DEGIRO Review 2026: My 4+ Year Take on Europe's Cheapest Broker

The short version

Who this review is for

I'm writing this for European investors who keep hearing that DEGIRO is "the cheapest broker" and want a non-promotional read on whether that's still true in 2026, what the actual experience is like, and what the catches are. I've been using DEGIRO as my primary stock broker for over four years, mostly for dividend growth stocks and European-listed ETFs. This is the broker I have the most direct continuous experience with after Bondora.

I'll assume you already have a basic understanding of how a brokerage account works — you fund it, you place trades, you hold positions, you eventually sell or withdraw. The question I'm answering isn't "should I invest" (yes, in something appropriate to your goals) but "is DEGIRO a good place to do it as a European resident in 2026, given that the broker landscape has changed materially in the past few years."

Three groups should keep reading. First, anyone choosing their first European broker — DEGIRO is the obvious cost-efficient default, but the catches matter. Second, anyone who's been on DEGIRO for years and is hearing about Trade Republic, eToro, or IBKR alternatives. Third, anyone confused by the flatex Bank merger and wondering whether their account changed when they got that email in 2020-2021.

What DEGIRO is in 2026

DEGIRO is a discount stock broker founded in Amsterdam in 2008, originally as an institutional brokerage that opened to retail investors in 2013. Its model from the start was aggressive cost reduction — using a custody-and-omnibus structure rather than direct registered ownership — which let it undercut traditional brokers by a wide margin. By 2018 it was the largest online broker in continental Europe by retail account count.

In 2020, DEGIRO merged with flatex AG, the parent of Germany's flatex Bank. The combined entity, flatexDEGIRO Bank AG, is German-headquartered, BaFin-regulated, and trades on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Operationally for retail customers, the merger meant: existing DEGIRO accounts were progressively migrated to the flatex Bank legal structure (a process that took roughly 18 months), and your cash balance is now a deposit at flatex Bank rather than a brokerage cash position. This is a meaningful upgrade in safety — German deposit insurance (€100,000 per depositor) now covers your cash balance, which it didn't under the old DEGIRO structure.

By the numbers in 2026: around 2.5 million customers across Europe, access to 32 stock exchanges (every major Western, several Eastern European, and the main Asian exchanges), more than 5,400 ETFs, and a stated minimum deposit of €0.01 (you read that right — practically zero).

The leadership and platform remain operationally what they were: cost-focused, slightly utilitarian, not pretty but reliable.

How DEGIRO actually works

The mechanics are slightly different from what most people are used to with a traditional broker.

When you open an account, you fund it via SEPA. Your cash sits in a flatex Bank deposit account, BaFin-protected up to €100,000. When you place a trade, DEGIRO routes the order through its execution arm, settles into your custody position, and charges its fee. The "custody position" is where DEGIRO's structure differs: most retail accounts use the Custody account model, where DEGIRO holds your shares in an omnibus structure (your name isn't directly on the share register; you're a beneficial owner via DEGIRO's custodian). This is what makes the platform so cheap — the omnibus structure has lower per-account operational cost than direct registration.

The trade-off has two parts. First, DEGIRO's Custody account participates in securities lending by default — your shares can be lent out to short-sellers, with DEGIRO keeping a spread between the lending revenue and what they pass to you (which is nothing, in practice). Some investors don't like this. Second, dividends and corporate actions are aggregated through DEGIRO rather than paid directly by the issuer, which can occasionally cause minor delays.

If you want neither of those trade-offs, DEGIRO offers the Basic account as an opt-out. Basic accounts don't participate in securities lending, but they pay slightly higher fees on certain order types and don't have access to all derivatives. For most buy-and-hold ETF investors, the Custody default is fine; for investors who specifically want to avoid securities lending, Basic is the answer.

The order flow itself is straightforward: market and limit orders, stop-loss, stop-limit, and a "day order" / "good till cancelled" toggle. The web platform supports 32 exchanges; the app supports the same.

Fees, in plain numbers

This is what people come for, and DEGIRO genuinely lives up to its reputation here.

ETF trades: free for the Core Selection list (about 200 ETFs) — one free trade per ETF per month, with a minimum trade size of €1,000 to qualify. Outside the Core Selection or beyond the free trade per month, the cost is around €2-3 per trade.

Stock trades: pricing varies by exchange. Frankfurt-listed stocks: around €2 + a small per-share component. Amsterdam, London, Paris: similar. US-listed stocks: around €1 + a per-share fee. The exact numbers shift; DEGIRO publishes a fee schedule that's worth checking before you commit.

Custody fee: €0 for stocks and ETFs on most exchanges. Some non-default exchanges charge around €2.50 per year per exchange held. Negligible for most portfolios.

