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Schwab Order Execution Advantage™

When you place trades with Schwab, you're placing your trust in us. That's why we're committed to providing fast, quality executions with the highest level of transparency related to our performance, process, and practices.

Schwab Order Execution Advantage comes from Schwab's regular and rigorous monitoring of order execution quality among competing market venues, and looking for opportunities to adjust our order routing based on performance trends, technological advances, and other competitive developments. It's part of our commitment to putting your interests first and also core to Schwab's Regulation NMS Equity Order Routing.

The value of Schwab's order execution quality.

In Q1 2026, clients received $756 million in price improvement on their exchange-listed equity orders.1 Here are other ways Schwab improved our clients' trade executions.

97%

of orders' price improved2

Orders were often filled at prices better than the displayed quote. 

6x

shares vs. displayed quote3

Large orders often filled without moving the market. 

0.05 second

average execution speed4

Orders were filled fast. 

Actual results may vary; data cited here are averages.

Investor’s Business Daily 2026 Best Online Brokers, Trade Execution/Speed/Price

Schwab ranked a Best Online Broker for Trade Execution Speed and Price by Investor's Business Daily5, 2026

A greater level of transparency

Transparency and honesty are hallmarks of the way we do business.

Learn more about how price improvement and the National Best Bid and Offer work.

Our advanced order routing process seeks to obtain high-quality execution results.

How we evaluate execution quality

Schwab rigorously and regularly monitors the quality of executions obtained from securities exchanges and liquidity providers to ensure that orders are routed to destinations that have provided high-quality executions over time.

Considering that no one sole metric defines execution quality, Schwab reviews a number of factors when making our evaluation, such as:

  • Execution price, speed, and accuracy
  • Market depth, order size, and trading characteristics of the security
  • Liquidity, automatic execution guarantees, and opportunities for price improvement
  • Service levels and the cost of executing orders

The execution quality statistics we review are provided by S3 Matching Technologies, a third party that conducts an independent analysis of our client executions. These results are used to evaluate the execution performance of securities exchanges and liquidity providers based upon similar order characteristics.

Why put your trust in trading with Schwab?

Schwab is committed to putting your interests first and to transparency in our order routing practices and execution quality performance.

See how order routing works Understand price improvement

Ready to start trading at Schwab?

Definitions

An Alternative Trading System (ATS) is an execution platform that brings together buyers and sellers of securities, similar to how orders are matched on an exchange. The system operator must be a licensed broker-dealer registered under SEC Rule ATS and must comply with various conduct and reporting requirements.

Liquidity providers are broker-dealers who execute orders based on their assessment of how to obtain the best executions. They may act as market makers and execute orders against their own account or route orders directly to other execution venues such as Alternate Trading Systems or securities exchanges.

A market maker commits its own capital and stands prepared to buy and sell securities during the trading day at quoted prices.

Price improvement occurs when an order is executed at a price lower than the quoted offer when purchasing, or a price higher than the quoted bid when selling. The amount of price improvement per share may be less than the minimum quotation price increment (typically, one cent).

A securities exchange is an entity that has registered with the SEC under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and facilitates the buying and selling of securities among market participants.

Have questions? We're here to help.

1. Includes market and marketable limit orders on exchange-listed stocks routed during normal market hours.

2. Percentage of orders receiving an execution price better than the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) at the time of order routing.

3. For orders larger than the NBBO size, the order-weighted average ratio of shares executed at or better than the NBBO price to shares reflected on the NBBO. For example, if a buy market order for 1,000 shares was completely executed at $9.995 when NBO (national best offer) price and size was $10.00 for 200 shares, then the liquidity vs. displayed quote was 5x (1,000/200).

4. The average time it took orders to receive an execution, measured from the time orders were routed by Schwab to the time they were executed by the market center.

5. The Investor's Business Daily® 2026 Best Online Brokers accolade was published by IBD on January 23, 2026. Results were based on a single quantitative online survey with a sample size of 4,000 investors, conducted by IBD and Magid. The study was conducted Nov. 4 through Nov. 17, 2025. Best Online Brokers 2026: Special Report | Investor's Business Daily Schwab paid a licensing fee to The YGS Group for the use of the accolade and corresponding logos through May 15, 2027.