A charge for inaction lands almost exclusively on customers who have already decided to stop. That is a strange group to bill, and a very quiet one. 

Who actually pays a fee for doing nothing? 

People who have quit. That falls straight out of the definition, since nobody still trading ever pays an inactivity charge. The customer who deposited a few hundred pounds, traded for a fortnight, decided the whole thing was not for them and stopped opening the app is the entire target population. Flat withdrawal fees work on the same group from the other side, because the person moving GBP 20,000 out once a year barely registers GBP 5 while the person retrieving what is left of GBP 200 very much does. Which makes these the only charges in retail trading aimed squarely at a departing customer, and the only ones the affected group is structurally unable to argue about. Somebody who has stopped opening the account has usually stopped opening the emails about the account, so the notice period runs out unread and the first they hear of it is a balance that has shrunk without anybody trading anything. 

What do they actually look like? 

Funding live accounts on FCA-regulated UK platforms and then watching what happened to the balance produced three patterns. A flat charge every time you take money out. A monthly charge that starts after a dormancy period. Or nothing at all, which is more common than the reputation of the industry suggests. 

Observed while funding live accounts on four UK platforms during 2026. A charge that did not fire on one account over one period has not been shown not to exist, and that is the standing limitation of testing anything by opening an account rather than reading about it. The limitation bites hardest on precisely these fees, because most of them need a year or two of silence before they appear at all, which is longer than a test account tends to sit untouched. Fee schedules are revised without ceremony as well, and the version that binds you is the one in force on the day you open. 

Why does the dormancy period matter more than the amount? 

Because the amounts are small and the periods are long, which is exactly what makes them effective. GBP 10 a month sounds trivial. Twelve months of forgetting is GBP 120, and the clock starts at a point you will not remember. The difference between a 12-month trigger and a 24-month one is the difference between being charged for the gap year you took from trading and not being charged for it. Nobody sets out to abandon an account. People intend to come back, then do not. The fee is priced against that intention, not against negligence. 

The arithmetic on a small forgotten balance 

Put the CMC trigger against a realistic leftover and the design becomes clearer. Somebody deposits GBP 200, trades for a few weeks, loses interest and walks away with GBP 120 still sitting there. Twelve months later the clock trips and GBP 10 a month starts coming off. That balance is gone inside a year, consumed entirely by a charge levied for the absence of activity, and at no point does anything happen that the customer would recognise as a decision they made. 

The IG trigger is gentler on timing and heavier per month, GBP 12 after twenty-four months, so the same GBP 120 survives two years and then disappears in ten. Neither firm is doing anything improper and both publish the terms. 

But run the ratio and the shape of the charge is unattractive: the smaller the forgotten balance, the larger the share of it the fee eventually takes. Almost every other cost in this industry scales the other way, with the percentage falling as the amount rises. Inaction fees are the one line item where being small is expensive. 

Is the flat withdrawal fee worse than it looks? 

It depends entirely on how you use the account, which is why a single number cannot rank it. GBP 5 on a GBP 2,000 withdrawal once a year is not worth the sentence describing it. GBP 5 on a GBP 200 withdrawal every month is 2.5% of the amount, charged twelve times, which is a materially worse deal than most of the trading costs the same customer will have agonised over. So the fee is not really a fee on withdrawing. It is a fee on withdrawing in small amounts, and it quietly penalises exactly the pattern a cautious beginner is most likely to adopt. That is worth knowing before you choose, not after. 

How long does getting your money out actually take? 

Longer than getting it in, universally. Deposits across the platforms tested cleared between roughly two hours and just over a day, with card funding generally faster than bank transfer. Withdrawal timings are the number that matters more and the one almost never advertised, which is why timing it from request to receipt has to be done by somebody actually holding the account. 

That asymmetry reflects genuine anti-money-laundering checks and banking rails rather than anything sinister. But it does mean the speed a platform boasts about at sign-up tells you nothing about the speed you will care about later. A withdrawal can only be timed by whoever is sitting there waiting for the money, so the figures worth reading come from The Investors Centre, which funds live accounts to test UK trading platforms and compares them on spreads, currency conversion charges and overnight financing costs as well as on what it costs to get in and back out again. Its trading app comparison reports the exit alongside the entry. 

Three words to search for before you deposit 

Before you deposit, search the platform’s fee page for three words: withdrawal, inactivity, and dormant. If all three return nothing, read the full terms rather than assuming the fees do not exist, because they are sometimes filed under custody or administration instead. Then, once funded, withdraw a small amount immediately and time it. You will never have a cheaper opportunity to find out how the exit works. 

It costs you one small transfer and possibly one flat fee. Set against the cost of discovering the answer at the point you actually need the money, that is a bargain. The Investors Centre’s research carries the workings behind the table above, along with the funded accounts the timings were taken from. The site funds its own testing rather than ranking platforms by affiliate commission, which is most of the reason an exit charge gets written down at all, since anybody paid on the deposit has no particular reason to sit and time the withdrawal. 

Do it in the first week or you will not do it at all, which is the whole argument in one line. The week you open an account is the only week you will have both the motivation to investigate the exit and the attention span to bother. Every week after that, the interest curve runs the same direction as the dormancy clock, and the two of them meet at the point where a charge lands on a balance you had stopped thinking about. 

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