Commissions and fees on micro futures, line by line

One micro futures round turn, buy and then sell one contract, costs a retail trader somewhere around a dollar in fees. Not ten dollars, not ten cents. About a dollar. That small number is easy to wave away, and a version of it sits underneath every figure on this site, because the results here are published net: the cost of trading is taken out before the number is printed. So it is worth taking apart, line by line, to see exactly where the dollar goes and what it does not include.

This is a plain accounting of what you pay to trade a micro contract: the broker's commission, the exchange and clearing charges, the regulatory fee, and the costs that are real but do not show up as a fee at all. If you are still deciding whether the contracts themselves make sense for you, start with futures and micro contracts first.

The four things you actually pay

A futures trade has more moving parts than a stock trade, but they are not mysterious. Every dollar you spend to get in and out falls into one of these buckets.

• Broker commission. What your brokerage charges to route and manage the order. This is the part that varies most between providers and plans.
• Exchange and clearing fees. What the exchange (CME, for US index micros) and the clearing house charge to match and guarantee the trade. These are set by the exchange, not your broker.
• Regulatory fee. A small assessment collected by the National Futures Association on every contract.
• Slippage and the spread. Not a fee on any statement, but a real cost: the difference between the price you wanted and the price you got.

Line by line, per round turn

Here is a realistic breakdown for one micro contract on a reasonable retail plan. Treat every figure as approximate: exchange schedules change, and broker rates depend on the plan you choose and the volume you trade.

Add the pieces and a micro round turn lands, for most retail traders, somewhere between about $0.60 and $1.80 in pure fees, commonly near a dollar or a little above. Some brokers quote you a single all-in rate; others itemize the exchange and NFA parts separately, which can make a cheap plan look cheaper than it is until the statement arrives. Either way, the honest comparison is the total round turn, and the way those costs compound over thousands of trades is worked through in slippage and commissions.

The costs that are not per-trade

Two more real costs do not scale with how much you trade. They are monthly, and they are yours whether you take one trade or a hundred.

These are small next to a serious trading result, but they are fixed, so they hurt most when you are trading little. Two flat trades in a quiet month still owe the data and platform bill. That is one of several reasons the question how much money you actually need has a floor that sits above the price of a single evaluation.

Slippage: the cost with no line on the statement

Slippage is the gap between the price you expected and the price you were filled at. It is not charged by anyone. It simply happens, because in the moment your order reaches the market the price has already moved, especially in the fast seconds around a data release. On a calm entry it can be nothing. On a violent one it can dwarf the commission.

Slippage is not a fee, but it spends exactly like one, so any honest cost model has to allow for it. That is precisely why the backtests behind this site do not just subtract commissions. Every trade is charged one tick of slippage on top of the commission, and both come off before the result is counted. There is no gross figure published anywhere here to flatter the net one against, which is deliberate: a gross number is the easiest number on a fact sheet to dress up.

Why we assume $1.90 a round turn, plus a tick

Every trade in the published backtests is charged $1.90 a round turn in commission, plus one tick of slippage, before it is counted. On a Micro Nasdaq contract that comes to about $2.40 a round turn all in; on a Micro S&P one, about $3.15. The Algomyth engine backtest runs on a mid-size account from January 2022 to September 2026 and takes 1,164 trades, and the $87,359 it reports has already had all of that taken out of it.

We use $1.90 because it sits at the top of the realistic range in the table above rather than at the bottom, and a cost assumption should be the pessimistic one: if your broker charges less, your result is a little better than the published figure, not worse. The slippage tick works the same way. The full arithmetic, and what a net figure means once evaluation fees are also counted, is in how much a trading bot actually makes.

How costs scale, and how they do not

Two things move your total cost, and it helps to keep them separate.

Contracts. Fees are charged per contract, so trading two micros costs twice the fees of one, and five costs five times. That is why the sizing level you run, Low, Medium or High, moves the cost line exactly as it moves the profit and the drawdown. All three scale together, which is a good reason not to size up faster than the figures you actually tested.

That single fact keeps the fee bill small relative to the position size. A strategy that scalps forty times a day pays the round turn forty times; these pay it once or twice. If you want the mechanics of the trade itself rather than its cost, how to trade futures is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions

What does one micro futures round turn actually cost?

For most retail traders on a reasonable plan, the all-in fees for one micro round turn land somewhere between about $0.60 and $1.80, commonly near a dollar. That total is made up of the broker's commission, the exchange and clearing fees, and a small NFA regulatory charge, counted for both the entry and the exit. Your exact number depends on your broker, your plan, and the specific contract, so the honest figure is always the full round turn, not the per-side rate.

Are "commission-free" futures apps really free?

No. A broker can waive its own commission and you will still pay the exchange fees, the clearing fees, and the NFA assessment, none of which the broker controls. You may also pay for it indirectly through worse fills or a required data plan. Free commission lowers one of the four cost buckets; it does not remove the other three, so always compare the total cost of a round turn rather than the advertised headline.

Why does the backtest use $1.90 a round turn instead of my real rate?

Because there is no single real rate that applies to everyone. Commissions vary by broker and plan, so the backtest charges $1.90 a round turn, deliberately at the pessimistic end of the range, and adds a tick of slippage on top, which comes to about $2.40 all in on a Micro Nasdaq contract and about $3.15 on a Micro S&P one. The point of publishing the assumption plainly is that you can replace it: put your own commission and slippage into the calculator and the figure updates to match your situation.

Is slippage a fee?

No, and that is exactly why it gets overlooked. Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you were filled at, and no one charges it as a line item, but it spends like a cost all the same. It tends to be worst in fast markets, such as the seconds around an economic release, so any serious cost model has to allow for it separately from commissions rather than pretending it is zero.

Do fees change how many contracts I should trade?

Fees scale linearly with contracts, so two micros cost twice the fees of one, but fees are rarely the reason to size up or down. The binding constraints are your account size and the drawdown you can tolerate, which is why the sizing here is published as three levels rather than as a single number. Size to the risk you tested, not to the fee savings, because the drawdown scales just as fast as everything else.