How plan coverage works

Each month, your plan will cover the transaction fees up to a set amount for individual buy and sell orders, as well as a separate, higher amount for auto-invest orders (including one-off buys for auto-invest orders).
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To see how transaction fees were covered for an order (and any additional transaction fees paid), go to the Activity feed or the contract note for the order.
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Your plan only covers transaction fees on the orders you place within your coverage balance. It doesn’t cover other fees such as currency exchange fees, or card top-up fees.
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Coverage renews every month, regardless of whether you’ve chosen to pay for a plan monthly or annually. You can also upgrade your plan to receive more coverage straight away.
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Coverage works differently depending on whether you’re buying or selling.

When you buy, the transaction fee comes out of the amount you’re investing. We need to know whether your plan is covering that fee before your order goes on market, so we set aside coverage as soon as you place it.
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When you sell, the fee comes out of what the sale returns. There’s nothing to work out until your order fills, so that’s when we use your coverage.

While your buy order is on market, the coverage we’ve held isn’t available for other orders, even though you haven’t been charged anything yet. If your order fills for less than we held, expires, or is cancelled, we’ll return the leftover coverage.
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This is worth knowing if you place several orders at once, or use limit orders that might sit on market for a while. A $500 limit buy order holds $500 of coverage from the moment you place it, whether or not it ever fills.
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If you’re near the end of your plan month and an order still hasn’t filled, you can cancel it to free up that coverage for a new order before your plan renews.

For buys, we use coverage from the plan that’s active when you place the order.
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For sells, we also look at the plan that was active when you placed the order, but we check what’s still available at the moment your order fills. And if that plan’s coverage has run out, we won’t use coverage from your new plan month, so the 1.9% transaction fee will apply.

Coverage is applied automatically, so you can’t choose capped fees instead. But if using your coverage would still leave you paying a capped fee, we’ll return the coverage and charge only the cap. See When your order hits a fee cap.
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When you place a buy or auto-invest order, we’ll calculate the highest amount it could fill at, and look to deduct the equivalent amount from your available coverage. We might deduct less if your order amount is higher than the amount of coverage you have left.
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Once your coverage is used up, the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) apply to all orders until your plan renews.
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Coverage is deducted from the plan that’s active at the time an order was placed. While your order is pending, the deducted coverage amount won’t be used for any other orders.
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If you’ve already got an order on-market when you start a plan, it won’t be covered by your plan. Instead, the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) will apply.
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We work out how much to deduct from your coverage by converting your order amount to NZD, and deduct the equivalent NZD amount of coverage. This happens at the time you place your order.
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We might return some (or all) of the deducted coverage amount when your order:

Any returned amounts will go back to the coverage for the month they originally came from. If that month has passed, you won’t receive that coverage amount back.
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If we’re returning coverage from an order in USD or AUD to you, we’ll convert the coverage amount at the time we make the return.
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If you have coverage returned to you during the month of your plan, you’ll be able to use it until your plan renews.
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You place a $100 buy order, and we deduct $100 from your available coverage. Part of your order fills for $80, while the remaining $20 of your order stays on-market.
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After 30 days, your plan has renewed, and the remaining $20 of your order is still unfilled and is cancelled. We return $20 of coverage to the previous month of your plan, but because that month has now passed, it can’t be used.
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Sell orders are deducted from any available coverage as they fill (which might happen in parts, and over multiple trades). For sell orders that fill after you’ve used up your coverage, the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) will apply until your plan renews.
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If your plan renews while you’ve got a sell order on-market, we’ll look to use any available coverage from the plan that was active when you placed your order. For any part that isn’t covered, the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) will apply.
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Because coverage is used as your sell order fills, what matters is how much of that plan’s coverage is still available at the time of the fill, not how much was available when you placed the order.
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If you start a plan while you’ve got a sell order on-market, the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) will apply.
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On the day before your plan renews, you place a sell order that goes on to fill over two $50 trades (for $100 total). The first $50 trade fills that day, and $50 is deducted from your coverage. The remaining part of your order stays on-market.
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The following day, your plan renews and the remaining part of your order fills for $50. If you’ve still got coverage available from the previous month of your plan, it’ll be used for the remaining $50 of your order. If you’ve used up all of your coverage from the previous month, the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) will apply.
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On 17 July you place a sell order for NZ shares. At the time, you’ve still got $600 of coverage available on your July plan. Your order stays on market and fills on 5 August.
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We look at your July plan and check what’s left when the order fills. If you’ve placed other orders in the meantime and used that coverage, there’s none left for this order, so the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps) will apply—even though coverage was available on the day you placed it.
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A partial coverage order is when some of your order uses your remaining available coverage, and the rest is charged the 1.9% transaction fee (and per order fee caps). This can happen when your order amount is higher than your remaining coverage.
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You place a $100 buy order, but you only have $50 of available coverage.

We’ll use the $50 of your available coverage first, and charge a transaction fee on the remaining amount to invest (1.9% × $49.07 = $0.93).

That means the total amount to invest will be $99.07, and you’ll be charged a transaction fee of $0.93.
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If your whole order fits within your available coverage, we’ll use your coverage and you won’t pay a transaction fee—even if the order is large enough that a capped fee would have applied without a plan.
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If your order is larger than your available coverage, we’ll look to use your coverage for part of it and charge the 1.9% transaction fee on the rest. If that fee reaches a fee cap, we’ll return the coverage that would’ve otherwise been used and charge the capped fee instead, so you keep that coverage for another order.
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This applies to any order large enough to hit a fee cap, not only to orders that are partly covered.
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Whether a fee cap applies depends on how much of your order actually fills, not the amount you ordered.
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You place a $2,000 buy order for NZ shares, but you only have $100 of available coverage.
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We’ll look to use the $100 of available coverage first, giving a remaining order amount of $1,900.
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A 1.9% transaction fee applied to $1,900 would work out to be $35.43 ($1,864.57 x 1.9%). But, because this hits the $25 per order fee cap for NZ shares, we’ll return the $100 coverage that would’ve been used, and instead charge a $25 transaction fee and $1,975 is invested. You’ll still keep your $100 coverage to use on another transaction.
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You place the same $2,000 buy order for NZ shares with $100 of available coverage. This time only $60 of your order fills before you cancel the rest.
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Because we work out the fee on the amount that actually filled, the $60 fill is nowhere near the $25 fee cap. Your coverage covers it in full, so you pay no transaction fee. The $40 of coverage we didn’t need goes back to your plan.

Coverage examples are in NZ dollars (NZD).