Charles Schwab Review 2025: Is It Right For You?

Where Charles Schwab shines

Well-rounded platform: Charles Schwab serves a wide range of investors. Beginners can get started easily thanks to the $0 minimum balance requirement, while frequent traders benefit from commission-free trades on stocks and exchange-traded funds.

Strong research tools: Schwab earns excellent marks for its research capabilities. Investors gain access to Schwab’s own stock ratings, along with expert insights, reports, and market commentary from leading independent research firms.

$50 bonus for new investors: With Schwab’s Starter Kit, first-time investors receive a $50 bonus to begin building their portfolio — a rare offer, as no other major brokerage rewards customers simply for getting started.

Where Charles Schwab falls short

Is Charles Schwab safe?

All investments involve some level of risk, but Charles Schwab is backed by multiple layers of protection and is fully registered with the proper regulatory authorities.

Is money invested through Charles Schwab FDIC insured?

Schwab provides FDIC insurance on cash held in its checking and savings accounts, covering deposits up to $250,000 per depositor.For brokerage accounts, Schwab is protected by SIPC insurance, which covers up to $500,000, including a $250,000 limit for cash. Keep in mind that SIPC does not protect against market losses or declines in investment value.

What type of investor should choose Charles Schwab?

For traders who want a complete package: Schwab delivers a wide range of investment choices along with deep, high-quality research. Whether you're exploring specialized assets or need expert-level insights, Schwab has you covered.

For experienced, active traders: If you’re a seasoned trader seeking a powerful, professional-grade platform, Schwab’s thinkorswim is an excellent fit. It’s loaded with advanced tools, customization options, and enhanced features designed to elevate your trading experience.

Charles Schwab at a glance

How to sign up for a Charles Schwab account

You can open a Schwab brokerage account online, by phone, or by walking into one of their branches. Start by selecting the type of account you want — such as a standard taxable brokerage account or an IRA — and decide whether it will be set up as an individual or joint account. To complete the application, you’ll need a few details: your Social Security number, a valid government ID (like a driver’s license), your employment information, and documents for any funds or investments you plan to transfer. Schwab will also require you to verify your identity and link your bank account for deposits or transfers.

What to know about Charles Schwab 's fees

Schwab makes it easy to get started — you can open and trade in a brokerage account with no minimum deposit, and there are only a handful of fees you need to be aware of. You won’t pay commissions on stock, ETF, or options trades. However, options do come with a $0.65 per-contract fee, which is standard across many traditional brokers, though some competitors have recently removed this cost. Schwab also charges $6.95 for each OTC trade, which means traders focused on penny stocks may find better pricing elsewhere.

When it comes to account-level charges, Schwab keeps costs very low. There are no annual fees, no inactivity fees, and no charge for a partial account transfer. Moving your entire account to another broker does carry a $50 full transfer fee.

If you're looking for automated investment management or personalized guidance, Schwab also offers both Schwab Intelligent Portfolios (robo-advisor) and human financial advisors, which we have reviewed separately.

Charles Schwab 's trading platforms and apps

Schwab offers five trading platforms: Schwab.com, Schwab Mobile, and the thinkorswim platform, which is available as a downloadable desktop platform, online and as a mobile app. Our rating for Schwab 's mobile app is based on Schwab Mobile, not the thinkorswim app.

Schwab.com 's platform works for everyday investing and trading, though both the web and mobile app experiences are a little clunky. They certainly don 't have the smooth user interface of more mobile-first brokers like Robinhood. Schwab 's online experience has some features, such as alerts and screening, but it 's limited. The mobile app is even more limited.

The platform that more advanced traders will love is thinkorswim. The most capable is the downloadable desktop experience, though the web experience offers similar features. Both the desktop and web versions of thinkorswim have customizable workspaces, Level II data, conditional orders, paper trading, live financial news and advanced charting. The thinkorswim app isn 't far behind: The only thing it lacks is screening within the app. Schwab.com 's website and app don 't offer most of those features. The paper trading function is fairly advanced compared to the competition: You can practice trading equities, options, futures and forex.

Thinkorswim is one of the highest-tier trading platforms out there. It offers deep customization with its charts and interfaces, screeners with custom attributes, Trade Flash (a feature that shows third-party analyst up/downgrades, trade imbalances, trading floor events and more), "what-if "scenario analysis on real and hypothetical trades and technical analysis from more than 400 studies.

