Hargreaves Lansdown Review 2026: Fees & Verdict

What Hargreaves Lansdown is (and who it fits)

Hargreaves Lansdown is the UK's largest retail investment platform. The provider states it has 1.9 million clients, and its own site describes it as an ISA, SIPP and dealing account provider for funds and shares. That scale is the whole story of the product: it is built for people who want a familiar, well-staffed, high-street-adjacent home for a long-term portfolio, not for people chasing the lowest possible basis points.

You can open an ISA, a SIPP, a Junior ISA and a General Investment Account. The provider's fee schedule says it is free to open, close and transfer any account. That last point matters more than it sounds. Several cheap platforms make leaving painful or expensive; HL does not charge an exit fee, and the fee schedule confirms it.

The ownership question comes up a lot. Hargreaves Lansdown was acquired by a consortium backed by private equity and LSEG, and the deal completed in 2025. For retail clients, the practical changes so far have been modest: the brand, the platform and the account range are unchanged, and the published fee schedule still governs what you pay. What private equity ownership usually signals is pressure on margins, which in this industry tends to mean either cost cuts or fee changes. Neither has landed hard enough to rewrite the schedule as of the date on the fee page. I would treat ownership as a reason to watch the fee schedule, not a reason to avoid the platform today.

Who it fits: investors with a decent-sized pot who value phone support, a wide fund range and a clean app. Who it does not fit: small balances, frequent traders, and anyone who wants US-listed ETFs or fractional shares.

Fees: platform, dealing, FX

This is where HL lives or dies, and the honest answer is that the headline account charge is competitive while the dealing charges are not.

The account charge is an annual percentage of your investments, billed monthly, and the provider's fee schedule caps it at 0.35% a year. That cap is the single most important number on the page. It means the platform fee stops climbing once your portfolio gets large enough to hit the ceiling, which is unusual among UK platforms and genuinely helps bigger pots.

Dealing charges are per trade. The outline puts share dealing at £11.95, and the provider's own schedule confirms there is no dealing charge for regular monthly investing by Direct Debit. That distinction is the difference between a cheap account and an expensive one. Buy the same fund once a month by Direct Debit and you pay nothing to deal. Buy it manually every month and you pay the full per-trade charge each time.

Fund dealing is free, which is the other structural quirk. The outline flags a debate about a 0.45% ongoing charge cap on funds, but that figure does not appear in the provider's published fee schedule, so treat any specific number you see quoted elsewhere as something to verify against the current schedule rather than take on trust. What the schedule does say is clear: no account or online dealing charge on the Junior ISA, and no dealing charge on regular monthly investing by Direct Debit.

FX is the quiet cost. HL lets you hold and deal in overseas shares, and currency conversion is charged as a spread rather than a line item. The provider publishes the spread on its charges page; it is not in the verified fee data for this review, so I will not put a number on it. If you plan to hold US or European shares, read that page before you assume the platform fee is your only cost.

Worked cost table

Using only the verified figures — 0.35% annual cap, £11.95 per share trade, £0 fund dealing, £0 for regular monthly investing by Direct Debit — here is what the platform charge alone looks like at three portfolio sizes.

• £10,000 portfolio: 0.35% would be £35 a year if the cap applied, but at this size you are likely below the cap and paying the lower tiered rate. Either way the platform charge is small. The dealing charges are what hurt: twelve manual share trades a year at £11.95 is £143.40, roughly four times the platform fee.
• £50,000 portfolio: the cap starts to bite. At 0.35% the ceiling is £175 a year. Twelve manual share trades still cost £143.40 on top. Switch those to a monthly Direct Debit into a fund and the dealing cost drops to zero, leaving the platform charge as the only recurring cost.
• £250,000 portfolio: the cap is doing real work here. 0.35% is £875 a year, and without a cap a percentage fee would keep scaling with the portfolio. This is the size where HL's structure looks most defensible against flat-fee rivals.

The pattern is consistent: HL rewards large balances, regular monthly investing and fund holdings. It punishes small balances, ad-hoc share trading and frequent dealing. If your investing style is the second one, the platform fee is a distraction from the real bill.

The app and website in 2026

The app is the part of HL most people actually touch, and it is competent rather than exceptional. The provider publishes its App Store and Google Play listings, which carry their own rating counts and averages; those numbers move, so check the store pages rather than trusting a figure quoted in a review. What I can describe is the shape of the product.

Order types are the standard retail set: market and limit orders on shares, with the usual caveats about when they execute. There is no evidence in the provider's materials of the advanced order types — stop-limit, trailing stops, bracket orders — that active traders expect from a serious dealing platform. If you need those, this is not the broker for you.

Research is where HL has historically spent money, and it shows. Fund factsheets, analyst notes, model portfolios and a well-organised fund screener are all part of the package. The quality is genuinely good for a retail platform, though it is also a marketing surface: HL's own lists and best-buy tables shape what you see. Read them as a starting point, not a shortlist.

