How to read Rule 605 and Rule 606 execution and routing reports

Two US rules make execution and routing data public, and both are routinely cited in arguments about which broker fills best. This page does not have a view on that question, and neither do the reports. It explains what each file contains, who must publish it, where to find it, and the parts of the execution that neither one can see.

The rules apply to orders in US-listed stocks, and Rule 606 also to listed options. A trading platform is not a broker: when you route stock orders from MultiCharts, Quantower or MotiveWave to a broker you connected, that broker's reports are the ones that describe your orders. Futures, which are the main business of platforms such as NinjaTrader and Sierra Chart, are not covered by either rule.

How it works

An order passes through two parties these rules care about. The broker receives it from you and decides where to send it. The market center executes it: an exchange, an exchange market maker, an OTC market maker such as a wholesaler, or an alternative trading system. A large broker can be both.

• Rule 606 is the broker's account of the first step: where it sent orders, and what money changed hands with each destination. Quarterly.
• Rule 605 is the account of the second: how orders were filled, measured against the national best bid and offer. Monthly. Until the 2024 amendments only market centers published it. From the compliance date of 1 August 2026, brokers that introduce or carry 100,000 or more customer accounts publish one too.

Neither is a record of your trades. Both are aggregates over everybody's orders that fit the rule's definitions, and the definitions leave a good deal out.

Rule 606: where the broker sent orders, and the money

Rule 606(a) requires every broker or dealer to publish, for each calendar quarter, a report on its routing of non-directed orders in NMS stocks submitted on a held basis, and of non-directed customer orders in listed options, broken down by month. It is due within one month after the quarter ends and must stay on a free public website for three years, built with the SEC's XML schema and PDF renderer. The report for the third quarter of 2026 is due by the end of October 2026.

Three definitions decide what is in it. A directed order is one where the customer told the broker which venue to use; everything else is non-directed, and only non-directed orders are counted. A held order is one the broker must try to execute immediately; a not held order gives the broker discretion over price and time, as the SEC's 2024 release summarises it, and is outside the public report. And a customer order under Rule 600 excludes any stock order worth $200,000 or more, and any options order worth $50,000 or more.

Each report has three sections, S&P 500 stocks, other NMS stocks and options, and each section gives:

• the share of orders that were non-directed, split into market, marketable limit, non-marketable limit and other orders;
• the ten venues that received the most non-directed orders, plus any venue that received 5% or more, with the share of each order type sent to each;
• for each of those venues, the net payment for order flow received, profit-sharing payments received, transaction fees paid and rebates received, as a dollar total and per share, for each order type;
• a written discussion of the material terms of each relationship, including volume-based tiers, incentives for reaching a volume threshold, penalties for missing one and minimum flow agreements.

Read it for what it is: a list of destinations and the economics attached to them. A venue named in 606 is where the broker sent the order "for execution". If that venue is a wholesaler that routes part of it on, the onward route is in the wholesaler's own reports, not the broker's. And 606(a) reports no execution prices at all.

Two further reports exist only on request. Under 606(b)(1) a customer can ask for the venue each of their orders went to over the previous six months, whether each was directed, and the time of any resulting execution, and the broker must say at least once a year in writing that this is available. Under 606(b)(3), a customer who places not held orders can ask for a six-month report, due within seven business days, with per-venue fill rates, average fill size, net fees or rebates in cents per 100 shares to four decimal places, and the shares executed at the midpoint and on each side of the spread. A broker is excused from 606(b)(3) where not held orders were under 5% of the NMS stock shares it received from customers over the prior six months, and for any customer who averaged under $1,000,000 a month in not held orders.

Rule 605: how orders were filled

Rule 605 produces two files a month, both due within one month after the month they cover and both kept online for three years.

Who files. Every market center, and, under paragraph (a)(7), any broker or dealer that introduces or carries 100,000 or more customer accounts trading NMS stocks, counting accounts held through an omnibus clearing arrangement. A firm that is both reports each function separately. The SEC's adopting release estimated that about 85 broker-dealers were above the threshold and that together they handled over 98% of customer accounts. The amendments were adopted on 6 March 2024 and took effect on 14 June 2024. Compliance, first set for 14 December 2025, was extended to 1 August 2026, so August 2026 is the first month reported under the amended rule.

Which orders count. A covered order is a market or limit order received during regular hours while a national best bid and offer is being disseminated, plus a non-marketable limit order received outside regular hours that executes during them. It excludes any order with special handling: market-on-open and market-on-close orders, all-or-none orders, not held orders, orders for other than regular settlement, and orders at prices unrelated to the market. A fill at the closing auction is not in a 605 report, and neither is anything executed before 9:30 a.m. or after 4 p.m.

The detailed report is categorised by security, by order type and by order size. The order types run from market orders through marketable limit and immediate-or-cancel orders to midpoint-or-better, executable non-marketable and stop orders. The size categories, rebuilt in 2024, combine a notional band (under $250, then $250 to $1,000, $1,000 to $5,000, $5,000 to $10,000, $10,000 to $20,000, $20,000 to $50,000, $50,000 to $200,000 and $200,000 or more) with whether the order was for less than a share, an odd lot or at least a round lot: 24 categories. Before the amendments, orders under 100 shares were not reported at all, and orders of 10,000 shares or more were excluded under a 2001 exemption.

