Bitcoin ETF Expense Ratios Compared (2026)

TL;DR. Thirteen US spot Bitcoin ETFs trade today and the published fee runs from 0.14% (Morgan Stanley's MSBT, listed 8 April 2026) to 1.50% (Grayscale GBTC). Eleven of the thirteen sit at 0.25% or below. The last launch waiver in the group, VanEck's 0% on HODL's first $2.5bn, expired on 31 July 2026, so every fund now charges its headline rate for the first time since January 2024. On $100,000 held for ten years, 0.25% costs roughly $2,469 and 0.15% roughly $1,489; GBTC's 1.50% costs $13,929. The fee isn't the whole price, though. Over the ten sessions to 22 September 2026 IBIT traded about $1.82bn a day while WisdomTree's BTCW traded $477,000 and printed nothing at all in 68 of the 78 five-minute windows of a regular session.

Every US spot Bitcoin ETF and what it charges

Everything below comes from each trust's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, filed with the SEC that August. More recent issuer figures are noted underneath. For the plain-English version of what these funds are, start with what a Bitcoin ETF actually is.

Ticker	Fund	Exchange	First traded	Fee	Launch waiver and when it ended	Bitcoin custodian	Net assets, 30 Jun 2026
MSBT	Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust	NYSE Arca	8 Apr 2026	0.14%	None	Coinbase Custody and BNY	$298.98m
BTC	Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust ETF	NYSE Arca	31 Jul 2024	0.15%	None	Coinbase Custody	$3.19bn
EZBC	Franklin Bitcoin ETF	Cboe BZX	11 Jan 2024	0.19%	0% on first $10bn, to 2 Aug 2024	Coinbase Custody	$334.7m
BITB	Bitwise Bitcoin ETF	NYSE Arca	11 Jan 2024	0.20%	0% on first $1bn, to 10 Jul 2024	Coinbase Custody (BNY for cash)	$2.13bn
HODL	VanEck Bitcoin ETF	Cboe BZX	11 Jan 2024	0.20%	0% on first $1.5bn to 24 Nov 2024, then first $2.5bn to 31 Jul 2026	Gemini and Coinbase Custody	$958.8m
ARKB	ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF	Cboe BZX	11 Jan 2024	0.21%	0% for nine months or first $1bn; assets crossed it in 2024	Coinbase, BitGo (x2), Anchorage	$1.89bn
IBIT	iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF	Nasdaq	11 Jan 2024	0.25%	0.12% on first $5bn for twelve months	Coinbase Custody (Anchorage backup)	$43.39bn
FBTC	Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund	Cboe BZX	11 Jan 2024	0.25%	0% to 31 Jul 2024; accrual began 1 Aug	Fidelity Digital Assets, N.A.	$10.30bn
BTCO	Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF	Cboe BZX	11 Jan 2024	0.25%	0% on first $5bn for six months	Coinbase Custody	$315.8m
BRRR	CoinShares Bitcoin ETF	Nasdaq	11 Jan 2024	0.25%	0% from 11 Jan to 10 Apr 2024	Coinbase, BitGo, Komainu (Jersey)	$342.4m
BTCW	WisdomTree Bitcoin Fund	Cboe BZX	11 Jan 2024	0.25%	0% on first $1bn for six months	Coinbase Custody (BNY for cash)	$136.5m
OBTC	Osprey Bitcoin Trust	Nasdaq	19 Dec 2025 (uplisted from OTC)	0.49%	None; rate cut to 0.49% at the uplisting	Coinbase Custody (U.S. Bank for cash)	$55.4m
GBTC	Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF	NYSE Arca	11 Jan 2024 (uplisted)	1.50%	Never waived	Coinbase Custody	$8.14bn

Four points the table compresses. IBIT's fee began accruing at its 5 January 2024 inception, but the shares started trading on 11 January with the rest. HODL charged 0.25% until 21 February 2024, then cut to 0.20% during the fee war. BTCW's 0.25% is worth stating plainly because several data feeds, our own funds endpoint until recently included, carried 0.30%; the June 2026 10-Q and the WisdomTree fact sheet both say 0.25%. And Osprey is the one most lists miss: OBTC was an OTC-quoted trust for years, moved to Nasdaq on 19 December 2025 and cut its fee to 0.49%, down from 1.02% the year before. It's the only one of the thirteen our flow tracker doesn't follow.

Newer issuer snapshots: $68.34bn for IBIT on 22 September 2026, $3.32bn for BITB on 21 September, $436.5m for BRRR on 17 September. Bitcoin rallied through September, so these sit above the June marks. One product that looks like it belongs here and doesn't: the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA), effective June 2026 at 0.65%, holds IBIT shares and writes options on them rather than holding bitcoin. Every spot fund we track is in the funds directory, and the roster view is in every US spot Bitcoin ETF in one table.

