How to Transfer a Brokerage Account

Transfer in kind, do not sell

The standard mechanism is an ACAT transfer, which moves your positions as they are to the new broker. In a taxable account this matters enormously: selling everything and rebuying realises gains and creates a tax bill in that year, while transferring in kind does not, because nothing is disposed of.

You start the transfer at the receiving broker, not the one you are leaving. You will need a recent statement from the old account and matching registration details on both sides.

What it costs

The receiving broker generally charges nothing. The broker you are leaving usually does. Across the firms we track, the published charge to move a full account out runs from $0 at Fidelity and Interactive Brokers to $125 at TradeStation. We have now read eleven of them from the firms’ own schedules and put every figure in one table, including the column that catches people out — whether moving part of the account costs the same as moving all of it: what it costs to leave your broker.

Two firms remain unverified rather than free: E*TRADE publishes no transfer-out fee on any page we could read, and SoFi’s schedule was unreadable to us. Both are marked unverified in our tables rather than assumed to be zero. Ask directly before you start.

What cannot move in kind

• Proprietary funds. A mutual fund available only through your old broker generally has to be sold before the rest transfers.
• Assets the new broker does not support. If the receiving firm does not offer a product — some do not offer mutual funds at all — those positions cannot be carried across.
• Fractional shares. Frequently liquidated rather than transferred. In a taxable account that is a disposal, with tax consequences.
• Crypto. Usually not transferable between brokerages under ACAT at all.

Retirement accounts

IRAs transfer between brokers with the tax wrapper intact, provided the registration types match on both sides — traditional to traditional, Roth to Roth. A direct trustee-to-trustee transfer avoids the complications that come with taking possession of the funds yourself. If you are unsure which mechanism you are being offered, ask, because the difference has tax consequences and this is a question for a tax professional rather than a comparison site.

Practical sequence

1. Open the new account first and confirm the registration exactly matches the old one.
2. Download statements, trade confirmations and cost-basis records from the old account before you start.
3. Check the outgoing fee at the old broker, and ask the new one whether it reimburses.
4. Identify anything that cannot transfer in kind, and decide what to do about each position deliberately.
5. Initiate the transfer at the new broker and expect the account to be frozen for trading while it settles.
6. After it completes, verify that cost-basis data arrived correctly — this is the step most often skipped and hardest to fix later.