Access Fee Cap
The access fee cap is the regulatory ceiling of $0.003 per share (30 cents per 100 shares) that the SEC established under Rule 610 of Regulation NMS, limiting the maximum fee that a trading venue may charge for accessing displayed quotes, with the goal of preventing exchanges from pricing access to their best quotes at levels that would discourage inter-market competition and harm best execution.
Rule 610 of Regulation NMS, adopted by the SEC in 2005, established two interrelated requirements governing access to displayed quotations: a prohibition on locking or crossing protected quotes without attempting to execute against them, and an access fee cap of $0.003 per share (three-tenths of a cent). The cap applies to fees charged for executing against protected quotations — the best displayed bids and offers that are subject to the trade-through prohibition.
The $0.003 cap was set at a level designed to balance several competing interests. It needed to be low enough to ensure that the cost of accessing the best quote on any venue did not discourage brokers from routing to that venue when it displayed the best price, because a prohibitively high access fee would effectively nullify the inter-market order protection rule. It also needed to be high enough to leave room for the rebates that exchanges pay to liquidity providers in maker-taker fee models, since exchanges price their rebates at slightly below the access fee they charge takers.
The access fee cap of $0.003 has remained unchanged since 2005, even as equity markets have undergone fundamental structural transformations. Its continued relevance has become a subject of significant debate in market structure reform discussions. Critics, particularly those concerned about the effects of maker-taker pricing on broker routing incentives, have advocated for substantially reducing or eliminating the cap, arguing that the rebate differential it enables is a primary driver of routing conflicts. Exchanges and market makers have opposed changes, arguing that rebates are essential compensation for the market-making services that provide displayed liquidity.
The SEC addressed the access fee cap question in its proposed Transaction Fee Pilot and in its 2022 equity market structure package. Proposals ranged from lowering the cap incrementally to testing a complete prohibition on exchange rebates within a pilot program framework, reflecting the ongoing tension between competition among exchanges and the distortions that fee-based routing incentives may create.