What the fee actually takes out of your position

The sponsor fee isn't billed. It accrues daily against net asset value and the trust pays it by handing over bitcoin, which is why your share count stays flat while the bitcoin behind each share slowly shrinks. Bitwise accrues 0.20% a year against holdings and settles in coin; Grayscale does the same at 1.50%; Fidelity calls its 0.25% a unified fee and pays most fund expenses out of it. Because the accrual is daily and compounds, ten years at 0.25% costs slightly less than ten times one year. The arithmetic on a static position, no price change:

Fee	Funds at this rate	$10,000 / 1 yr	$10,000 / 3 yr	$10,000 / 5 yr	$10,000 / 10 yr	$100,000 / 10 yr
0.14%	MSBT	$14	$42	$70	$139	$1,390
0.15%	BTC mini	$15	$45	$75	$149	$1,489
0.19%	EZBC	$19	$57	$95	$188	$1,882
0.20%	BITB, HODL	$20	$60	$100	$198	$1,980
0.21%	ARKB	$21	$63	$104	$208	$2,078
0.25%	IBIT, FBTC, BTCO, BRRR, BTCW	$25	$75	$124	$247	$2,469
0.49%	OBTC	$49	$146	$242	$478	$4,782
1.50%	GBTC	$149	$440	$723	$1,393	$13,929

Two readings of the same table. Inside the 0.14% to 0.25% band, ten years on $10,000 separates the cheapest fund from the dearest by $108: real, and also less than one bad fill. Between 0.25% and 1.50% the same ten years cost $1,146 more per $10,000, and at that distance the fee stops being a tie-breaker and becomes the decision.

The dollar figures assume a flat bitcoin price, because the fee is charged on assets rather than on your cost basis. If the position appreciates, the same percentage lands on a bigger number and the dollar cost rises with it. The percentage drag doesn't change.

The waiver era ended on 31 July 2026

For most of 2024 the published fee and the fee you paid were different numbers, and the gap was the whole marketing story of the launch. Nine of the ten January 2024 funds waived something, GBTC being the exception, and the windows are in the last column of the first table above. Three of them still matter.

• FBTC had one, whatever you have read. A Fee Waiver Agreement effective 9 January 2024 waived the entire sponsor fee through 31 July 2024, with accrual at 0.25% starting on 1 August. The FY2024 10-K states this in both the notes and the management discussion. Our own FBTC review says Fidelity never ran one, and it's wrong.
• BRRR ran the shortest, 11 January to 10 April 2024. Of $1,263,370 in sponsor fees accrued during 2024, $150,399 was waived. Invesco waived $480,739 on BTCO over its six months.
• HODL was the last one standing. VanEck ran 0% on the first $1.5bn from 12 March to 24 November 2024, replaced it with 0% on the first $2.5bn, and extended that twice, finally to 31 July 2026. The fund never reached the threshold, so holders paid nothing for more than two years and now pay 0.20%.

Every US spot Bitcoin ETF now charges its published rate, which makes the fee table directly comparable for the first time. It also means anyone who picked HODL for its zero fee should check what they're paying. Our HODL review was written while the waiver was live and describes it as having expired in 2025, wrong in both directions.

The fee isn't the price: spread and liquidity

A basis point of fee costs you a basis point a year. A basis point of spread costs you a basis point the moment you trade, and again when you leave. On a two-year hold those are the same size. On a two-month hold the spread is twelve times more important.

Three issuers publish a 30-day median bid-ask spread: 0.02% for IBIT on 22 September 2026, 0.02% for BITB on 21 September, 0.05% for BRRR on 17 September. The rest don't, so we measured the next best thing from our own five-minute price and volume series across the ten regular sessions to 22 September 2026. A full US session holds 78 five-minute windows, and a fund that doesn't print a trade in most of them isn't a fund you can exit quietly. OBTC is absent below because our intraday series doesn't cover it.

Ticker	Fee	Median turnover	Windows traded (of 78)	Flat windows	Published spread
IBIT	0.25%	$1.82bn	78	0.0%	0.02%
FBTC	0.25%	$255m	78	0.0%	n/a
GBTC	1.50%	$94.5m	78	0.1%	n/a
BTC mini	0.15%	$65.3m	78	0.0%	n/a
ARKB	0.21%	$41.8m	78	0.6%	n/a
BITB	0.20%	$38.2m	78	2.1%	0.02%
HODL	0.20%	$17.4m	78	4.9%	n/a
MSBT	0.14%	$11.9m	78	3.9%	n/a
EZBC	0.19%	$6.4m	64	26.5%	n/a
BTCO	0.25%	$2.06m	26	55.4%	n/a
BRRR	0.25%	$0.81m	22	60.0%	0.05%
BTCW	0.25%	$0.48m	10	58.6%	n/a

The bottom four lines are the interesting ones. BTCW charges exactly what IBIT charges and turns over about one 3,800th as much. BTCO and BRRR sit at the same 0.25% and are silent for over half the trading day. A fund that trades in 10 of 78 windows has no continuous market to speak of, and a market order into it is the day's print.

