Hong Kong Stock Trading Fees Explained: Stamp Duty, Platform Fees and a Full Round-Trip Example

The fees on a Hong Kong stock trade are five different parties each taking a slice: the government (stamp duty), the regulators (SFC and AFRC levies), the exchange (trading fee), the clearing house (settlement fee) and your broker (commission plus platform fee). Most of them are a percentage of trade value charged on both the buy and the sell, but the broker's part usually carries a fixed minimum or a flat per-trade fee, which is why small orders cost proportionally more. In the worked example below, a HK$50,000 round trip costs about HK$185 in total, so the stock has to rise about 0.36% before you have made anything at all.

Key takeaways

• HK fees come in five layers: government (stamp duty), regulators (SFC and AFRC levies), exchange (trading fee), clearing house (settlement fee) and broker (commission + platform fee). The first four are statutory or market-wide; only the broker's layer is worth shopping around for.
• Stamp duty is the largest item, currently 0.10%, paid by both buyer and seller. That is the rate at the time of writing; it changes (it was cut back from 0.13% to 0.10% in November 2023), so check HKEX, the SFC and your broker's fee schedule.
• Percentage fees cost the same share of any order. Fixed fees (platform fee, minimum commission) are what make small orders expensive: at the same rates, a HK$5,000 round trip costs almost 1%, a HK$100,000 round trip about 0.33%.
• When you work out what a trade cost you, count both legs. You already paid once on the buy; the break-even line is both sides added together.
• Stock Compass does not connect to your broker, but it applies the rates you enter in Settings to every realized P&L figure and every backtest, so those numbers are net of costs.

Who is charging you: the five layers, item by item

Lay every item on the table first. The rates below are the published rates at the writing date (September 2026) and the values Stock Compass uses in its default Hong Kong preset. Statutory rates change with policy and broker rates differ by firm, so treat the official schedules and your own contract notes as the source of truth.

Three things to notice:

• Every item is charged on both legs. This is different from A-shares, where stamp duty is sell-side only. In Hong Kong you pay stamp duty once when you buy and again when you sell, so a round trip pays it twice.
• The four middle items (SFC, AFRC, HKEX, CCASS) are not negotiable. Stock Compass folds them into one field, Other Fees (%), with a Hong Kong default of 0.018%. That is a little above the plain sum of the four statutory rates, deliberately: contract notes often carry small pass-through items, and for a tool whose job is to tell you the truth about your returns, erring high is the safe direction. You can simply type the "other fees" total from your broker's schedule into that field.
• Only commission and platform fee are worth comparing. Some brokers charge a low commission plus a flat platform fee; others charge no platform fee but a higher minimum commission. The two structures behave very differently across order sizes, as the next section shows.

Why fixed fees punish small orders

A percentage fee takes the same share whether you buy HK$5,000 or HK$500,000. Add up the percentage items in the default preset (0.03% + 0.018% + 0.10%) and you get a one-side "percentage floor" of 0.148%. What actually moves with order size are the two fixed-or-floored items:

• Platform fee HK$15 per trade: 0.015% of a HK$100,000 order, but 0.30% of a HK$5,000 order, twice the whole percentage floor.
• Minimum commission HK$3: at 0.03%, any order below HK$10,000 produces a percentage commission under HK$3, so it gets lifted to HK$3.

At the same rates, the one-side cost as a share of the order looks like this:

From HK$5,000 to HK$100,000 the round-trip cost falls from nearly 1% to about 0.33%; beyond that, bigger orders only creep toward the 0.296% two-side floor. If your typical order is a few thousand Hong Kong dollars, the first question is not "which signal" but "how big does each order need to be before it is worth placing" — the same question position sizing answers from the other direction.

A full worked example: buy 1,000 shares at HK$50, sell at HK$55

Using the app's Hong Kong default preset (commission 0.03% with a HK$3 minimum, platform fee HK$15, other fees 0.018%, stamp duty 0.10%). You can follow along with a calculator.

