How to transfer your ISA or portfolio between brokers

On 4 April 2025 the S&P 500 closed at 5,074.08. On 10 April it closed at 5,268.05. Six calendar days, and the index was 3.8% higher.

Sitting inside that window was 9 April, when the index rose 9.52% in a single session to close at 5,456.90, its largest one-day gain since 2008, after the White House paused most of the reciprocal tariffs (CNBC). Anyone whose broker had sold their portfolio to cash for a transfer missed that day entirely. On a £60,000 portfolio, buying back six days later cost roughly £2,290 in units you no longer owned.

That is the whole argument. The exit fees further down this page run from nothing to a few hundred pounds. Six days of the wrong market can cost you an order of magnitude more, and nobody sends you an invoice for it. So the first question to ask when you leave a broker is whether your shares travel as shares. What the broker charges you comes second.

An in-specie transfer, which most brokers call a stock transfer or a portfolio transfer, moves the actual holdings. Your 143 shares of an ETF leave one nominee account and arrive in another as 143 shares of the same ETF. You stay invested throughout. Your acquisition cost travels with them.

A cash transfer sells everything, moves the proceeds, and leaves you to buy back at the other end. Brokers like it because it is simple and settles quickly. It also puts you in a position no investor would voluntarily choose: holding cash, with a fixed intention to buy back, and no control over the price you will pay. If the market falls during the gap you get a windfall. If it rises you eat the difference. That is a coin flip you were not asked whether you wanted.

There is one more asymmetry. In-specie transfers are slower and more likely to hit a snag, because two back offices have to agree on every line of your portfolio. Cash transfers are faster precisely because they throw away the thing that was hard to move. Speed here is not a feature.

Everything below comes from the provider's own published document, not from comparison sites. That matters more than usual here, because exit fees have moved fast and most of the secondary sources are out of date. Several pages still quote a £25 per holding transfer-out charge at Hargreaves Lansdown that no longer exists.

This is the part that catches people who did everything else right. You asked for an in-specie transfer, you were granted an in-specie transfer, and you still ended up partly in cash.

A fractional share is a contractual entitlement your broker creates against a whole share it holds, and that contract exists only between you and that broker. It has nowhere to go. The settlement systems that move stock between nominees deal in whole units, so the fraction cannot be re-registered. It gets sold.

The brokers say so plainly. Trading 212 states that only whole shares can be transferred, and that if you hold fractional shares you will need to sell them and withdraw the cash. Lightyear states that fractional positions cannot be transferred, and adds a condition that surprises people: each position must be worth at least 1,000 in EUR, GBP or USD, or 7,000 DKK, to move at all. XTB states that fractional rights are not transferable to other entities.

Work through what that means for a real portfolio. Say you hold 143.62 shares of an ETF. The 143 travel in specie and stay invested. The 0.62 is sold at whatever the market does that morning, and the proceeds follow separately, often weeks behind the main transfer. If you built your positions through monthly automated investing, which is exactly the behaviour fractional shares exist to enable, then almost every line in your portfolio has a fraction on the end of it. Twenty holdings means twenty small forced sales. Outside an ISA every one of them is a disposal.

There is a fix and it takes ten minutes. Before you start the transfer, top each holding up to the next whole share. Buying 0.38 of a share to round 143.62 into 144 costs you the price of 0.38 of a share and removes the forced sale entirely. Rounding down by selling the fraction yourself works too, and at least you choose the moment.

The old-guard platforms sidestep this by not offering fractions in the first place. AJ Bell allocates shares to the nearest whole share and sells any residual fractions in the market, and Hargreaves Lansdown does not offer fractional dealing. Nothing to strand, because nothing was ever fractional.

One rule matters more than the rest. GOV.UK tells you to contact the provider you want to move to and complete their transfer form, and then says what happens if you do not: withdraw the money yourself and you will not be able to reinvest that part of your tax-free allowance again. There is no appeal and no correction. A £70,000 ISA built over four years, withdrawn to a current account and paid into a new provider, comes back as a £20,000 subscription and £50,000 of taxable money. The receiving provider always pulls the account. You never push it.

On timing, GOV.UK sets a service standard of 15 working days for cash ISA to cash ISA transfers and 30 calendar days for other types, which is where stocks and shares transfers sit. HMRC's guidance for ISA managers breaks the cash timetable down into its component steps but is looser on stocks and shares, telling managers to complete such transfers in line with their own terms. So the 30 days is a standard rather than a hard deadline, and in practice a transfer involving an overseas custodian or an unusual holding can exceed it.

The current-year rule has changed and a lot of guides have not caught up. Partial transfers of the current tax year's subscriptions have been permitted since April 2024, and HMRC's manager guidance now says an investor may transfer some or all of the current year's subscriptions. What it does not do is force providers to offer that. Whether partial current-year transfers are available has to be set out in the account terms, and plenty of providers decline. Trading 212 is a good example of how this plays out in practice: it allows partial ISA transfers only as cash, so if you want your stock to move as stock, the entire ISA has to go.