The columns that matter most:

• Effective spread: for a buy, twice the execution price minus the midpoint of the national best bid and offer at the time the order was received; for a sell, the reverse. Reported as an average, as a percentage of the midpoint, and as a ratio to the quoted spread. A ratio under 100% means executions were, on average, inside the quoted spread.
• Price improvement: shares executed better than the quote, at the quote and outside it, with the average amount per share. Since 2024 there is a second set measured against the best available displayed price, which also counts the best odd-lot order on the consolidated feed, so a fill can look improved against the NBBO and not against the odd-lot price.
• Realized spread: the same calculation as the effective spread, but against the midpoint at fixed intervals after the execution, at 50 milliseconds, 1 second, 15 seconds, 1 minute and 5 minutes. It measures where the midpoint went after the fill, which is a property of the market and the order flow as much as of the venue.
• Speed: shares executed in time buckets running from under 100 microseconds to 5 minutes or more, measured from receipt, or for a non-marketable limit order from the moment it became executable.
• For limit orders: how many received any fill, and how many shares traded in the market at prices that could have filled them while they were live, counted market-wide and on exchanges only.

The summary report is the readable one. Paragraph (a)(2) limits it to market and marketable limit orders, split into S&P 500 stocks and other stocks and into nine size rows: the eight notional bands and a combined row for every order under $200,000. Its twelve columns are average order size in shares and in dollars, average midpoint, percentage executed at the quote or better, percentage price-improved, net percentage price improvement, percentage effective spread, percentage quoted spread, the effective-to-quoted ratio, percentage realized spread at 15 seconds and at 1 minute, and average execution speed in milliseconds. It is a CSV built to the SEC's schema with a PDF renderer; the technical specification names each file with the reporter's code and the month, and puts the designated participant's code in the first column.

The April 2026 exemptions. An SEC order of 1 April 2026 adjusted the scope before the first reports. A customer-facing broker that executes fractional shares only so customers can sell fractions left by a dividend reinvestment plan or a stock dividend need not file a separate market-center report for that activity. The order also replaced the exemptions for orders around trading halts and crossed markets, extended the one for inactively traded securities to brokers, and rescinded the old exclusion of manually received orders.

Where the files are

Rule 606 reports are on each broker's own website. The rule names no central registry; it requires a free, readily accessible site and three years of history. Brokers usually file it under order routing or regulatory disclosures.

Rule 605 reports are also on each firm's own site, but there is an index. Under the Rule 605 NMS plan, every reporting firm designates a self-regulatory organization, which assigns it a reporter identification code and posts a link to its reports. On 9 October 2026 FINRA's page listed 230 firms that had designated it: 124 broker-dealers, 61 OTC market makers, 25 alternative trading systems, 19 single-dealer trading systems and one exchange market maker. Each exchange can act as designated participant too, and lists its own reports and the firms that chose it. The SEC's schemas page carries the renderers for both report types, so a downloaded file can be turned into the standard PDF layout.

What the reports cannot tell you

The rule says it first. Rule 605's preamble states that its disclosures "do not encompass all of the factors that may be important to investors in evaluating the order routing services of a broker-dealer", that any firm's statistics mix orders from many brokers with different objectives, and that the information "alone does not create a reliable basis to address whether any particular broker-dealer failed to obtain the most favorable terms reasonably available". Beyond that:

• Different order mixes are not comparable. A venue's 605 averages over every broker that sent it orders. Two venues receiving different stocks, sizes and times of day will produce different spreads and improvement figures, whatever their quality. The summary's S&P 500 split and size rows narrow this; they do not remove it.
• 606 has the money, 605 has the quality, and they do not join. A 606 names venues and payments per order type for a quarter; a 605 describes the venue's whole flow for a month. Nothing links the orders in one to the orders in the other.
• The excluded orders are the ones many active traders use. Not held, auction, all-or-none and extended-hours orders are outside 605, and directed and not held orders are outside 606(a). If you pick the destination exchange on the order ticket, your order is directed and absent from the broker's public routing statistics, though still in a 606(b)(1) report on request.
• Fees and commissions are elsewhere. 605 measures price against the quote. What you paid the broker is on your statements, and 606 shows only what passed between the broker and the venues.
• The word "order flow" means two things. In "payment for order flow" it is a broker's stream of customer orders, as defined in Rule 10b-10. On a footprint chart it is the prints and book updates from a venue. The reports concern the first.

What you can do about it

Find your broker's 606. Search the broker's site for "606" or "order routing". Open the latest quarter, then read the S&P 500 and other-stocks sections separately, because routing often differs between them. For each listed venue, note the share of market and marketable limit orders sent there and the net payment or fee per share in the same row. Then read the narrative section for volume tiers and minimum-flow terms, which the numbers do not show.

Ask for your own routing report. A 606(b)(1) request returns the venue and execution time for each of your orders over six months. If you use not held orders at an average of $1,000,000 a month or more, ask for the 606(b)(3) report too, which comes back within seven business days with fill rates and fees by venue.

Read the 605 for the venues your broker routes to. Take the top venues from the 606, find each one's reporter on FINRA's list or the exchange's own site, and download the summary report for the same months. Compare like with like: the same S&P 500 section, the same order type and the same notional band as your own orders. Read the effective-to-quoted ratio, the percentage price-improved and the realized spread at 15 seconds side by side, and remember the mix caveat above.

From August 2026, read the broker's own 605. If your broker has 100,000 or more customer accounts, it now publishes execution statistics on the orders it receives, the closest the public data comes to describing a broker's customers rather than a venue's. Months before August 2026 do not exist under the amended rule, so a series that starts there has no earlier comparison.

Check what your platform sends. On a desktop platform the broker and the order type are your choice. An order the platform marks for a specific exchange, an auction order or an extended-hours order falls outside parts of both rules. If the comparison matters to you, compare orders of the types the reports cover, and keep your own fills: the trading platforms category lists the platforms and the brokers each card names.