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The cheapest Stocks and Shares ISA managed by experts is interactive investor, it’s low cost (flat monthly fee) and is award-winning. We also recommend Beach, it's great if you're new to investing and has a great track record of growing money over time. If you want to make your own investments, Lightyear has low fees and an awesome app.
Keen to invest in a low-cost ISA? Look no further. We’ve researched the best Stocks and Shares ISAs out there to find the cheapest.
Beach offer a tax-free Stocks & Shares ISA managed by a team of experts and you can even set up a pension pot too. It's also easy to use with a great app.
Offers available
interactive investor have a great option where the experts manage the investments for you, called a managed ISA. You'll benefit from their very low fees, and easy to use platform (website and app), while having the experts look after your ISA, planning for great investment performance over time.
You can get set up in a few minutes online and they'll match you with the right investment plan for you. And that's it.
interactive investor are very well established and part of the huge financial company aberdeen. It's also has excellent customer service (and over the phone).
ii offers a range of account types to suit your financial goals, including an ISA (which can be self-managed or managed by their experts for the same fee), a Trading Account, and a three-time Which? Recommended Personal Pension (SIPP).
Their plans start from £4.99 a month, with a range of unique benefits as you move to higher-priced plans (such as free accounts for your friends and family). There’s also useful analytical tools, which are embedded in the platform, and are great for in-depth insight into the markets, helping to make smarter investment decisions.
Trades typically cost from £3.99 per investment (buying or selling), although regular investing monthly is free. Other fees apply too, depending on what you’re investing in.
If you’ve got a larger portfolio, ii’s flat fee makes investing very low cost. And if you’re just starting out, it’s still low cost overall, but the monthly fee will be a higher proportion of your investments while you’re building up your portfolio.
The UK-based customer service team is excellent and award-winning, with both online and phone available (which is very rare these days).
Overall, we think ii is great, and definitely worth checking out to see if it’s right for you.
Best for: experienced investors with a growing portfolio (benefit from the flat fee)
Nuts About Money rating: 5 stars
Fees: low
Minimum deposit: £25
Easy to use
A great and easy to use investing app. Add money from your bank or transfer your existing ISA, with the investments handled by experts. There’s a pension pot too.
The customer service is excellent, and has email and phone support based in the UK.
Beach is an easy to use investing app (and easy to set up), just add money and the experts handle everything. It’s all managed on your phone with a great app, and you can see your total savings whenever you like.
You’ll get an easy access pot (access money in around a week), which can be an ISA where all the money you make is tax-free (save up to £20,000 per tax year), and a standard account for those saving in addition to this (or who don’t want an ISA), where there’s no contribution limits (but also no tax-free benefits).
The investments are managed by experts from the largest investment company in the world (BlackRock). And they consider things like reducing climate change, meaning your savings could make the world a little better in future too.
There’s also an optional pension pot to save for retirement, so you can keep all your savings in one place, and if you’ve got lost or old pensions, Beach can also find them and move them over too.
Fees: a simple annual fee of up to 0.98% (minimum £4.99 per month).
Minimum deposit: £25
Customer service: excellent
Pros:
Cons:
Beach offer a tax-free Stocks & Shares ISA managed by a team of experts and you can even set up a pension pot too. It's also easy to use with a great app.
Beach offer a tax-free Stocks & Shares ISA managed by a team of experts and you can even set up a pension pot too. It's also easy to use with a great app.
Deposit £50, get 10 free trades
Lightyear is an awesome mobile app with very low cost investing.
There’s a decent range of investment options (over 4,000 stocks and ETFs), you can store multiple currencies, and the app itself is modern and super slick.
ETFs are commission-free, and stocks are max. £1/$1/€1 per order. There's also very low currency conversion fees of 0.35%, or you can hold the currency itself and avoid this fee.
You can invest with a tax-free ISA, a regular account and a business account.
And if you’ve got cash savings, you’ll also get one of the best rates possible with their Cash ISA (it matches the Bank of England base rate).
Get fractional shares worth up to £100
Trading 212 is a platform built for everyone in mind – there's over 2,000,000 customers! It’s great for beginners to get started, and perfect for experienced traders looking for more advanced trading options, such as CFDs, meaning you can trade with leverage (borrowed money), and trade the price going down (go short). There's all the trading tools you’ll need too, such as stop-loss and limit orders.
It’s one of the cheapest platforms out there with low fees when buying foreign stocks (currency conversion fee).
Platform experience: good
Device options: website & phone app
Support: 24/7
Stocks & Shares ISA: yes
Pension (SIPP): no
Range of investments: large
Stocks: yes
ETFs: yes
Fractional shares: yes
Crypto: no
CFDs: yes
Forex: no
Account fee: free
Cost per trade: free
Spread fees: yes (low)
Currency conversion fee: 0.15% on stocks, 0.50% on CFDs
• Low cost trading
• Huge range of investment options
• Hold and trade in multiple currencies
• Very low foreign exchange fees (0.15%)
• Offers an ISA
• Offers CFD trading (alongside regular investing)
• Great mobile app
• Lots of resources to learn
• Awesome customer service
• No minimum investment
• Fractional shares
• No personal pension (SIPP)
Above, we’ve recommended Stocks and Shares ISAs managed by experts, and Stocks and Shares ISAs managed by yourself. If you’re quite not sure what these mean, let’s run through them.
