# Exchange fee

Also written exchange fees, market data fee.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/glossary/exchange-fee · next to Stock Market Data APIs*

**Definition:** The charge a trading venue levies for its own market data, set in a published schedule and owed by whichever distributor reports you as a subscriber. Your vendor collects it and passes it on, which is why two APIs built on identical technology cannot price alike. It is not the transaction or connectivity charge that a trade confirmation also calls an exchange fee.

## How it works

The fee belongs to the venue, not to the vendor. An exchange generates the data, publishes a schedule,
and licenses distributors to pass it on; the distributor reports how many subscribers it has
permissioned each month and is billed for them. Nothing in that chain is negotiated by you, and
nothing in it depends on how much data you request — which is why an API's own costs are dominated by
a document its engineers did not write.

The full stack, the words that move the price and the current figures are in
[what real-time market data costs](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/real-time-market-data-fees). This page is the term: what
gets called an exchange fee, and the billing mechanics that decide what it does to an invoice.

## Four different charges wear the name

- **A market data fee.** The monthly subscription charge for receiving a venue's prices, priced per
  subscriber, device or User ID for display use and per firm or platform for
  [non-display use](https://stockmarketstack.com/glossary/non-display-use). This is the one this catalogue means.
- **An access or port fee.** A charge for the connection itself, owed whether or not a single person
  reads a quote. On NYSE's pricing guide dated 14 May 2026, non-display use carries an 8,400 dollar
  access fee alongside the per-category charges; the OPRA fee schedule dated February 2026 prices
  direct access at 1,000 dollars a month. The tape's delayed data policy charges access fees purely
  for taking real-time information and delaying it — 1,250 dollars a month for Network A last sale
  information by direct access at the time of writing, less indirectly.
- **A transaction fee.** The per-share or per-contract charge on execution, which reaches you through
  your broker. In the same family is the fee an exchange or other self-regulatory organisation owes the
  SEC under section 31 of the Exchange Act on the aggregate dollar amount of certain sales, at a rate
  the Commission sets by advisory. It is the line most people have actually seen, and it has nothing to
  do with data.
- **A membership or licence fee.** What a firm pays to be a participant. Irrelevant to a data buyer,
  and a frequent source of confusion in forum answers about why data "costs thousands".

## What the mechanics do to a bill

Three properties make a market data exchange fee behave unlike software pricing, and all three sit in
the venues' own policy documents.

**The quantity is declared, not measured.** You are billed for
[entitlements](https://stockmarketstack.com/glossary/entitlement) your vendor reported, on capability rather than use. A
permission left switched on is a charge, and NYSE's policy package declines retroactive credit
adjustments older than sixty days on indirect billing — so the correction window is short.

**It is not pro-rated.** In NYSE's disaster recovery policy, where fees apply they apply for the
entire month and any use during a month attracts the full charge. Half a month of a feed is a month
of a feed.

**The schedule changes independently of your contract.** Fees are set by the venue and revised on
notice — the tape's delay period itself can be respecified on sixty days' written notice — so the
number your vendor quoted is downstream of a document that can move without your involvement.

That is also the arithmetic behind "global coverage". There is no global market data fee; there are
thirty-odd venue schedules, and outside the US they are shaped as annual licences rather than
per-user counts, owed before a vendor's first customer. A cheap API covering US equities and
end-of-day everything else is not being lazy. It is declining to pay thirty annual licences.

## Why it matters here

The practical test on a card is whether exchange fees are itemised or bundled, and neither answer is
wrong. [Databento](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/databento) itemises, which is the shape you want when you need one venue
deeply and want to see what the venue is charging rather than what the vendor averaged.
[Alpaca Market Data](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/alpaca-market-data) bundles the consolidated tape into a plan, which is the
shape you want when the tape is enough and you would rather not read a schedule at all.
[Cboe DataShop](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/cboe-datashop) is the third shape: historical files bought outright, where the
per-subscriber machinery never starts.

Two things follow. First, compare plans on the exchange fee assumption rather than the headline — two
APIs with the same monthly number differ entirely once your category is professional, non-display or
redistributed. Second, every one of those answers is yours to establish before shopping, because a
vendor cannot discount a fee it does not own. Start from [market data APIs](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/market-data-apis)
with the answers in hand, or from [delayed data](https://stockmarketstack.com/glossary/delayed-data) if it turns out nothing you
are building needs the live number at all.

## Where you will meet this

- [Databento](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/databento.md)
- [Alpaca Market Data](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/alpaca-market-data.md)
- [IQFeed](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/iqfeed.md)
- [Cboe DataShop](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/cboe-datashop.md)
- [AlgoSeek](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/algoseek.md)
- [ATAS](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/atas.md)
- [Bookmap](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/bookmap.md)
- [Daloopa](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/daloopa.md)
- [Fiscal.ai](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/fiscal-ai.md)
- [IMF Data](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/imf-data.md)
- [Intrinio](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/intrinio.md)
- [Jigsaw daytradr](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/jigsaw-trading.md)

## FAQ

### My broker's confirmation lists an exchange fee of a few cents. Is that the same thing?

No. That is a transaction charge on the trade, alongside the regulatory fee an exchange or other self-regulatory organisation owes the SEC on the dollar value of certain sales. A market data exchange fee is a monthly subscription charge for receiving prices, has nothing to do with whether you trade, and is billed through whoever supplies your data rather than through your broker's execution path.

### Can my vendor absorb the exchange fee?

It can bundle it, which is not the same as removing it. A vendor holding a distributor licence pays the venue per subscriber it reports, so a plan with real-time data and no separate line for exchange fees has priced an assumed category into the headline number. That works until your category changes, which is the moment a bundled plan and an itemised one stop looking alike.

## Sources

1. [NYSE Proprietary Market Data Pricing Guide](https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/data/NYSE_Market_Data_Pricing.pdf) — New York Stock Exchange, 2026-05-14
2. [NYSE Market Data Policy Package](https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/data/NYSE_Market_Data_Complete_Policy_Package.pdf) — New York Stock Exchange, read 2026-09-21
3. [Delayed Market Data (Network A and Network B) Policy](https://www.ctaplan.com/publicdocs/ctaplan/notifications/trader-update/Policy%20-%20Delayed%20Market%20Data.pdf) — Consolidated Tape Association, read 2026-09-21
4. [Options Price Reporting Authority Fee Schedule](https://cdn.opraplan.com/documents/OPRA_Fee_Schedule.pdf) — Options Price Reporting Authority, 2026-02-26
5. [Fee Rate Advisories](https://www.sec.gov/rules-regulations/fee-rate-advisories) — US Securities and Exchange Commission, read 2026-09-21

*Last updated 2026-09-21. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*