CommSec Pocket Fees: What It Costs and How It Compares

💵 What CommSec Pocket costs🔗

Pocket’s whole fee schedule is two numbers. Up to and including A$1,000 of trade value you pay A$2. Above A$1,000 you pay 0.20% of the trade value. Opening the account is free, and CommSec charges no ongoing account-keeping fee and no management fee. In fee terms it is a pay-as-you-trade model: no subscription, no monthly charge, no minimum balance.

Most write-ups start and stop at the A$2, so here is the part of the structure that decides your actual bill. The flat figure and the percentage meet exactly at A$1,000, because 0.20% of A$1,000 is A$2, so there is no jump or gap as an order crosses that line. What changes is the weight of the charge.

• On a A$50 trade the A$2 is 4% of your money.
• On a A$1,000 trade it is 0.20%.
• Above that the percentage keeps scaling: A$6 on A$3,000, A$20 on A$10,000, A$40 on A$20,000.

🎯 The essential: Pocket’s brokerage is charged each time you trade, and that includes the sell. Buying an ETF and selling it later is two charges, not one.

One fee in the fine print is not CommSec’s. Each ETF provider charges its own management fee, it varies by ETF, and it is deducted from the fund’s unit price rather than billed to your account. So when you browse an option in the app and see a management cost, that comes from the fund provider, not from CommSec.

🔒 Is CommSec Pocket CHESS sponsored?🔗

Yes, and the clause that settles it sits in a document almost nobody opens. CHESS is the ASX’s Clearing House Electronic Subregister System, the electronic register that records who owns Australian listed shares and ETFs, and holding under CHESS means those assets are registered in your own name under your own Holder Identification Number. CHESS sponsorship explained walks through the register itself.

CommSec Pocket Terms and Conditions, Part 4 clause 2, states it plainly:

Your CommSec Pocket Holder Identification Number (HIN) is separate to any other HIN you may hold with CommSec. Only Pocket Securities are eligible for CHESS sponsorship with CommSec on your CommSec Pocket HIN.

Two facts fall out of that sentence. Your Pocket holdings are registered under a HIN in your name, not in an account CommSec owns. And that HIN is a different HIN from the one on your main CommSec account. The word custodian does not appear once in the Pocket terms document, which runs to roughly 90,000 characters, so this is not a nominee arrangement wearing a CHESS label.

🪪 Why a second HIN matters🔗

A second HIN is the detail that changes what your admin looks like. Two HINs mean two sets of CHESS holding statements arriving for the same investor. If you hold ETFs in Pocket and shares in a main CommSec account, you have two records of one portfolio to line up when you report your income, work out a capital gain, or hand the paperwork to an accountant.

It also is not a HIN you can consolidate into. The same terms say you cannot transfer into, or hold, anything in a CommSec Pocket account other than Pocket Securities, so shares from your main CommSec account cannot move across and blend in. If you ever want everything under one HIN, the holdings would need to move to your other HIN instead.

Capital gains tax on shares covers that rule in full.

🎯 The ten themed ETF options🔗

What can you actually buy inside Pocket? Ten themed ETFs, and the list is closed. Here it is in full: Aussie Top 200, Aussie Dividends, Global 100, Emerging Markets, Health Wise, Sustainability Leaders, Tech Savvy, Diversified Equities, Aussie Sustainability and Aussie Corporate Bonds.

You can hold one, some or all of them, in one-off trades or recurring investments. What you cannot do is buy an individual share, a listed investment company or an ETF from outside that list. Every option is a themed fund, which is a different thing from owning a slice of the whole market: Aussie Top 200 spreads you across the largest 200 companies on the ASX, while Tech Savvy concentrates on a single sector. What an ETF actually is explains the wrapper if you have not bought one before.

🎯 The essential: Neither CommSec’s Pocket page nor CommBank’s publishes the underlying ticker for these options. Do not fill that gap from a third-party blog, and do not assume a theme name maps neatly to a fund you have heard of. Check the product disclosure statement for the option you are looking at, because that is the document carrying the actual holdings and the fund’s own management fee.