These are Stocks and Shares ISAs that are well, simply managed by experts. All you need to do is add your money, and the experts will handle the investments, and aim to grow your money sensibly over time – and they’re typically very good at it, it's their job after all!
You’ll pick from a few simple options, normally categorised into risk levels – and these range from lower risk to higher risk.
With higher risk, your money is likely to grow much more over a long period of time, but there will be more ups-and-downs along the way. With lower risk, there’s less ups-and-downs, but your money is likely to grow less over time.
Each risk level is suited to different types of people, but typically, if you’re looking to invest over a long timeframe (5+ years), a higher risk level is typically better suited. And if you’re looking to withdraw the cash within the next couple of years, a lower risk level is seen as a better option.
These types of ISAs are often called robo-advisors. And you’ll use easy to use technology such as a website or app to get started and track your money over time, while the experts (the advisors) manage your investments. To learn more, here’s the best robo-advisors.
With a self-managed Stocks and Shares ISA, instead of the experts, you’ll be the one making your own investment decisions. So, you’ll be deciding which investments to buy, when to buy, and when to sell. (We’ll cover the different types of investment you can make below.)
It can get pretty complicated, and ideally you’ll need to know how to build a well diversified investment portfolio for long-term growth – that means a suitable wide range of investments aimed at growing your money over time (often regarded as the best investment strategy).
That’s why we typically recommend most people to use an expert-managed investment platform (website or app) for their ISA. Here's where you can see our recommended expert-managed investment platforms.
A sensible option could be to open a General Investment Account (GIA), which is a standard investment account with no tax-free benefits, but also has no limits (like you have with an ISA, explained below). With this, you could make your own investments alongside the experts looking after your ISA.
If you want a reminder of our recommendations scroll up or click our top self-managed Stocks and Shares ISAs.
The types of investments you can buy within your own self-managed Stocks and Shares ISA can range quite a bit, we’ll cover the main types below. And, these are the same types of investments the experts will buy within an expert-managed ISA too.
Stocks and shares are where you own part of a company, you own a ‘share’ of the company. There’s often lots of shares for each company, and all of them combined equal the total valuation of the company (it’s market capitalisation).
The value of shares can change over time normally depending on the company’s performance, and the stock market in general.
Companies can also pay out their profits to shareholders and these are called dividends.
These shares are traded on stock exchanges (places to buy and sell investments), for instance the London Stock Exchange (LSE), in the UK, and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), in the USA.
Investment funds (such as mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs)), are a collection of lots of different investments, all pooled together into a single investment – which makes buying and selling a wide range of investments much easier. Investment funds are typically managed by experts, called fund managers.
There’s lots of different types of investment funds, for instance they could represent an industry, such as electric vehicles, or green energy. Or, they could represent a subsection of a stock exchange (called a stock index), such as the top 100 companies in the UK (called the FTSE 100).
A bond is where you essentially loan your cash to a large business (corporate bonds) or a government, in return for interest (similar to when you borrow money from a bank). Typically, these are regarded as lower risk than stocks and shares.
Property is also sometimes included within investments, and this is often commercial property such as office buildings and shops. These provide a rental income.
Let’s go back to the start quickly, and run through what a Stocks and Shares ISA actually is.
A Stocks and Shares ISA, also called an investment ISA, is an account to help you boost your savings over the years, by being completely tax-free. So, your money grows over time without having to pay Capital Gains Tax, Income Tax or Dividend Tax (the main taxes on investments).
You can save up to £20,000 per tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), which is called your annual ISA allowance. This is your annual allowance for all of your ISAs – there’s also a Cash ISA for cash savings, and a Lifetime ISA, for saving for your first home.
If you’re keen to learn even more, check out our guide: what is a Stocks and Shares ISA?
Note: ISA stands for Instant Savings Account. A government scheme to help you save more, and save tax-free.
Overall, the best Stocks and Shares ISAs are Beach¹ and interactive investor – they have great investment performance, low fees and are super easy to use. If you want to manage your own investments, the best Stocks and Shares ISAs are Lightyear and Trading 212 – they’re low cost and have a great range of investments to choose from.
Here’s the best Stocks and Shares ISAs to learn more, and see the full range of options.
The best Stocks and Shares ISA for beginners is also Beach¹. It’s super easy to use and having the experts on hand to help you and answer any questions you might have is a great option.
Not quite sure how fees actually work with Stocks and Shares ISAs? No problem. Let’s run through how everything works.
