Stats › Active, passive and flows › Fund fees
Fund fees and expense ratios
A fund's expense ratio is the slice of your money it keeps every year for running the thing. It's quoted as a percentage, it comes out whether the fund goes up or down, and for most of investing history it was large enough to matter enormously and quiet enough that hardly anyone looked at it.
This page is what those charges actually are now, across the main types of fund, and how far they've fallen since 1996. I built it because fees are the one part of your outcome that is known in advance and completely within your control. Everything else on this site is uncertain to some degree. This isn't. You can look the number up this afternoon. There's also a section on why the decline happened, and one on the single category where the fee went up, which turns out to mean the opposite of what it looks like.
It's one source, the Investment Company Institute's annual study of fund expenses, and it reports asset weighted averages, which means what investors really paid rather than what funds advertised. The link and the publication date are at the bottom of the page. It's worth ten minutes of reading in the original, not because I've misrepresented it, but because the category tables are more useful than any summary of them.
The average expense ratio on equity mutual funds was 0.40% in 2025, down 62% since 1996. Bond mutual funds averaged 0.36%, down 57%. Index equity ETFs charge 0.14% and index bond ETFs 0.09%, having fallen a further 33% and 50% over nine years. This is the single largest and most reliable improvement in investor outcomes of the last thirty years, and it happened without anyone having to forecast anything.
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Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart and 1 named source, roughly 1200 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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