One area where Schwab.com stands out over thinkorswim is with its available products. On Schwab.com 's online experience and its app you can trade stocks, ETFs, options, complex options, mutual funds and fixed income. On thinkorswim you don 't get access to mutual funds or fixed income, though you can trade futures and forex. That said, most advanced traders probably aren 't too worried about mutual funds or bonds.

Charles Schwab 's investment selection

Charles Schwab has a large selection of tradable securities, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, index funds, options, forex and futures.

Schwab delivers access to more than 7,700 no-transaction fee mutual funds, and within its own proprietary lineup of index funds and ETFs, Schwab now offers some of the lowest expense ratios available.

With so many available funds, it can be hard to choose. Schwab 's ETF Select List helps narrow the choices, featuring picks for the best fund in selected categories. You can sort the list by feature, including expense ratio , Morningstar category and benchmark index. There 's also the Personalized Portfolio Builder tool, designed to help you create a diversified portfolio based on your financial goals, risk tolerance and time horizon. You can also invest with Schwab 's Investing Themes, which allow you to choose from over 40 themes that you can customize.

When it comes to bonds, Schwab has a comprehensive selection. Choices include new-issue municipal and corporate bonds, plus government options such as Treasurys.

Schwab Stock Slices offer access to fractional shares, so investors can buy a small slice of a stock rather than paying the full share price. For example, if a stock costs $100 a share, and you buy a $10 slice, you’d own 10% of a share. Single slices are available for as little as $5, and investors can buy up to 10 slices at a time. However, this feature is only available for stocks of S &P 500 companies. Similar brokers that offer fractional trading don 't have such restrictions on their fractional share offerings.

Charles Schwab clients aren 't currently able to trade cryptocurrencies directly. However, the broker does offer access to spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs.

Other key Charles Schwab features

Research and data

Schwab provides its own equity ratings, along with reports from several top-tier providers. In addition to real-time news and earnings reports, the broker offers a variety of research reports and market commentary authored by in-house experts, as well as a quarterly magazine free of charge.

Schwab’s investment screeners are easy to use and let you save your screens. Select Lists, like the previously mentioned one for ETFs, are compiled by the company’s experts and released quarterly to give you a pre-screened selection of mutual funds and ETFs. The funds on the list are divided by category, so you can easily see the company’s picks for, say, large-cap stock mutual funds.

The company is also integrated with Google Assistant — you can ask Google for stock quotes, general market updates and more — and has an Amazon Alexa skill that provides similar information, including the ability to create and get updates on a watch list.

Customer support

Customers have plenty of ways to get in touch. Phone, email and online chat are all available 24/7. If you prefer to speak to someone in person, there are nearly 400 Charles Schwab branches around the country, with some even open on Saturdays.

Execution quality

Schwab does receive payment from market makers for routing orders (called payment for order flow), although the company says that does not affect the value consumers get from using its brokerage services. It is also very transparent and clearly explains its order routing process, overall price improvement statistics and execution quality on its website. Schwab says its execution quality is 97%.

IRA account

Charles Schwab is a leading broker in the retirement account space, with traditional and Roth IRAs as well as self-employed retirement accounts, custodial accounts and inherited accounts. IRAs are retirement savings accounts that offer significant tax savings, such as a tax deduction on contributions or tax-free growth of your investments. You can have an IRA in addition to a standard brokerage account.

For traditional and Roth IRAs, Charles Schwab does not charge fees for opening or closing an account, maintenance or inactivity. Schwab also does not charge any annual fees.

Schwab Starter Kit

Schwab provides new investors with $50 to split across the top five stocks in the S &P 500 and educational content specifically designed to help people learn how to invest. This is a pretty unique opportunity: No other brokers start you off with your first chunk of cash to invest with.

Good to know about Charles Schwab

Low interest rate on uninvested cash

Schwab pays about 0.05% on uninvested cash in your brokerage account (this rate can vary based on market conditions). Schwab does offer clients options for getting a higher rate for cash products, but you 'll need to select and opt into them.

Is Charles Schwab right for you?

Most likely. Given its array of features and investment selections, a Charles Schwab brokerage account generally checks the boxes for every type of investor.