Withdrawal: free.

Inactivity fee: none.

FX: €0 on EUR transactions. For trades in foreign currency (USD-listed stocks, GBP-listed stocks), DEGIRO charges around 25 basis points on the FX conversion — roughly half what eToro charges. Still meaningful at scale, but EUR-native trades aren't affected.

Real-world example: a €2,000 trade in a Core Selection ETF costs €0. A €2,000 trade in an off-list ETF costs around €2-3. A €2,000 trade in a US stock costs around €1 commission plus ~25 bps FX (€5). Compare that to traditional banks at €15-30 per trade and you see why DEGIRO has held its market position for so long.

The flatex Bank handover, explained

If you opened a DEGIRO account before 2021, you got a series of emails between 2020 and 2022 about your account being migrated to flatex Bank. Some users found this confusing or alarming. Here's what actually happened.

DEGIRO was a brokerage; flatex was a German bank with its own brokerage. The merger combined them under the holding company flatexDEGIRO Bank AG, which became BaFin-regulated. Your DEGIRO account was rebranded operationally — the platform stayed the same — but your cash balance was moved into a deposit account at flatex Bank. That's the key change: previously your DEGIRO cash was held under a Dutch financial-firm structure with €20,000 of investor protection; after the migration, it's a German bank deposit covered by BaFin's €100,000 deposit insurance.

For your securities (stocks, ETFs), the change was more administrative. They remain held in segregated custody — DEGIRO can't lose them through its own insolvency — but the legal arrangement transitioned from the Dutch to the German framework.

In practice for retail customers: nothing visible changed in the platform. The login was the same, the dashboard was the same, your positions were intact. The only thing you might have noticed was a slightly different statement footer indicating flatex Bank as the custody provider.

The migration was completed for the vast majority of retail accounts by mid-2022. If you opened a DEGIRO account in 2023 or later, you onboarded directly under the flatex Bank structure from day one.

ETF Core Selection: where the free trades come from

The Core Selection is DEGIRO's curated list of free-to-trade ETFs, which is the single most powerful cost lever in the platform if you're a regular ETF investor.

The mechanics: any ETF on the Core Selection list can be traded with zero commission, once per month per ETF, with a minimum trade size of €1,000. The constraints are important. If you want to buy €500 of an ETF (you can't — minimum is €1,000), you pay the off-list fee of around €2-3. If you want to buy the same ETF twice in a month, the second trade pays the off-list fee.

What's typically on the list: major Vanguard, iShares, and Amundi ETFs that track broad indices — VWCE (Vanguard FTSE All-World), VHYL (Vanguard FTSE All-World High Dividend Yield), iShares Core MSCI World, and similar. The list rotates annually based on DEGIRO's commercial agreements with ETF issuers, and a small number of ETFs drop on or off each year.

The strategic implication for most investors: pick a primary ETF that's on the Core Selection, batch your monthly contributions into a single €1,000+ trade, and your trading costs are effectively zero. This is what I've done for the bulk of my European ETF portfolio for four years.

If your preferred ETF isn't on the Core Selection (some ESG-tilted, factor, or niche thematic ETFs aren't), you have two options: pay the €2-3 per trade off-list fee (still cheap), or substitute a similar Core Selection ETF for the bulk of your contributions and only buy the niche one occasionally.

Is DEGIRO safe?

Yes — operationally and structurally — with the standard caveats that apply to any broker.

Regulation: BaFin (Germany's federal financial-supervisory authority) since the flatex Bank merger. BaFin oversees flatexDEGIRO Bank AG as a credit institution, which is a stricter framework than the Dutch broker-only oversight DEGIRO operated under previously.

Cash protection: €100,000 per depositor under the German deposit insurance scheme (Entschädigungseinrichtung deutscher Banken). If you hold more than €100,000 in cash on DEGIRO, only the first €100,000 is insured; the practical mitigation is to keep most of that money invested rather than as cash.

Securities protection: shares and ETFs are held in segregated custody, meaning they don't form part of flatex Bank's balance sheet. If the bank itself failed, your securities should be recoverable through the administrator (slow, but legally protected). The €100,000 insurance limit doesn't apply here — it covers cash deposits, not custody assets.

Securities lending risk: Custody-account users implicitly participate in securities lending. The risk is theoretical (the borrower might fail to return the shares) but mitigated by collateralization. In practice no DEGIRO customer has lost shares to lending failure that I'm aware of, but the risk is non-zero and worth knowing about. Basic account opts you out.

Regulatory action history: DEGIRO has had several minor BaFin and AFM warnings or fines over the years — usually about disclosure quality, marketing claims, or operational reporting — none of them suggesting customer-fund risk. By the standards of the discount broker space, this is unremarkable.

