 a contract.

One contract costs more at IBKR, at every premium

The $1.00 order minimum is the whole story on a single contract. IBKR’s rate never goes above $0.65, but a one-lot order is charged $1.00 regardless, while Schwab charges its flat $0.65.

From two contracts upward the minimum stops binding at the $0.65 rate, and on any option priced at $0.10 or more the two schedules are identical to the cent: $1.30 for two, $3.25 for five, $6.50 for ten.

IBKR is cheaper in one place only: options priced under $0.10, traded two or more at a time, where its $0.25 and $0.50 bands undercut Schwab’s flat rate.

Why the premium decides everything

Here is what one round trip, buying and then selling, costs as a share of the premium you paid:

The same $13 is 0.7% of a $2 option and 26% of a five-cent one. On a cheap option the position has to gain a quarter of its value before it covers the cost of getting in and out, and on a single contract at IBKR it has to gain forty per cent.

When volume discounts start to matter

IBKR’s rate only falls after 10,000 contracts in a month. Spread across roughly twenty-one trading days, that is about 476 contracts a day, every day, before the first discount applies.

Above that line the saving is real. Between 10,001 and 50,000 contracts, an option priced at $0.05 or more costs $0.50 instead of $0.65, so the next 10,000 contracts save $1,500 against a flat $0.65 schedule. Beyond 100,000 contracts a month everything costs $0.15, fifty cents less per contract than Schwab’s flat rate.

Those are desk volumes rather than personal ones. For almost anyone reading a comparison of retail brokers, the discount bands are not the part of the schedule that applies; the $1.00 minimum and the premium bands are.

One exception at the small end: IBKR lists Nanos options on Cboe at $0.065 a contract with no order minimum, plus third party fees. On those contracts the minimum that dominates one-lot orders elsewhere does not exist.

What sits on top of the commission

Regulatory and exchange fees. IBKR lists them separately under third party fees: exchange, clearing, regulatory and transaction fees on top of its Pro rates. It names the Options Regulatory Fee, charged by a list of eighteen exchanges including Cboe, ISE, MIAX, Nasdaq and PHLX, on executions that clear in the customer account at the OCC. These are small per contract and they are not zero.

Proprietary index options. Schwab notes that an exchange such as Cboe may charge a proprietary index option fee on products that trade only there, naming SPX, OEX and VIX. That fee comes from the exchange, not the broker, and it applies to the product rather than to the account.

Spread. The largest cost on an illiquid option is usually the gap between bid and ask, and it appears on no pricing page. On a five-cent option a one-cent spread is twenty per cent of the price before any commission.

How to price your own trading

Count contracts per order, not orders. On a one-lot, IBKR’s minimum decides; from two contracts at $0.10 and above, the two brokers cost the same.

Look at what you pay per option, not per contract. If most of your trades are options under ten cents, the commission is a large share of the position and IBKR’s lower bands matter. If they are a dollar or more, the choice between these two schedules is worth nothing.

Add the spread before the commission. On cheap and thinly traded contracts it is the bigger number, and it is the one the fee comparison leaves out.

Avoid the phone. Schwab’s broker-assisted charge is $25 on top of the per-contract fee, which on a ten-lot is almost four times the commission.

The same pattern of a small fixed charge dominating small trades appears on shares, where IBKR’s $1 minimum makes a ten-share order cost twenty times its headline rate; we set that out in IBKR Tiered vs Fixed.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

The commission rates, order minimum, volume bands and broker-assisted charge were read from the Interactive Brokers options commissions page and the Charles Schwab pricing page on 16 September 2026, for US-listed options. The percentages are our arithmetic on those published figures.

We have not reproduced the per-contract amounts of the regulatory, clearing and exchange fees, which change on the exchanges’ own schedules. IBKR Lite is listed as available to US residents only, and we have not compared its options pricing here. We hold no account at either firm and report no fills or spreads of our own.

Sources

• Interactive Brokers: options commissions
• Charles Schwab: pricing and account fees