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Rival investment platforms have benefited from a surge in wealthy customer departures from Hargreaves Lansdown as the UK’s largest “DIY” investment site suffers a backlash over recent fee changes.
The Bristol-based company announced at the end of January that it will more than treble a charge cap paid by investors for holding shares in Isas from March, in a blow to better-off customers.
While the change came within a broader fee alteration that Hargreaves expected to reduce or not increase costs for eight out of 10 clients, several rivals confirmed to the FT that they had each seen a surge in switches from the platform in the week after the announcement, cumulatively running well into the thousands.
Hargreaves also confirmed that almost half of the transfer requests since the fee shake-up were from roughly 400,000 clients who would have paid more from March.
Investment site AJ Bell said it had seen “a big spike in applications from HL customers” following the adjustment. In a typical month, AJ Bell receives inbound transfers in the high hundreds of millions of pounds from other platforms and on a normal day 10-15 per cent of this would be from HL. However, on the day after HL’s announcement this jumped to 50 per cent.
Another platform, IG, said that as of Wednesday last week, inbound transfer requests from HL had reached 94 per cent of 2025’s total volume. The mean transfer value rose from £95,000 last year to £280,000 in the same period since the fee changes, it added.
Interactive Investor told the FT it had also seen “a large influx” of customer transfers from HL since its announcement. The number of Sipp, Isa and general investment account switches had almost tripled in the week following the price change, compared with the previous week.
Freetrade said its average daily transfer in requests had increased threefold since January 22, compared with the average total in all of December 2025, with Hargreaves one of the leading sources.
Under the plans, the annual charge for holding stocks, ETFs and investment trusts among other products within Isas will rise from a £45 cap to £150 a year.
A Hargreaves customer with £100,000 in a stocks-and-shares Isa who makes 12 share trades in a year will therefore pay £233.40 from March 1, up from £188.40, according to research by Boring Money. Meanwhile, a customer in the same circumstances would pay £179.88 at Interactive Investor, £102 at AJ Bell or £322 at Barclays.
The changes are part of a broader package of measures that included cutting the account charge from 0.45 per cent a year to 0.35 per cent and share dealing from £11.95 per trade to £6.95. Online fund dealing will incur a charge of £1.95 for those who do not have a regular automated investment plan, having previously been free.
Chris Bredin at The Lang Cat, a consultancy, welcomed the headline platform fee cut and said it moved Hargreaves “closer to where the wider market has been heading for some time”.
But he cautioned that the Isa charge cap and other fee increases “may not be well received, especially among long-standing customers . . . accustomed to simple pricing structures”.
Hargreaves Lansdown’s move to cut costs comes after it was acquired by private equity firms, including CVC Capital Partners in a £5.4bn deal that was completed last year.
Competition to reduce fees has increased in recent years, as digital upstarts have entered the fray.
Julian Roberts, an analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank, said “smaller clients will benefit” from Hargreaves Lansdown’s fee overhaul, while “bigger ones will lose, and the move will, overall, nudge people towards funds over shares”.
Hargreaves Lansdown previously said that only 3 per cent of clients will experience an increase of more than £10 a month.
Simon Belsham, chief client officer at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “We did a lot of analysis to determine the best way to reinvest in value, basing our decisions on a review of client behaviour and need.”
He added that some clients had contacted the platform to “thank us” for the changes, while some had stayed as a result.