Investing Fee Statistics (2026)

Fund fees are quoted as an expense ratio: the annual cost of a fund as a percentage of your money in it. In 2025 the average stock mutual fund investor paid an asset-weighted expense ratio of 0.40%, meaning 40 cents a year for every $100 invested (ICI). Bond mutual funds averaged 0.36% and hybrid funds 0.57%.

Asset-weighted is the number that matters because it reflects what investors actually chose, not the full menu of funds. On that basis, fees across mutual funds and ETFs have never been lower. Morningstar puts the all-fund asset-weighted average at 0.34% in 2024, down from 0.83% two decades earlier.

There are two very different fee numbers, and confusing them is common. The simple average expense ratio (every fund offered, counted equally) for equity mutual funds was 1.08% in 2025. The asset-weighted average (weighting by where the money is) was just 0.40% (see the table below).

That gap exists because investors overwhelmingly buy the cheapest funds. At year-end 2025, 78% of index equity fund assets and 69% of actively managed equity fund assets sat in the lowest-cost quartile of funds. The pricey funds exist, but few dollars are in them.

Costs vary a lot by wrapper and strategy. Among the cheapest are index equity mutual funds at 0.05% and index bond ETFs at 0.09%; index equity ETFs run 0.14%, money market funds 0.24%, and target-date funds 0.27% (see the chart below). Actively managed and hybrid funds sit at the higher end.

The pattern is consistent: passive, large-cap, and bond strategies cost less to run, while active, sector, and global strategies cost more. Bond and money market funds tend to be cheaper than equity and hybrid funds because they are less research-intensive to manage.

Even inside equity funds the spread is wide. In 2025, blend funds (which often track broad indexes like the S&P 500) averaged just 0.23% asset-weighted, while sector funds averaged 0.64% and global funds 0.53% (see the table below). Value and growth funds landed in between.

The dispersion is even starker across the full menu: 10% of growth equity funds charge 0.60% or less while another 10% charge 1.75% or more. Specialized and small-cap strategies cost more because the underlying securities take more research to manage.

The single biggest fee decision is active versus index. In 2025, actively managed equity mutual funds averaged 0.64% while index equity mutual funds averaged 0.05%, more than a twelvefold difference (see the chart below). On the bond side it was 0.44% active versus 0.05% index.

That cost gap is why index investing has taken over. Both active and index fees have fallen for decades, but index funds keep costs low by holding a fixed basket with low turnover, whereas active managers charge for research and discretion that most, over time, do not recoup.

ETFs have become exceptionally cheap. Index equity ETF fees fell from 0.21% in 2017 to 0.14% in 2025, and index bond ETFs from 0.18% to 0.09%, as competition and scale pushed prices down (ICI). ETF total net assets reached $13.4 trillion at year-end 2025, and 89% of that is in index ETFs.

Even actively managed ETFs got cheaper, from 0.90% in 2017 to 0.44% for equity ETFs by 2025. ETFs are structurally low-cost because they trade on an exchange and typically build no distribution or advice payments into the expense ratio.

Two index funds tracking the same benchmark can still price differently. In 2025 index equity mutual funds averaged 0.05% versus 0.14% for index equity ETFs. The reason is not quality: index mutual fund assets are more concentrated in ultra-cheap large-cap blend funds, and the average index mutual fund ($14.6 billion) is more than twice the size of the average index ETF ($6.2 billion), so it captures more economies of scale.

The gap has been narrowing as the ETF market matures. For most investors the difference between 0.05% and 0.14% is trivial next to the choice between index and active, or between paying an advisor and not.

The decline in average fees is mostly a story of investor behavior, not just price cuts. Since 2000, gross sales of no-load mutual funds (those without a 12b-1 distribution fee) rose from 46% to 92% of long-term fund sales, as investors moved away from commission-laden share classes (ICI).

At the same time, index mutual funds and ETFs grew from 19% of long-term fund assets at year-end 2010 to 52% at year-end 2025. Dollars have steadily migrated to the cheapest corners of the market, dragging the asset-weighted average down even when list prices held steady.

Advice is the largest fee most investors pay, and it sits on top of fund costs. The median traditional advisor charges about 1.0% of assets a year on portfolios up to $1 million, per Kitces Research, with most fees falling between 1.00% and 1.20% below $1 million and easing to 0.80-1.00% past $2 million (see the table below).

AUM-based pricing dominates: 92% of advisors use it in some form, and 86% call it their primary method. Note the layering: a client in actively managed funds could pay roughly 0.60% in fund fees plus 1.0% in advisor fees, an all-in cost near 1.5-1.6% a year.

Automated advice reset the price of portfolio management. The median robo-advisor fee is about 0.25% of assets, per Morningstar's review of 16 providers, roughly a quarter of a traditional advisor. Betterment and Wealthfront both charge 0.25% for their digital tiers.

Premium and hybrid tiers that add human advisors run higher, around 0.40-0.50% (Betterment Premium is 0.40% with a $100,000 minimum). Even so, a robo plus low-cost index funds can keep an investor's all-in cost near 0.30-0.40%, well under the 1.5%+ common with a full-service advisor.

Retirement savers have seen fees drop sharply. The average equity mutual fund expense ratio paid by 401(k) participants fell 66% over 24 years, from 0.76% in 2000 to 0.26% in 2024 (ICI). Scale and the shift to index options drove most of the decline.

Total plan costs have also come down: among large 401(k) plans, the participant-weighted total plan cost fell from 0.65% in 2009 to 0.49% in 2021 (BrightScope/ICI). Fees still vary widely by employer, and small plans generally cost more than large ones.

Fees look tiny as a percentage but compound brutally over decades. The SEC's own example: a $100,000 portfolio growing 4% a year for 20 years is worth about $208,000 at a 0.25% fee, about $198,000 at 0.50%, and about $179,000 at 1.00% (see the chart and table below). The 0.25% versus 1.00% choice costs roughly $29,000.

The damage grows with time and balance. On a larger portfolio over a full career, a 1% annual fee can consume hundreds of thousands of dollars in foregone compounding, because every dollar taken in fees is also a dollar that never earns future returns.

Fees are easy to miss because they are deducted from fund assets rather than billed. In a 2021 FINRA Foundation survey of about 2,800 investors, 21% believed they paid no fees at all on their non-retirement investments, and 17% did not know how much they paid.

Among mutual fund owners specifically, 38% appeared unaware they pay fund fees. That invisibility is exactly why fees persist: a cost you cannot see is a cost you rarely shop for, which is why checking the expense ratio and any advice fee is the highest-leverage thing most investors can do.

Fees are one of the few things in investing you can control, and they are almost perfectly predictive of net returns over time. Start with the expense ratio: a broad index fund or ETF at 0.03-0.15% keeps essentially all of the market's return, while a 0.60%+ active fund needs to consistently outperform just to break even after cost.

Then weigh the advice layer honestly. A 1% advisor fee can be worth it for planning, behavior coaching, and taxes, but stacked on active funds it can quietly cost 1.5%+ a year. Whether you use an advisor, a robo, or invest yourself, knowing your all-in fee, fund plus advice, is the number that determines how much of your money stays yours.