Anyone buying crypto on Bitpanda pays a trading fee of between 0.99 and 2.49 percent. Which of the four tiers applies to your coin is set out in a mandatory disclosure document that few buyer
Anyone buying crypto on Bitpanda pays a trading fee of between 0.99 and 2.49 percent. Which of the four tiers applies to your coin is set out in a mandatory disclosure document that few buyers ever open. The current version is dated July 8, 2026, and for the trading fee it answers the question “what does a purchase on Bitpanda cost me?” very precisely. A second type of cost, one that arises at every broker, does not appear in it at all. This article covers both: the numbers you can check yourself, and the point where you have to look for them yourself.
The reason the arithmetic is worth doing is unspectacular. On a savings plan of 100 euros a month, the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive tier comes to 18 euros a year. On a single purchase of 1,000 euros it is 15 euros. That decides no investment, but it is money you hand over for nothing if you do not know which tier your coin sits in.
At Bitpanda the trading fee is not one uniform figure. It depends on the price tier a coin has been assigned to. The cost information document for crypto assets, in its version of July 8, 2026, names four of them:
Price tier here means a fixed percentage service fee charged at the level of the individual coin, for market access and execution. According to the document, this rate is calculated on the basis of a binding quote from Bitpanda. That half-sentence matters more than it looks, and the section on the spread comes back to it.
What the classification means for you in practice: the same order costs two and a half times as much depending on the coin. A coin can also change tier when its market capitalisation rises above or falls below the 100 million mark. The tier of an individual coin is not in this document, however; it is shown to you during the purchase process.
A percentage on its own says little, because the fee is charged twice: once on the purchase and once on the sale. On the sale it applies to the then smaller amount. Calculated on a stake of 100 euros, once in and once out, that gives:
From that follows a threshold you can keep in your head: a tier 4 coin has to gain around 5 percent before a purchase and a later sale leave you at break-even. At tier 2, just under 2 percent is enough. Anyone who reshuffles often pays that span again every time.
The cost information document is public and detailed. One type of cost it still does not list.
In its standard business Bitpanda acts as a broker: you are not trading against other users in an order book, you are accepting a quote from the house. That is what the wording about a “binding quote” in the cost document refers to. Under this model there is always a second quantity alongside the trading fee: the spread, meaning the gap between the price at which you can buy and the price at which you could sell at the same moment.
The cost information document in its version of July 8, 2026 describes the trading fee, the tiered scale for Bitpanda Fusion, the staking commission, the blockchain fees, the margin rates and a recovery fee. The word spread does not appear in it at any point. The same goes for the public price display: it shows one rate per coin, without a bid and an ask next to each other.
That is not an accusation, nor is it a peculiarity of this provider. It is the nature of the broker model, and it runs right through the German market: at the Bison app it is 1.25 percent of spread, disclosed as the only block of cost; at Trade Republic no spread is published at all; and through Sparkasse and Volksbank, 1.5 percent of commission plus the spread add up. At Coinbase, too, part of the cost sits in the rate rather than in the fee line.
The difference lies in what follows from it for you: the trading fee you can look up before you buy, the spread you have to read off yourself. That takes two minutes in any app. Display the buy price and the sell price for the same coin and divide the difference by the buy price. That number is added to the trading fee, it appears in no table, and it moves with the market. A provider comparison that merely lines up the disclosed percentages should therefore be read with care, including our comparison of crypto brokers, which collects the published terms and cannot show the spread, because hardly anyone publishes it.
The same cost document contains a second fee schedule that has little to do with the first. Bitpanda Fusion is the provider’s trading interface for active users, and there billing goes by volume rather than by coin tier. The scale starts at 0.25 percent for a trading volume up to 100,000 euros and falls through six further steps to 0.02 percent above 250 million euros.
The bottom Fusion step therefore applies to practically every retail investor, because 100,000 euros of volume is not something you normally reach. And it changes the arithmetic above considerably: the same 100 euros in and out costs 50 cents through Fusion instead of 2.96 euros. At tier 3 that is almost a sixfold difference, at tier 4 almost tenfold.
On a savings plan it adds up. Anyone paying in 100 euros a month for twelve months pays 11.88 euros of purchase fees on Bitcoin through the standard interface, and 17.88 euros on a tier 3 coin. Through Fusion it is 3 euros. What is added there in spread depends on the order book and is a different quantity from the broker quote: with an order book you see both sides of the market.
The catch is in the handling, not in the price. An interface with an order book, order types and charts takes more learning than a buy button. For an investor who buys twice a year and leaves it alone, six euros of saving a year is not worth that. For a savings plan running over several years, or for larger single amounts, the calculation turns out differently.
Anyone who signs their coins up for staking through Bitpanda, handing them to the blockchain for a fee to help secure it, does not receive the proceeds in full. The cost document names a commission of 20 percent of the rewards, deducted automatically before the rest reaches the customer.
A gross yield of 4 percent therefore becomes 3.2 percent, 5 percent becomes 4 percent, and 8 percent becomes 6.4 percent. For “Passive Earn” the document describes the same order of magnitude the other way round: the passive rewards there correspond to 20 percent of the attributable net income, pro rata by the amount signed up and by time.
Some context: 20 percent is within the usual range for custodial staking through a platform. The Bison app says it keeps 27 percent. Anyone who runs a validator themselves or delegates from their own wallet pays less, and carries the technology and the downtime risk instead. Nor is the commission a fixed quantity over the years; it stands in this particular document and can change with the next version.
The Bitpanda Crypto Indices bundle several coins into one product that is adjusted monthly to a model portfolio from MarketVector. Buying and selling an index costs 1.99 percent according to the cost document. For holding it, no additional fee applies.
