Investing App Statistics (2026)

Investing has gone mainstream and mobile. Roughly 62% of US adults own stock in some form (Gallup, 2025), and the platforms that serve them are enormous: Fidelity administers about $18.0 trillion for roughly 57 million customers, Charles Schwab holds 39.1 million active brokerage accounts, and Robinhood counts 27.4 million funded customers (see the chart and table below).

The catch is that no two firms count the same way. Fidelity reports customers, Schwab reports active brokerage accounts, Robinhood reports funded customers, and app-first challengers like Coinbase report monthly transacting users. So a clean apples-to-apples ranking is impossible, but the scale of the shift toward self-directed, app-based investing is unmistakable.

Robinhood is the app that defined commission-free, mobile-first investing. In Q1 2026 it reported 27.4 million funded customers (up 6% year over year), $307 billion in total platform assets (up 39%), and average revenue per user of $157, with quarterly revenue of $1.07 billion (see the table below). Total platform assets have grown from about $62 billion at the end of 2022 to $324 billion at the end of 2025 (see the chart below).

Its premium tier is the growth engine: Robinhood Gold hit a record 4.3 million subscribers in Q1 2026, up 36% year over year, a 16% adoption rate among funded customers (Robinhood IR). Full-year 2025 revenue was a record $4.5 billion, with net deposits of $68.1 billion.

Charles Schwab is the largest publicly traded brokerage by client assets. It ended 2025 with 38.5 million active brokerage accounts (up 6%) and $11.90 trillion in total client assets, then grew to 39.1 million accounts in Q1 2026 (see the table below). Clients opened 4.7 million new brokerage accounts in 2025, up 13% from the prior year.

Schwab is also where a lot of trading actually happens: daily average trades ran around 7.4 million in Q3 2025, and core net new assets reached $519.4 billion for the full year, up 42%. The 2020 acquisition of TD Ameritrade cemented its dominance among active traders (Schwab SEC filing).

Fidelity is privately held, so it discloses less, but by scale it is arguably the biggest retail platform of all. Its 2025 Annual Report put assets under administration at $18.0 trillion (up 19%) and managed assets at $7.1 trillion, serving roughly 57 million customers across retail brokerage, workplace retirement plans, and health accounts (see the table below).

Trading activity surged too: Fidelity's daily average trades rose 31% to 4.4 million in 2025 and reached 5.5 million in Q1 2026. Its retail advisory business crossed $1.0 trillion in managed assets, and revenue climbed 15% to $37.7 billion (Fidelity).

Below the big three sits a crowded field of app-first challengers. Webull reports more than 20 million registered users and 40 million-plus downloads globally. SoFi ended 2025 with 13.7 million members after adding 1 million in a single quarter for the first time, and Cash App counts roughly 58 million monthly active users, a large share of whom now use its stock and bitcoin features.

Crypto-native apps overlap heavily with stock investing behavior. Coinbase reported 8.2 million monthly transacting users in Q1 2026, down from a 9.7 million peak in early 2025 as crypto volumes cooled. These challenger user counts come from company self-reports and aggregators (Business of Apps), so they are less audited than the SEC-filed brokerage numbers.

Zoom out from the apps and the base question is how many Americans own stock at all. Gallup's 2025 reading is 62%, matching 2024 and well above the 52% low seen in 2013 and 2016, though still below the roughly 65% peak before the 2008 crisis (see the table below). That 62% includes stock held through funds and retirement accounts, not just individual shares.

Ownership is deeply unequal, though. It ranges from 87% of high-income households down to 28% of those earning under $50,000, a reminder that the market boom of recent years has accrued disproportionately to households that already held assets (Gallup).

Income is the single strongest predictor of stock ownership. Among households earning $100,000 or more, 87% own stock; among those under $50,000, just 28% do. Education tracks the same divide: 84% of college graduates own stock versus 42% of adults with a high school education or less.

Marital status matters too, largely because it correlates with dual incomes and home equity: 77% of married adults own stock compared with 49% of unmarried adults. These gaps have been remarkably stable across Gallup's surveys, which is why widening participation, not just rising prices, is the real measure of a democratized market.

Ownership rises with age and then plateaus. Only 39% of adults aged 18-29 own stock, versus 60% of those 30-49, 62% of those 50-64, and 59% of those 65 and older (see the chart below). The young-adult figure is low mostly because many have not yet started a 401(k) or built up investable savings.

That said, participation among the young is climbing over time as workplace auto-enrollment and zero-commission apps lower the barrier. The 2025 Fed SHED found that 36% of Gen Z hold stocks through a retirement account and another 20% hold them outside one, so the picture is brighter than the headline age gap suggests.

Stock ownership varies sharply by race and ethnicity, closely mirroring the broader wealth gap. Gallup finds 70% of White adults own stock, compared with 53% of Black adults and 38% of Hispanic adults. Those differences persist even after accounting for income, reflecting gaps in inherited wealth, homeownership, and access to workplace retirement plans.

This is one reason low-cost, low-minimum investing apps matter beyond convenience: by removing account minimums and commissions, they lower the on-ramp for households that have historically been shut out of the market, even if the ownership gap remains wide today.

The clearest behavioral shift is when people start. Survey data shows Gen Z made their first investment at about age 20 on average, compared with 26 for millennials, 28 for Gen X, and 31 for baby boomers. More than half of Gen Z respondents say they had begun investing by age 21.

Apps are central to that shift. Younger investors overwhelmingly manage money on a phone, and roughly 15% of all US stock trades now come from investors aged 18-34, up from about 10% in 2020 (Charles Schwab). The tools, more than the willingness, are what changed.

Retail investors are no longer a rounding error in market volume. JPMorgan estimated individuals made up roughly 20-25% of US equity trading volume on average in 2025, and their share spiked to a record ~35% in April 2025 during the tariff-driven selloff, when retail buyers famously bought the dip (see the table below).

Other desks measure it higher: MEMX puts wholesaler-adjusted retail flow at 30-37% of daily volume depending on conditions. The estimates diverge because they treat off-exchange and payment-for-order-flow trades differently, but the direction is consistent: retail is now a structural, market-moving force (MEMX).

The device has changed as much as the demographics. By industry estimates, about 75% of retail trades globally are now placed on a smartphone, and mobile trading app installs kept rising through 2025. For a large majority of Gen Z and millennial app users, the phone is the only interface they use.

That has real consequences for behavior. Frictionless mobile trading encourages more frequent activity and can amplify herd moves around social-media-driven names. It also makes portfolio tracking, price alerts, and now AI-assisted analysis a native, always-on experience rather than something you log into a desktop to do.

The 2020-2021 app-investing boom has cooled from its frenzy. The FINRA Foundation's National Financial Capability Study found that only 8% of investors had started within the two years before its 2024 survey, down sharply from 21% before the 2021 survey, and the median age of pandemic-era first-timers rose from 31 to 38, suggesting many of the youngest new entrants stepped back.

That does not mean participation fell, established investors kept investing, but the wave of brand-new, very young accounts slowed. It is a reminder that headline user-growth rates at the apps can mask churn beneath the surface (FINRA Foundation).

The takeaway is that access has never been higher: zero commissions, no minimums, fractional shares, and a phone are all it takes to own a slice of the market. If you are among the 38% of adults who do not yet own stock, the barrier today is rarely the tooling and more often just getting started with a small, automated habit.

The flip side of frictionless trading is that it makes overtrading easy, and studies consistently show frequent traders underperform buy-and-hold investors. The durable edge is a clear thesis and a disciplined, diversified plan you actually stick to, using the app as a low-cost way to execute it, not as a reason to trade more.