When does a lower fee pay back a wider spread?

Plain division. Break-even in years equals the extra round-trip cost in basis points divided by the annual fee saving in basis points. A round trip pays the spread twice, so a fund quoting 0.10% against one quoting 0.02% costs about 16 extra basis points to get in and out.

Comparison	Fee saving per year	+5 bp round trip	+10 bp	+20 bp	+50 bp
MSBT 0.14% vs IBIT 0.25%	11 bp	0.5 yr	0.9 yr	1.8 yr	4.5 yr
BTC mini 0.15% vs IBIT 0.25%	10 bp	0.5 yr	1.0 yr	2.0 yr	5.0 yr
EZBC 0.19% vs IBIT 0.25%	6 bp	0.8 yr	1.7 yr	3.3 yr	8.3 yr
BITB 0.20% vs IBIT 0.25%	5 bp	1.0 yr	2.0 yr	4.0 yr	10.0 yr

On $10,000 a 20 bp round-trip penalty is $20; on $100,000 it's $200. The years column is the same either way, because both sides scale together. Three conclusions fall out.

1. BITB against IBIT is free money. Both publish a 0.02% median spread, so there's nothing to pay back and the 5 bp saving starts on day one. Same for the Grayscale mini, on the evidence of its $65m of daily turnover.
2. EZBC's 6 bp needs a real hold. Franklin's fund is quiet for a quarter of the session. If that costs 20 extra basis points on the round trip, the cheaper fee takes better than three years to catch up.
3. BTCW, BTCO and BRRR have nothing to pay you back with. They charge the same 0.25% as IBIT and FBTC. Whatever the spread costs, the fee saving is zero, so the break-even never arrives.

None of this replaces checking the premium or discount before you press the button, a separate cost covered in premium and discount to NAV. The full pre-trade routine is in the selection checklist.

GBTC: what 135 basis points have cost, in public numbers

Grayscale runs both ends of the fee table. GBTC charges 1.50%; the Bitcoin Mini Trust, spun out of it on 31 July 2024 with a tenth of its bitcoin, charges 0.15%. Same sponsor, same custodian, same asset, ten times the price.

For a holder, two years of that gap costs $266 per $10,000 and $2,656 per $100,000. At fund level it's larger. From the trusts' own statements of operations, GBTC paid its sponsor $290.5m during 2024, $280.6m during 2025 and $84.7m in the first half of 2026, about $655.8m since the January 2024 conversion. The mini trust, holding $3.19bn, paid $2.8m over the same six months.

Set that against BlackRock. In the six months to 30 June 2026 IBIT collected $72.1m in sponsor fees on $43.39bn of net assets; GBTC collected $84.7m on $8.14bn. The fund five times smaller earned its sponsor more money.

Holders have been voting. GBTC held 619,526 bitcoin on 31 December 2023, 205,399 a year later and 138,505.76 on 30 June 2026, a 78% decline, some of it the mini spin-off and most of it redemptions. Our daily flow series through 22 September 2026 puts cumulative net outflow at $27.84bn, against $64.86bn of net inflow to IBIT, $10.87bn to FBTC and $2.93bn to the mini. GBTC is the only US spot Bitcoin ETF with a negative cumulative flow, and it's negative by more than any fund but IBIT is positive. The series runs day by day on the Bitcoin ETF flows tracker.

Why anyone stays: switching means selling, and holders who bought in 2020 or 2021 are sitting on gains that would be taxed on exit. For them 1.50% is the price of deferral, and the maths is personal rather than general. Our GBTC analysis and IBIT vs GBTC work through it. For new money there's no version that makes sense.

MSBT moved the floor to 0.14%

The cohort's pricing held still for two years and then moved. Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust commenced operations on 7 April 2026, listed on NYSE Arca on 8 April under the ticker MSBT, and charges what its filings call a Delegated Sponsor Fee of 0.14%, paid to Morgan Stanley Investment Management. It's the cheapest US spot Bitcoin ETF, and it launched at that rate with no introductory waiver at all, a different playbook from January 2024.

