The Access Rule And Fee Caps

The Order Protection Rule forces venues to route orders to wherever the best displayed price sits, even a venue they'd rather avoid. That only works fairly if reaching that other venue isn't prohibitively expensive — otherwise an exchange could quote an attractive price and then charge an outrageous fee to actually trade against it. Reg NMS Rule 610, the Access Rule, closes that loophole by capping the fee a venue can charge for accessing its protected quotations.

The cap is $0.0030 per share (30 mils) for stocks over $1.00. Any exchange offering top-of-book liquidity has to keep its access fee at or below that ceiling, regardless of how its own fee schedule is structured.

This cap is the reason the maker-taker pricing model looks the way it does across US exchanges. A typical exchange charges a "taker" fee close to the cap — often around $0.0030 per share — to traders who remove liquidity by hitting a resting quote, and pays a slightly smaller "maker" rebate to traders who post the resting quote in the first place. The spread between what's charged and what's rebated is the exchange's revenue. Because the cap is fixed, competition between exchanges shows up mostly in how the rebate side is set, not in the taker fee, which tends to cluster near the $0.0030 ceiling across venues.

Worked example. An exchange charges $0.0030 per share to take liquidity and rebates $0.0025 per share to the resting order that gets hit. A trader buys 500 shares by hitting a posted offer: they pay $0.0030 × 500 = $1.50 in taker fees. The trader whose resting order was filled receives $0.0025 × 500 = $1.25 as a maker rebate. The exchange keeps the $0.25 difference. If that same exchange tried to charge $0.0050 per share to take liquidity, it would be in violation of Rule 610 and the SEC could require it to lower the fee.