Brokerage Account Statistics (2026)

There is no single national tally of brokerage accounts, so the clearest read comes from the biggest firms. Charles Schwab alone reported 38.5 million active brokerage accounts at year-end 2025, while Fidelity and Vanguard each serve more than 50 million customers or investors, and Robinhood counts 27.0 million funded customers (see the chart and table below).

The numbers are not strictly comparable: Schwab and Robinhood report accounts and funded customers, while Fidelity and Vanguard report individual customers who may hold several accounts each. Even so, the picture is clear that tens of millions of Americans now hold a self-directed brokerage relationship at just a handful of firms.

Account counts tell you reach; client assets tell you scale. Fidelity administers roughly $17.9 trillion, Schwab held $11.90 trillion at year-end 2025, and Vanguard manages about $11.6 trillion, making the big three custodians of a large share of US household investment wealth (see the table below).

Definitions matter here. Fidelity's figure is assets under administration, which bundles custody and advice, so it is not the same as pure assets under management. Robinhood, by contrast, reported $324 billion in total platform assets, a fraction of the incumbents despite a large customer base, because its accounts skew younger and smaller.

Because Schwab discloses clean quarterly account metrics, it is the best single window into industry momentum. In 2025 it grew from 36.5 million to 38.5 million active brokerage accounts, opened 4.7 million new brokerage accounts, and pulled in $519.4 billion of net new core assets, up from $366.9 billion the year before (see the table below).

Trading activity jumped too. Schwab's daily average trades ran about 8.3 million for the year and hit a record 9.9 million in a single month in early 2026. When a firm this large is setting activity records, it signals broad-based retail engagement, not a niche trading fad.

Owning a brokerage account is not the same as owning stock, and the ownership rate has been climbing. Gallup found 62% of Americans owned stock in 2025, matching 2024 and up from 61% in 2023, the highest level in about 15 years after a long stretch below 60% from 2010 to 2022.

Gallup's measure is broad: it counts individual shares plus stock held through mutual funds and retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs. That breadth is why the headline number is high even though far fewer people actively trade in a taxable brokerage account.

Dig into how people own stock and the story shifts. The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found 58% of families held stock in some form, up from 53% in 2019, but only 21% owned individual shares directly, up from 15%, the largest three-year jump on record (Federal Reserve).

In other words, most stock exposure lives inside retirement plans and funds, not a self-directed brokerage account. Roughly 37% of adults hold investments outside a retirement account, which is closer to the real universe of active brokerage users than the headline 62% ownership figure.

Participation is deeply uneven. In Gallup's 2025 data, 87% of households earning $100,000 or more owned stock versus just 28% of those under $50,000, and 84% of college graduates versus 42% of those with a high-school education or less (see the chart and table below).

The gaps extend to race and marital status: 70% of White adults owned stock compared with 53% of Black adults and 38% of Hispanic adults, and 77% of married adults versus 49% of unmarried adults. Notably, Gallup found no meaningful difference by gender or political party.

The modern brokerage account was reshaped in a single week. Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading in 2015, and in October 2019 the incumbents capitulated: Interactive Brokers, then Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E*TRADE, Ally Invest, and Fidelity all cut equity trading commissions to zero within days of each other.

That removed the most visible cost of owning a brokerage account and helped open the floodgates to a new wave of small-balance investors. It also triggered a wave of consolidation, most notably Schwab's acquisition of TD Ameritrade and Morgan Stanley's purchase of E*TRADE, as standalone discount brokers lost their main revenue line.

Free was not free for the brokers. When commissions went to zero, Schwab expected to lose about $100 million in quarterly revenue and TD Ameritrade about $240 million, because commissions were roughly 8% of Schwab's revenue but about 28% of TD Ameritrade's (see the table below).

Markets reacted immediately: in the week of the announcements, Schwab fell about 15%, E*TRADE about 17%, and TD Ameritrade about 30%. Brokers replaced commission income with net interest on cash, advice fees, securities lending, and payment for order flow, which is why understanding how a broker makes money now matters more than its trade price.

The commission cut set the stage; the pandemic lit the fuse. By one widely cited estimate from JMP Securities, individual investors opened about 10 million new brokerage accounts in 2020, and the pace did not slow, with more than 7 million new accounts estimated in just January and February of 2021.

Stimulus checks, lockdown boredom, zero commissions, and easy mobile apps combined to pull first-time investors into the market at a rate not seen in decades. Much of that activity flowed through taxable, non-retirement accounts opened via online brokers, a structural shift toward self-directed investing.

The pandemic cohort looked different from prior investors. A FINRA Foundation and NORC study found that about 66% of new investors were under 45, with a mean age of 43, and that they earned lower incomes and were more racially and ethnically diverse than people who were already in the market (FINRA Foundation).

New account holders were more frequently Black (16%) and Hispanic or Latino (15%) than pre-2020 investors (7% and 13%). That broadening of the investor base is one of the most durable effects of the account boom, even as some of the speculative trading has cooled.

All those accounts add up to real market clout. Retail investors now drive roughly 20-25% of US equity trading volume on an average day, up from around 10% in 2011, and their share spiked to a record 35% in April 2025 during a volatile stretch (see the chart and table below).

Estimates vary by source and method: Bloomberg Intelligence put retail above 22% by 2021, JPMorgan cites a 20-25% average with volatility peaks near 35%, and Goldman has flagged days near 30%. However you cut it, retail has gone from a rounding error to a force that moves prices.

The economics behind zero commissions run largely on payment for order flow, where market makers pay brokers to route customer trades. The 12 largest US brokerages collectively earned about $3.8 billion in payment for order flow in 2021, and Robinhood alone took in $974 million, roughly half its revenue that year (Congressional Research Service).

Not every broker takes it: Fidelity, Vanguard, Interactive Brokers (on its Pro tier), and Merrill Edge forgo equity payment for order flow, while Robinhood, E*TRADE, Webull, and Schwab accept it. It is why the same trade can be free at two brokers yet economically very different under the hood.

Cheap, easy accounts also make borrowing to invest easy, and leverage has hit records. FINRA margin debt, the total customers borrow against their portfolios, crossed $1 trillion in mid-2025 and climbed to roughly $1.30 trillion by spring 2026, up more than 50% year over year (FINRA).

Margin debt tends to peak alongside the market and then unwind sharply, as it did in 1929, 2000, 2007, and 2021, so record leverage is both a sign of confidence and a risk amplifier. For most long-term investors it is a reminder that a brokerage account's borrowing features can cut both ways.

Opening a brokerage account has never been cheaper or easier: commissions are gone, minimums are near zero, and fractional shares let you start with a few dollars. The data shows a market that is far broader than a decade ago, but still tilted toward higher-income, college-educated households, which is exactly the gap that low-cost, diversified investing can help close.

The practical takeaways are simple. Understand how your broker actually makes money (interest on cash, order flow, fees), avoid using margin unless you fully understand the downside, and remember that most long-term wealth is built through steady, diversified investing inside tax-advantaged accounts, not frequent trading. An account is just the door; the habits behind it are what compound.