Inside an ISA or a SIPP, the choice between stock and cash is purely about market risk. Outside one, in a general investment account, it is also a tax event, and getting this backwards is the most expensive mistake available on this page.

An in-specie transfer is not a disposal. HMRC's Capital Gains Manual at CG10720 states that the transfer of legal ownership between a nominee and the beneficial owner does not constitute a disposal for the purposes of the Act. You were the beneficial owner before the transfer and you are the beneficial owner after it. All that changed is which nominee company holds the legal title. Your acquisition cost carries over untouched and there is nothing to report.

A cash transfer is the opposite. Your broker sells your holdings on the open market at market value. That is a disposal of every line in the account, on one day, whether or not you wanted to realise those gains this tax year. The annual exempt amount is £3,000 for 2026 to 2027, with gains above it taxed at 18% within the basic rate band and 24% above it. Working out the gain on a holding you bought in several instalments is its own problem, and one your broker's average price does not solve: see capital gains tax on shares for the pooling rules and worked examples.

Put numbers on it. A general investment account holding £80,000 with a £30,000 embedded gain, moved as cash by a higher-rate taxpayer with no other disposals that year, produces a taxable gain of £27,000 after the exemption and a capital gains tax bill of £6,480. Moved in specie, the bill is zero and the gain stays unrealised until you choose to sell. The transfer method is the only variable.

This is also the strongest argument for rounding your fractions up rather than letting them be sold. Twenty forced fractional sales in a taxable account are twenty disposals you have to work into your return, for amounts too small to be worth the trouble.

The most common failure is the simplest: the receiving broker does not offer something you hold. A transfer is a re-registration, and a broker cannot re-register an instrument it has no relationship with. Investment trusts, smaller AIM listings, structured products and anything on an exchange the new broker does not reach will all be refused. XTB is honest about this and warns that a transfer can be rejected by either side if the security is not offered by the destination broker. The refusal usually arrives after the rest of the portfolio has already moved. You are left with one orphan position at a broker you have finished with.

The second is regulatory rather than operational, and it hits European investors moving from a broker outside the EU to one inside it. Under the PRIIPs Regulation, a product sold to EU retail clients needs a Key Information Document. US fund managers do not produce one, because EU regulation does not bind them, and as the French regulator the AMF puts it, that lack of a KID is what stops such an ETF being marketed in the European Economic Area. So a portfolio of US-listed ETFs arriving at an EU broker may be accepted but frozen: you can hold and sell, but never buy more. Check the receiving broker's instrument list against your holdings first, ticker by ticker.

Currency is the third. If you hold USD-denominated stock and the receiving broker runs sterling-only accounts, the position either gets refused or gets converted, and the conversion is priced by the broker doing you the favour.

The fourth is the residue. A partial transfer leaves the old account open, often with a few pounds of unswept dividend or a stranded fraction in it. That is enough for a platform fee to keep being charged against a nearly empty account. Close it deliberately once the last cash arrives.

Open the receiving account and get it fully verified before you touch anything else. Identity checks, tax residency, the W-8BEN if you hold US stock. A transfer request from an unverified account sits in a queue and nobody tells you why. Our W-8BEN guide covers where that form lives on each platform.

Then export your holdings from the old broker and check every line against the new broker's instrument list. This is the step people skip and it is the one that prevents the orphan holding. While you have the list open, round the fractions up.

Cancel recurring investments and direct debits into the old account. Money arriving mid-transfer either bounces or creates a second residual balance that has to be chased separately. Let any pending dividends settle first, since a dividend paid to the old broker after the account closes takes months to rematerialise.

Then start the transfer from the receiving broker, never the sending one, and expect to be unable to trade the affected holdings while it runs. Assume four to six weeks even where the published figure is 30 days, and do not plan a rebalance around it.

Some moments are worse than others to begin. The fortnight before the 5 April ISA deadline is the worst, because every provider's transfer desk is saturated. Do not start one when you have a corporate action pending on a holding, because a rights issue or a merger mid-transfer will stall the whole account. And if you are within a few weeks of needing the money, do not start one at all: a transfer in flight is a portfolio you cannot sell.

On where to go, one filter worth applying is how easy it will be to leave the place you are about to join. Interactive Brokers, Trading 212 and Lightyear all charge nothing to transfer out, which is the reason I would weigh them over a broker charging per ISIN, whatever its dealing fees look like on day one. Our Interactive Brokers, Trading 212 and Lightyear reviews go through what each is actually good at.

The thing I would tell anyone dreading this: the dread is mostly about the wrong risk. People worry the transfer will take three months. It might, and it will not cost you anything if your shares stayed shares the whole time. What costs money is being in cash for six days in the wrong week. Get the in-specie box ticked and the timeline stops mattering much.