Buy: 1,000 shares × HK$50 = HK$50,000

Sell: 1,000 shares × HK$55 = HK$55,000

Totals and net result

• Round-trip fees: 89.00 + 96.40 = HK$185.40
• Gross gain: 55,000 − 50,000 = HK$5,000
• Net gain: 5,000 − 185.40 = HK$4,814.60
• Net return: 4,814.60 ÷ (50,000 + 89.00) = 9.61%, not the 10% the price chart shows
• True cost per share: (50,000 + 89) ÷ 1,000 = HK$50.089, which is what Stock Compass means by cost basis once fees are included

Break-even: for the cash you get back after selling to equal the HK$50,089 you paid in, the sell price has to reach HK$50.18, a rise of about 0.36%. It sounds small, but it means any "gain" under 0.36% is a loss after fees, and a 5% stop-loss really costs 5% plus that 0.36%.

How fees change your stops, targets and trade frequency

Fees are not a standalone number; they decide how tight your rules can be.

• Subtract fees from your stop and target. A -5% stop and +10% target are really -5.36% and +9.64% on a HK$50,000 order, and more is eaten on smaller ones. Build fees into the numbers, as covered in how to set take-profit and stop-loss.
• The more often you trade, the more fees dominate. Fifty round trips a year at 0.36% each is 18% of your capital in a year. A high-frequency rule that looks good in a backtest with no fees can turn negative the moment fees are applied.
• A headline percentage understates small orders. "0.03% commission" describes one of seven items. Check your own order size against the table above instead of remembering a single percentage.

How to set this up in Stock Compass

Stock Compass does not link to a brokerage account and does not place orders. What it does is apply the rates you enter to every trade you record and every backtest you run. The path is Settings → Trading Cost.

• Each market stores its own schedule. Hong Kong, US and A-share rates are saved separately and do not affect each other. Switch to the Hong Kong tab before you edit.
• Pick a broker to pre-fill, then check by hand. The dropdown offers moomoo, Futu, Tiger, IBKR and Custom, and pre-fills a set of defaults. Treat that as a starting point: compare every field against your most recent contract note, especially commission rate, minimum commission and platform fee.
• Five fields map to the five layers above: Platform Fee (HK$ per trade), Commission (%), Min Commission (HK$), Other Fees (% — the SFC, AFRC, HKEX and CCASS items combined) and Stamp Duty (%).
• Check the preview before saving. Below the fields the page shows the one-side cost of a HK$5,000 / 10,000 / 50,000 order and the round-trip cost of a HK$10,000 order at your rates. It should be close to what your contract notes show; if it is far off, one field is wrong.

Once saved, realized P&L, return percentage and cost basis on the Holdings page are all net of both legs' fees, and backtests deduct the same fees on every simulated buy and sell, so the equity curve is on the same footing as your real account. When rates change (a stamp duty adjustment, a broker moving to a new pricing structure) you update this one place.

Common mistakes

• Counting only the sell-side fees. You already paid once on the buy. Leaving it out overstates your gain by about half the total fees.
• Treating stamp duty as sell-side only. That is the A-share rule; in Hong Kong both buyer and seller pay.
• Using rates from a few years ago. Hong Kong stamp duty rose to 0.13% in 2021 and returned to 0.10% in November 2023; the HKEX trading fee has changed too. Check the official schedules at least once a year.
• Ignoring minimums. 0.03% commission sounds cheap, but the HK$3 floor more than doubles the effective rate on orders under HK$5,000, and the HK$15 platform fee pushes the real cost of small orders well above the advertised rate.
• Backtesting without fees. A rule that trades a hundred times a year looks great with no costs and tells the truth only once costs are applied. Fill in your rates first, then read the backtest.

Summary

A Hong Kong trade carries seven fee items from five parties, each charged on both the buy and the sell. Stamp duty at 0.10% is the largest; the SFC, AFRC, HKEX and CCASS items together come to under 0.02%; the broker's commission and platform fee are the only part you get to choose. At the app's default rates a HK$50,000 round trip costs about HK$185 and breaks even at about 0.36%; a HK$5,000 order needs almost 1% and a HK$100,000 order about 0.33%, with the whole difference coming from fixed fees. Enter your own broker's real rates under Trading Cost in Stock Compass and every P&L figure and backtest result you see afterwards is already net of costs. Rates change, so check the official schedules once a year and update that one place.