The figure that is easy to miss comes one sentence later: in the monthly adjustment, crypto assets are swapped automatically, and those automatic transactions also carry 1.99 percent. How much that amounts to over a year depends on how far the weightings shift. In a quiet month little is swapped; after a strong move in individual positions, more. No fixed annual figure can be derived from it, and the document names none.
There is also a detail for the exit: if individual assets are requested out of an index, trading fees may apply, provided those assets are reported on an index basis only. An index is therefore not a product to reshuffle often without a look at the costs.
Behind the broker quote stands the same market as behind an order book, with an intermediary in front of it.
Leveraged positions have a schedule of their own, and it is the most expensive in the whole document. The purchase fee is 0 percent; instead a daily fee runs, charged every four hours and falling with the holding period: 0.18 percent a day for days 1 to 60, then 0.12 percent to day 100, 0.06 percent to day 180 and 0.0312 percent from day 181. Closing adds 0.3 percent, and a liquidation a further 1 percent.
In absolute numbers: a week costs 1.26 percent of the position value, a month 5.4 percent, and the full 60 days at the most expensive rate 10.8 percent plus the 0.3 percent for closing. These costs run regardless of where the price moves. For shares, ETFs and ETCs on margin the same scale applies.
Hence the real point of this section: under this cost model a leveraged position is not an instrument to leave lying around. Anyone holding one for weeks needs a price move in the high single digits for the holding costs alone, on top of the risk that a liquidation ends the position first and costs 1 percent extra.
That this document exists at all is not a courtesy but European law. The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA for short, obliges authorised providers among other things to disclose their costs. Bitpanda collects the mandatory documents, the cost information, the crypto white papers and the reference to the MiCA register of the European supervisor ESMA, on its legal page.
For you as an investor in Germany, one check follows from that which costs nothing: whether a provider is authorised in Germany can be looked up in BaFin’s company database, rather than relying on a marketing claim. The same regulation is also the reason the figures above can be recalculated at all, and the reason a provider without such documents is a warning sign. What obligations the regulation places on companies up to 2026 is set out together in our overview of the MiCA obligations.
That an authorisation is no blank cheque is clear from a look at enforcement: the first published MiCA penalty was imposed on Bitpanda, and it concerned a white paper. What that case means for the reading of white papers we have taken apart in a piece of its own. The lesson for the cost view is the same as there: the mandatory documents are the starting point of the check, not its end.
For a savings plan what counts is the sum over the term, not the single order. Twelve instalments of 100 euros make a stake of 1,200 euros a year. Of that, the purchase fee takes:
The sale is not yet in these figures, and the spread is added on top of every single instalment. Anyone planning a savings plan over ten years should therefore work out the cost side once before placing the first instalment: at tier 4 it comes to almost 300 euros over ten years in purchase fees alone. How savings plans are built at the various providers is collected in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plans.
A second lever is the number of instalments. Four quarterly instalments of 300 euros cost the same percentage fee as twelve monthly instalments of 100 euros, because the fee is a percentage and has no minimum flat charge. At providers with a fixed order fee it would be otherwise. Here the question of rhythm changes nothing about the cost; it is a question of entry prices, not of price.
Fees are not lost on the tax authority. When crypto assets are sold as a private disposal under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (Einkommensteuergesetz), what counts is the gain, and incidental acquisition costs reduce the taxable amount. The trading fee on the purchase is one of them, as is the fee on the sale as a cost of disposal. Anyone who invests 1,200 euros a year and pays 17.88 euros in fees therefore also has a taxable gain lower by that amount, provided the sale falls within the one-year period.
That presupposes that you can document the fees. At most providers the statements remain available only for a limited time, and anyone trying to reconstruct their purchase fees after three years has a problem. How big that can become is shown by the planned reform, under which the tax office is to treat half of the sale price as the gain where there is no record of the purchase. A portfolio tracker that collects the statements continuously takes that work off your hands; the common programmes are in our comparison of tax tools.
Two points that often get mixed up here: the one-year holding period applies to the sale, not to the purchase, and it runs separately for each purchase tranche. And staking proceeds are a category of income in their own right, on which the one-year period for selling the staked coins does not automatically have the same effect. Where there is doubt, you settle that allocation with a tax adviser, not with a spreadsheet.
The interesting question is not whether 1.49 percent is a lot, but how it stands within the German market. The comparison with what other providers publish gives this picture:
Two things stand out. First, Bitpanda with Bitcoin on the cheapest tier sits below what the high-street banks charge and above what an exchange with an order book costs. Second, comparability is limited as long as the spread is missing at almost all of them: a disclosed fee of 1.25 percent can be more expensive than one of 1.49 percent if the rate behind it sits further from the market.
Anyone wanting to derive a decision from this should therefore work through a test purchase of a small amount instead of sorting the percentages: how many coins do you get for 50 euros, and what would the same coins be worth at another provider at the same moment? That single number contains the fee and the spread together. Which houses are authorised in Germany at all is in our overview of the crypto exchanges.
Honesty requires saying what remains open even after reading it. The document covers the trading, staking, index and margin fees, as well as the recovery fee of 15 percent for crypto assets deposited incorrectly. Deposits and withdrawals in euros do not appear in it, and the statements of third-party portals on the subject contradict one another: sometimes all routes are said to be free, sometimes a surcharge of 1.5 percent is named for card payments.
As long as that cannot be documented from a source of the provider, the same applies to this point as to the spread: the figure appears in the purchase process, before you confirm. Blockchain fees for withdrawing to your own wallet are independent of this; they go to the network and, according to the document, are neither set nor retained by Bitpanda.
(As of October 1, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
