The all-in cost of one side of a Hong Kong share trade.
Total cost of this trade
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Brokerage
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Stamp duty
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Levies + fees
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Break-even price move
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Your breakdown
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The five charges hiding inside one contract note
A Hong Kong share trade is never just your broker's commission. Layered on top are several small statutory and exchange charges that most investors never read line by line. This tool adds them all up for one side of a trade so you can see the true cost. The components are your brokerage, the stamp duty the Inland Revenue Department charges, the Securities and Futures Commission transaction levy, the Accounting and Financial Reporting Council levy that replaced the old FRC charge, the Hong Kong Exchange trading fee, and the CCASS settlement fee.
A word on where these numbers come from. The 0.1 percent stamp duty is the IRD figure, but the four levy and fee rates are tiny percentages set by the SFC, the AFRC, and HKEX, and they are not part of the shared data behind the rest of this site. They are entered directly in this tool from the published schedules and are the rates it applies rather than independently certified figures. Confirm each one against the SFC, the AFRC, and the HKEX fee schedules before relying on it, since the regulators revise them from time to time.
A $100,000 buy at a 0.08 percent commission
Using the defaults, a $100,000 trade with a 0.08 percent brokerage rate and a $50 minimum commission breaks down as follows. The levies and fees are combined into one line because individually they are fractions of a dollar.
That is about 0.193 percent of the trade value for one side. Notice that stamp duty, at $105, is actually the largest single component here, bigger than the broker's own commission. The chart shows the three groups side by side.
The minimum commission that quietly punishes small trades
The most important behaviour in this tool is the minimum brokerage. Brokers charge a percentage, but never less than a floor, often around $50 to $100. On a $100,000 trade the 0.08 percent rate produces $80, which clears the $50 floor, so the floor does not bite. Drop the trade to $10,000 and 0.08 percent is only $8, so the $50 minimum takes over and your brokerage jumps to $50. That is effectively a 0.5 percent commission on the small trade, more than six times the rate you thought you were paying. The lesson is blunt: tiny trades are disproportionately expensive in percentage terms, which is a real argument against scattering money across many small orders.
The break-even line in the results is the practical payoff. Because you pay costs to buy and again to sell, the stock has to rise by roughly your round-trip cost percentage before you are even. At about 0.19 percent a side, you need the price to move up around 0.4 percent just to get your money back. For day-trading-style churn that hurdle is real; for a long-term hold it is trivial. A common mistake is comparing brokers on headline commission alone while ignoring that stamp duty and the exchange levies are the same whoever you trade through, so the commission is often the smaller part of the gap.
Which of these fees can I actually negotiate?
Only the brokerage. Stamp duty is fixed by law and the SFC, AFRC, HKEX, and CCASS charges are set by the regulators and the exchange, so they are identical across brokers. When you shop around, you are really only comparing commission rates and minimum charges, which is exactly what the first two inputs let you test.
Do the levies have minimums or maximums?
Some do. The CCASS settlement fee in particular has a published minimum and maximum per transaction, so on very small or very large trades the simple percentage here is an approximation. For an exact figure on an unusual trade size, check the current HKEX and CCASS fee schedule, and treat this tool's total as a close estimate rather than a guaranteed invoice.