The honest summary: DEGIRO is one of the structurally safer European discount brokers in 2026. The custody model is unconventional, the securities lending is real, but the deposit insurance and BaFin oversight are strong. I keep meaningful capital here without losing sleep.

Withdrawals, FX, and taxes

Withdrawals: free, SEPA bank transfer, typically same-day to T+1.

FX: €0 on EUR-EUR transactions. ~25 bps spread on FX conversions for non-EUR trades. Significantly less than eToro's 50 bps and far less than traditional banks at 100-200 bps.

Tax reporting: DEGIRO provides a country-specific annual tax statement that maps cleanly into most EU tax regimes. German Steuerbescheinigung, French IFU equivalent, Spanish modelo 720 export, Dutch IB-aangifte data. This is genuinely better than eToro and most international brokers — the German Steuerbescheinigung in particular is at the level a domestic bank would provide, with all relevant numbers pre-calculated.

The catch: DEGIRO does not pre-withhold any taxes. You receive gross interest and dividends, and you're responsible for declaring them. The Steuerbescheinigung tells you exactly what to declare, but the act of declaration is on you. For most investors with a simple buy-and-hold portfolio this is straightforward; for high-frequency traders, plan to spend an hour or two with the year-end statement.

DEGIRO vs Trade Republic vs Interactive Brokers

These are the three brokers most often compared, and the right one depends entirely on what you actually need.

DEGIRO wins on: cost for buy-and-hold portfolios with monthly €1,000+ trades, breadth of exchanges, Core Selection free-ETF list, mature platform with 4+ years of personal track record for me.

Trade Republic wins on: app UX and onboarding simplicity, automatic monthly savings plans (€0 to set up and run), 3.5% interest on uninvested cash (as of mid-2026 — meaningful), and direct German deposit insurance via Solarisbank. Read my Trade Republic review.

Interactive Brokers wins on: multi-currency portfolios, lowest FX costs (a few basis points vs DEGIRO's 25), broadest product range (futures, options, bonds, complex derivatives), and tools-for-power-users functionality. Read my Interactive Brokers review.

My personal stack uses all three: DEGIRO as the cost backbone for European ETF buy-and-hold, Trade Republic for the savings-plan automation and the small cash balance earning 3.5%, IBKR for any multi-currency or US-stock trading where FX matters. Most readers don't need three accounts; most readers can get by with DEGIRO + Trade Republic for 90% of what a private investor actually does.

Country-specific notes

• EU residents — onboard through flatexDEGIRO Bank AG (Germany), BaFin-regulated. Tax statement provided in your country format where supported (DE/FR/NL specifically; ES/IT/PT mostly). Native EUR.
• Germany — full Steuerbescheinigung. Abgeltungsteuer is not automatically withheld by DEGIRO — declare in Anlage KAP. Freistellungsauftrag does not apply to DEGIRO (you handle the allowance manually). For German residents who want automatic withholding and Freistellungsauftrag integration, Trade Republic or comdirect is the easier choice.
• United Kingdom — DEGIRO closed to new UK customers post-Brexit. Existing UK accounts continue to operate under transitional arrangements, but new UK signups need to use Trading 212, Hargreaves Lansdown, or IBKR UK instead. Verify the current state with DEGIRO directly if you're in the UK.
• France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ireland — open to new accounts. Tax statement quality varies by country; Netherlands and Germany are best-supported.

Pros and cons

FAQ

Verdict

After 4+ years on the platform, DEGIRO is still my primary European broker for the same reason it was four years ago: nothing else in the EU comes close on cost-per-trade for buy-and-hold ETF investing, and the flatex Bank merger has if anything made it operationally safer. The Core Selection list does the heavy lifting for €0 trades on the ETFs most European investors actually own, and the 25 bps FX on non-EUR trades is half what eToro charges.

What's changed since 2020 isn't DEGIRO — it's the rest of the market. Trade Republic now offers automatic savings plans and 3.5% on cash that DEGIRO doesn't compete with. eToro has a much better app and social layer. IBKR has lower FX costs and broader product range. So my recommendation has shifted: DEGIRO is still the cheapest trading venue for the bulk of a European portfolio, but it's no longer obviously "the only broker you need" — the right setup is usually two or three brokers each playing to their strengths.

If you can only have one broker and you're a European buy-and-hold investor, DEGIRO is still the right answer. If you want monthly savings plan automation, pair it with Trade Republic. If you want multi-currency or US-focused exposure, add IBKR. The lack of fractional shares and the dated UX are real annoyances, but for the cost savings over a 5- or 10-year horizon, they're easy to live with.