With an expert-managed Stocks and Shares ISA, you'll have 3 different types of fees, and they’re all percentages of the amount you have invested.
First, you’ll pay an account management fee (sometimes called a platform fee), which goes to the investment platform itself. These can range from 0.25% to 1.5%+.
You’ll then pay fees on the investments themselves. This is a fee within the investment fund, and goes to the experts managing the fund (the fund manager). This can be anywhere from 0.1% to 2% depending on the investment fund, however expect to pay around 0.25% with most investment platforms.
And finally, a small fee when the experts buy and sell investments, which is called a trading fee, or a spread fee. And this is typically around 0.07%.
So, all in all, expect to pay around 1% in total with an expert-managed Stocks and Shares ISA. Here's where you can view all our top expert-managed Stocks & Shares ISAs.
With self-managed investment platforms, the fees are a bit different. The more modern platforms have completely done away with account fees, they’re completely free to use and store your investments. They’ve also done away with fees to buy and sell investments too (e.g. shares).
In fact, with the best companies, the only fee you’ll pay is a currency conversion fee, and this is a fee to convert your local currency (Pounds) into the currency of the shares you want to buy. For instance, if you want to buy Microsoft shares in the US, you’ll need to convert your Pounds into US Dollars when you buy (it’s all handled automatically). This ranges from 0.15% all the way to 1.5%.
However, with more traditional stock brokers, you will pay an ISA account fee to hold your investments, and a fee to buy investments, called a share dealing fee.
These can be reasonable, however, it’s not the cheapest way to invest overall. One of the cheapest traditional stock brokers is AJ Bell¹, with just a 0.25% account fee, and a share dealing fee starting at £1.50 (but can go up to £9.95 depending on what you’re buying). Here’s our AJ Bell review to learn more.
Overall, the cheapest share dealing ISA is Trading 212¹ – it’s completely free except for a currency conversion fee, which is just 0.15%, and it has a great range of investment options to buy.
A Stocks and Shares ISA is a great account for saving and investing, but it’s not your only option. Let’s run through your other options:
A General Investment Account is a no-frills investment account that doesn’t have any tax-free benefits. However, there’s no limit on how much you can invest (there’s a £20,000 ISA allowance with an investment ISA).
A great idea is to have your investment ISA with an expert-managed investment platform, and then if you want to make your own investments, do that within a GIA.
If you want to open a GIA check out the best UK share dealing accounts.
A personal pension is perfect for saving for retirement, in addition to the State Pension (the government pension) and a workplace pension if you have one (a pension your employer will set up for you if you’re employed).
When you save into a personal pension, you’ll get a massive 25% bonus on everything you pay in. How good is that? And, you could claim back even more if you’re a higher rate taxpayer (40%) or additional rate taxpayer (45%), which you can do on your Self Assessment tax return.
Plus, your money will grow inside your pension completely tax-free!
You can save as much as £60,000 per year into your pension, or up to your total income (e.g. salary), whichever is lower.
Your money will be locked away until at least age 55, and when you want to withdraw it, the first 25% will be tax-free, which you can take as a tax-free lump sum, and you might pay tax on the remaining 75% depending on your income at the time.
You can learn lots more about these, and find the best pensions with our guide to the best pension providers. Spoiler: PensionBee¹ and Beach¹ top the list, they are super easy to use and low cost.
Yep. It’s perfectly safe to invest within a Stocks and Shares ISA. All ISA providers have to be authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). They’re the people who make sure financial companies are looking after you and your money.
You can find out if an ISA provider is authorised by the FCA by checking the FCA register.
This also means that you are protected by up to £85,000 under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). This protects you should anything bad happen to your ISA provider, such as going out of business.
However, with investments, your money is actually held with large banks, and all in your name, and can only be returned to you.
This doesn’t mean you can’t lose money however. Your investments can go up and down in value. Although with a solid investment strategy your money should grow over the long term.
That’s it for the cheapest Stocks and Shares ISA. We hope that makes ISAs much easier to understand, and you’re keen to get saving! It can really improve your financial future.
We recommend using an expert-managed investment ISA – simply let the experts grow your investments over time, while you sit back and relax. Best of all, our recommendations are great value. Simply scroll up to see the cheapest Stocks and Shares ISAs managed by experts.
If you want to make your own investments, all our recommendations are low cost and a great range of investments. Click here to see the cheapest self-managed ISA platforms.
Good luck saving and investing! Your future self will really thank you.
Beach offer a tax-free Stocks & Shares ISA managed by a team of experts and you can even set up a pension pot too. It's also easy to use with a great app.
We’d love to hear from you, and it will help others too.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
We're experts in all things investing, with many years of combined experience writing and talking about investing and trading. Some of our team were top financial advisors. We understand and love helping people learn more about both short term trading and investing for the long term – investing can be a great way to grow your money over time.
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Beach offer a tax-free Stocks & Shares ISA managed by a team of experts and you can even set up a pension pot too. It's also easy to use with a great app.