Junior ISA charges: what can you expect?

Saving for your child’s future is one of the most thoughtful gifts you can give them. And if you use a Junior ISA to do this, that gift could keep on giving as they’ll have the potential to earn interest on their savings, or profits from any investments they hold, until they gain access to the money on their 18th birthday.

But opening this type of account often comes with a cost. And if you’re a parent or guardian who’s thinking about putting some money away for your child’s future, you’ve probably already explored your options, and have seen the different fees being charged by Junior ISA providers.

But what are these actually for, and how do they work?

If you’re still unsure, here’s a simple guide to Junior ISA charges, and how we keep ours clear and affordable so your child can keep more of their returns.

• Platform fees
• Costs of investing
• Transfer fees
• Wealthify Junior ISA fees
• Winner of Best Junior ISA 2024/25

Platform fees

If you’ve already done some research into Junior ISAs (or ‘JISAs’, as they’re also known), you might have come across something called platform fees. But what does this mean?

Before we explain, it’s useful to understand the different types of Junior ISA your child can have:

• Junior Cash ISAs are savings accounts that pay a fixed rate of interest (which is set by the provider). There isn’t a risk of losing money with this type of Junior ISA, but due to inflation, it could be worth less than it is now when your child withdraws it in future.
• Junior Stocks and Shares ISAs allow you to invest in the stock market, offering potential for better growth as their profits could be higher than the interest being paid by Cash ISAs. However, they do carry some risk as investments can go down and up in value.

With that in mind, platform fees are a charge that are applied by investment providers to use their platform and tools to do the trading yourself, or for them to manage your child’s Junior Stocks and Shares ISA for you.

In the case of Wealthify, this charge covers our experts doing the hard work for you — from building your child’s investment portfolio, to managing it on an on-going basis. This means keeping an eye on the markets, and making adjustments to help keep their performance on track.

We aim to keep our platform fees simple and low (0.60% per year, charged monthly), so you can focus on growing your child’s money without worrying about confusing or hidden costs.

Costs of investing

Because they’re a type of investment account, Junior Stocks and Shares ISAs can also come with other fees to be aware of, which we’ll explain below:

Fund charges: if you invest in funds (which we do on behalf of our customers), the fund manager will charge a fee to manage it. Funds can help you to keep costs low as they’re like baskets full of investments (meaning you can invest in lots of different assets at once).

Trading fees: these are charged by brokers or investment platforms (like Wealthify) when you buy or sell assets (like stocks and bonds, for example).

Market spread: this is the difference between the highest price a buyer is willing to pay for a stock or other asset, and the lowest price the seller is willing to part with it for. This cost is factored into the buying and selling of investments, so you don’t need to think about it.

When it comes to Wealthify Junior ISA charges, we aim to keep these as low as possible, with our fund charges and trading fees coming in at a combined average of 0.16% per annum for Original Investment Plans, and 0.70% for Ethical ones.

And why are these fees higher for our Ethical Junior ISAs? That’s is because we use active funds, which means the manager of the fund will continuously monitor the companies included to ensure they are maintaining the standards they expect.

Transfer fees

If your child already has a Junior ISA, you might want to transfer it to a different provider to potentially get:

• Lower management charges
• More control over your child’s investments
• The potential for better growth

This could be to the exact same type of JISA, or a different one (such as from a Junior Cash ISA to a Junior Stocks and Shares ISA, for example).

Or, if your child has a Junior Trust Fund (CTF), you can also transfer this into a Junior ISA (like ours). For more information on this, check out our blog: should you transfer a Child Trust Fund to a Junior ISA?

However, you could be hit with transfer fees, which might be an exit fee from your current provider, or charges from the new provider to move the JISA to them. Or even a combination of both.

These could eat considerably into the value of your child’s savings, so make sure you’re clued up on how much you could be charged if you were to go ahead with the transfer.

And just FYI; at Wealthify, we don’t charge any Junior ISA transfer fees, even if you decide to move from us to a new provider.

Wealthify Junior ISA fees

Want to see how our costs stack up against other providers? Here’s a quick summary of Wealthify Junior ISA fees and how they’re charged:

Winner of Best Junior ISA 2024/25

You already know about our low Junior ISA charges — but why else would you consider using us to build a nest egg for your little one’s future?

As well as giving you the option to only invest their savings in companies that are having a positive impact on the world, you can also invite your friends and family to pay into their Junior Stocks and Shares ISA and give their pot the chance to grow even further. After all, it does take a village.

We’ve also won ‘Best Junior ISA’ at the Personal Finance Awards for the past 6 years in a row — and this is thanks to our customers always taking the time to vote for us.

Now you’re all clued up on Wealthify Junior ISA fees, why not start building a financial safety net for your child’s future? Head over to our Junior ISA page to get started, and use our handy projection tool to see how much you could gift them on their 18th birthday.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

Resources:

Junior Individual Savings Accounts (ISA): Overview - GOV.UK