It's also the first of these trusts to name BNY as a bitcoin custodian alongside Coinbase Custody, and it prices off a CoinDesk Indices benchmark rather than the CME CF rate most of the cohort uses. The fund held $298.98m and 5,059 bitcoin at 30 June 2026 after issuing 17.9m shares in its first quarter. Our flow series has it taking in $733.2m through 22 September 2026, already more than CoinShares, Franklin, Invesco and WisdomTree combined. Distribution through a wirehouse does that. MSBT is one of the launches in every new crypto ETF of 2026.

Whether 0.14% holds is the open question. Neither BlackRock nor Fidelity has moved off 0.25% in two and a half years, despite EZBC undercutting them by six basis points since 2024. Scale, not price, has been winning.

A cheap fee doesn't keep a fund alive

Hashdex is the cautionary case. Its Bitcoin ETF, ticker DEFI on NYSE Arca, charged 0.94% at first, cut to 0.90% on 27 March 2024, then cut again to 0.25% on 10 February 2025, level with IBIT and FBTC. It didn't help: the fund held $13.3m and 200,000 shares on 30 June 2026.

On 3 August 2026 Hashdex Asset Management filed an 8-K announcing a plan to liquidate the fund, end the continuous offering and deregister the shares. Trading was suspended at the close on 17 August, with assets of roughly $14.7m as of 30 July. On 24 August the sponsor sold the trust's entire bitcoin position over the counter to an unaffiliated third party and distributed cash pro rata to shareholders. A Form 15 followed on 3 September 2026. DEFI was the fourteenth US spot Bitcoin ETF; thirteen are left.

The lesson for the bottom of the fee table: a closure is a forced sale on the sponsor's calendar, not yours, and in a taxable account it realises whatever gain you had. Choosing between two funds that both charge 0.25%, the one with $136m carries a risk the one with $43bn doesn't.

How to choose on cost

• Holding for years, in size: the fee compounds. MSBT at 0.14% and the Grayscale mini at 0.15% are cheapest and both trade enough to get in and out of. On $100,000 over ten years they save roughly $1,000 against the 0.25% tier.
• Trading in and out, or buying in tranches: the spread dominates. IBIT and BITB both publish a 0.02% median, and IBIT's $1.8bn of daily turnover means a large order doesn't move it. Pay the extra fee, keep the execution.
• You want non-Coinbase custody: FBTC holds at Fidelity Digital Assets, an affiliate of the sponsor; HODL splits between Gemini and Coinbase; ARKB and BRRR spread across three or four. The mechanics are in how Bitcoin ETF custody works.
• You're in an IRA or 401(k): the available list is usually short, and the platform may settle this before fees do.
• You already hold GBTC: the question isn't which fund is cheaper, it's whether the tax bill on switching beats the fee you'll pay from here. At 1.50% that break-even arrives sooner than most assume.
• You're looking at a fund under $500m: weigh closure risk alongside the fee, and check what it trades in a normal session first.

Where the fee war goes next

Bitcoin is where issuers fought hardest, and the result is a tight band with one legacy outlier. The newer asset classes look nothing like it. Ethereum funds run from 0.14% to 2.50% with staking revenue splits on top, and those splits move the economics far more than the sponsor fee does. The 2025 and 2026 altcoin launches are dearer again: several sit at 0.30% to 0.50%, and the Canary Litecoin and HBAR funds charge 0.95%, four times the Bitcoin median, because there's less competition and much less scale to spread costs across. Where a fund stakes, the sponsor's cut of rewards is usually the bigger number, and comparing headline fees across assets without it is a mistake. For the flow side, how to analyse ETF flows without fooling yourself covers the traps, and the fund directory carries fees and sizes across all thirteen tracked assets.

FAQ

Sources and further reading

• Forms 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, filed August 2026, on EDGAR: IBIT, FBTC, GBTC, MSBT and OBTC. Fees, waivers, custodians, net assets and bitcoin held come from these filings.
• VanEck Bitcoin ETF Form 10-Q, quarter ended 30 June 2026, for the 25 November 2024 to 31 July 2026 waiver window and the Gemini and Coinbase custodians: sec.gov.
• Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund Form 10-K for 2024, for the Fee Waiver Agreement effective 9 January 2024 and its 31 July 2024 expiry: sec.gov.
• Hashdex Commodities Trust Forms 8-K of 3 and 24 August 2026 and Form 15-12G of 3 September 2026: sec.gov.
• Issuer pages for September 2026 net assets and published spreads: ishares.com (IBIT), bitbetf.com (BITB), coinshares.com (BRRR).
• Daily data: Bitcoin ETF flows tracker and the fund directory. Turnover and five-minute trading statistics are our own, computed from intraday price and volume series over the ten sessions ending 22 September 2026.