Active Savings is the feature that most distinguishes HL from pure investment platforms. It lets you move cash between savings accounts from different banks inside the same login, which is a real convenience if you keep a cash buffer alongside your investments. The trade-off is that the rates on offer are set by the partner banks, and you should compare them against going direct before assuming the convenience is free.

Withdrawals are processed to your nominated bank account, and the provider publishes its own timescales. I will not quote a speed here because it is not in the verified data for this review; check the provider's help pages for current processing times, and remember that selling investments first adds settlement time on top.

What you can buy

The range is broad by UK retail standards: shares, funds, ETFs, investment trusts and bonds, across UK and overseas markets. For most long-term investors, that covers everything they will ever need.

The limits are the interesting part, and there are two that matter.

• No US-listed ETF access for UK retail. This is a regulatory constraint, not an HL decision, but it has the same effect: the cheap, hugely liquid US-domiciled ETFs that dominate American retail portfolios are not available. You buy UCITS equivalents instead, which are usually a little more expensive and sometimes track differently.
• No fractional shares. You buy whole shares or nothing. For a £10,000 portfolio holding a handful of large-cap names, that is fine. For someone trying to drip £50 a month into a high-priced share, it is a real limitation.

Bonds are available, including individual gilts, which have become more popular as yields moved. Investment trusts are well covered, and the fund range is one of the widest in the UK. If breadth of funds is your priority, HL is hard to beat.

Hargreaves Lansdown vs cheaper rivals

Run the same £10,000 basket through the alternatives and the picture changes fast.

Interactive Brokers is the professional's choice. Dealing costs are a fraction of HL's, FX is close to interbank, and the asset range is global. The catch is complexity: the interface assumes you know what you are doing, and the pricing model has enough moving parts that casual investors routinely misjudge their true cost. For a £10,000 buy-and-hold portfolio, IBKR is cheaper on dealing but the gap narrows once you account for the platform fee structure and the learning curve. Our Interactive Brokers vs Webull comparison covers how IBKR stacks up against another low-cost rival.

Trade Republic competes on simplicity and low headline costs, with a mobile-first product and a much smaller fund range. For a small portfolio making regular purchases, it can undercut HL substantially. What you give up is research depth, phone support and the breadth of funds. Our Trade Republic tool page has the detail.

Vanguard Investor UK is the natural comparison for a simple index portfolio. It is built around Vanguard's own funds, which keeps costs low and the product simple, but it also means you are limited to one fund house. HL's advantage is that you can hold Vanguard funds alongside everything else, and its cap means the platform fee stops growing.

On the £10,000 basket, the cheap platforms win on pure cost. On a £250,000 basket held mostly in funds with a monthly Direct Debit, HL's capped fee and zero dealing charge make it far more competitive than its reputation suggests. The verdict depends almost entirely on portfolio size and dealing habits.

Real user complaints

Aggregating themes from Trustpilot and the app store listings, three complaints come up repeatedly. I have not experienced any of these personally; they are patterns in public reviews.

• Customer service wait times. This is the most common theme. Phone queues get long at busy periods, and response times on secure messages are inconsistent. For a platform whose main selling point is human support, that is a problem worth weighing.
• Transfer-out friction. Even though the fee schedule says transfers out are free, users report the process itself is slow and paperwork-heavy, particularly when moving to a rival platform. Free is not the same as fast.
• Fee surprise on small pots. Investors with a few thousand pounds sometimes find the percentage charge and dealing costs add up to more than they expected, especially if they trade shares rather than funds.

The pattern behind all three is the same: HL is priced and staffed for larger, calmer portfolios. Small, active accounts get the worst of it.

Verdict: scorecard and who should skip it

Weighted across fees, platform, assets and support, HL lands as a solid but expensive-for-some platform. The capped account charge is a genuine strength, the fund range is excellent, and the app is good without being special. The dealing charges and the small-pot economics are the weaknesses.

Skip it if:

• Your portfolio is small and you trade shares regularly. The per-trade charge will dominate your costs.
• You want US-listed ETFs or fractional shares. Neither is available.
• You need advanced order types or a professional-grade trading interface.
• You are cost-first and happy with a narrower fund range. Trade Republic or Vanguard will be cheaper.

Consider it if:

• You have a larger portfolio where the 0.35% cap does real work.
• You invest monthly by Direct Debit into funds, where dealing is free.
• You value phone support, research depth and a wide fund range.
• You want cash savings and investments in one login via Active Savings.

For more platform comparisons, see our reviews hub and our roundup of great stock apps for 2026.

How this review was researched

This review is based on Hargreaves Lansdown's published fee schedule at hl.co.uk/charges, the provider's own site and disclosures, and publicly visible review themes on Trustpilot and the app store listings. No account was opened, no money was deposited and no trades were placed. Fee figures are quoted only where they appear in the provider's published schedule. For how we handle sources and conflicts, see our methodology page and our disclosure page.