Stats › Active, passive and flows › Exchange economics
How stock exchanges make money
Ask most people how a stock exchange makes money and they'll say it takes a cut of every trade. It's a reasonable guess and it's wrong. At the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, trading US cash equities and equity options brought in $467 million in 2025, which is 4.7% of the group. Selling data and connections brought in more than twice that.
This page is about where the money actually comes from and why that matters to you even if you never think about exchanges. It covers the revenue lines at three big operators, the maker taker model that means an exchange can collect $4,170 million and keep $1,201 million of it, the rule that caps what a venue can charge for taking liquidity, and the long running fight over what market data should cost. Some of it is regulatory detail, and I've kept it because the detail is where the arguments live.
I put this together because the plumbing of the market shapes what your orders cost, and almost nobody explains it without an axe to grind on one side or the other. Where the two sides of a dispute both have a fair point, I've said so instead of picking. Everything is sourced to company results, SEC filings and court rulings, listed at the bottom with dates, and the notes flag which figures are my arithmetic rather than a company's own disclosure.
Stock exchanges barely make money from trading stocks. At the operator of the New York Stock Exchange, cash equities and equity options produced $467 million of net revenue in 2025, which is 4.7% of the group total and less than half what its data and connectivity business produced. At Nasdaq, market services generated $4,170 million gross and $1,201 million net, because $2,528 million was paid straight back out as trading rebates. The SEC adopted a cut in the access fee cap from 30 to 10 mils in September 2024, it survived a court challenge in October 2025, and compliance has now been exempted until November 2027.
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