⚖️ Pocket against the main CommSec platform🔗

This is where the CommSec versus CommSec Pocket question gets answered, and the answer moves with the size of the order. Main CommSec prices ASX trades on a ladder: A$5 up to A$1,000, A$10 up to A$3,000, A$19.95 up to A$10,000, A$29.95 up to A$25,000, then 0.12% of trade value. Pocket prices on a single rule: A$2 up to A$1,000, then 0.20%.

Both columns are published brokerage for online trades, read at source on 20 September 2026. Neither includes the ETF provider’s management fee, which sits inside the fund on either platform.

What a fee table cannot show is what the money buys. The main platform trades any ASX share or ETF and holds it on your main HIN, and how to buy shares on CommSec covers that side of the house. Pocket trades ten themed ETFs and holds them on the Pocket HIN. If you want fee context across nine platforms rather than two, that comparison sits on our broker fee comparison.

📐 Where the crossover sits, and why🔗

The crossover sits at about A$9,975 an order. At that size Pocket charges A$19.95 and so does the main CommSec platform. Below it Pocket is the smaller of the two numbers, and above it Pocket is the larger one.

The reason is the shape of each fee. Pocket’s 0.20% is a percentage with no cap, so it keeps climbing with the order, for as long as the order grows. Main CommSec’s ladder is built from flat dollar steps, so its fee stops climbing at each rung, and above A$25,000 the ladder turns into 0.12% of trade value. That is 0.08 percentage points below Pocket’s rate, which means that once Pocket has been passed, it does not take the smaller number back. At A$20,000 the split is A$40 against A$29.95, and bigger orders widen that gap rather than close it.

🧾 How CommSec Pocket fees are taxed🔗

General and factual only. Your own position depends on your circumstances, and this is not tax advice.

Brokerage does not attract tax of its own, but it turns up in two places on your return. First, the cost base. The ATO treats incidental costs of buying and selling an asset, brokerage included, as part of what the asset cost you, so the A$2 or the 0.20% adds to your cost base when you later work out a capital gain or loss.

Second, the income the ETFs produce. ETF distributions are income to you, and the ETF provider or its registry sends an annual tax statement after the end of the financial year setting out the components, including any franking credits and any capital gains the fund passed through. That statement, rather than your trade confirmations, is the document that feeds your return. There is no single Pocket tax statement covering both sides: the trade confirmations come from CommSec, and the annual income statement comes from the fund side, per holding.

Then there is the holding period. The ATO’s 50% CGT discount can apply to a gain on an asset an individual has held for at least 12 months, so the date you buy matters when you eventually sell. The discount reduces the gain rather than the sale proceeds, and the clock runs from the date of acquisition. Holding your Pocket ETFs on a separate HIN does not change any of that, because the units are registered to you either way.

😴 Closing a dormant CommSec Pocket account🔗

If you are looking up how to close a CommSec Pocket account, the terms deal with the automatic version first. CommSec may close a Pocket account without prior notice where three things are all true at once: there has been no transaction on the account for more than 12 months, the account has a credit balance under A$10, and it holds no CHESS sponsored holdings. All three, not whichever comes first.

Read the third condition carefully, because it is the one that catches people. An account with A$8 sitting in it and one ETF still in it stays put, because it holds CHESS sponsored securities. An account with A$8 in it and nothing held, untouched for over a year, can be shut without warning. And an account with A$20 in it and nothing held fails the balance test, so the closure power does not bite.

Closing one on purpose is a request to CommSec rather than something you can do by walking away, and anything held in the account needs dealing with first. Selling is a capital gains event and a transfer generally is not, which is the same distinction that matters on any broker move. There is no account-keeping fee on Pocket, so nothing is draining the account while it sits idle, but dormant is not the same as forgotten.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗

🔗 Sources🔗

• CommSec Pocket, product page, CommSec. Accessed 20 September 2026.
• CommSec Pocket ETFs, Commonwealth Bank. Accessed 20 September 2026.
• CommSec Pocket Terms and Conditions, CommSec. The CHESS and dormant-closure clauses quoted here. Accessed 20 September 2026.
• Rates and fees, CommSec. The main platform's ASX brokerage ladder. Accessed 20 September 2026.
• CHESS sponsored and issuer sponsored holdings, fact sheet, ASX. Accessed 20 September 2026.
• CGT discount, Australian Taxation Office. Accessed 20 September 2026.