How to read your broker's order-routing report and spot the rebate signal

The week to look once

With SpaceX targeting June 12 for its Nasdaq debut and a portion of the deal available to retail through Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, and E-Trade (per CNBC reporting on May 21), a wave of new retail orders is about to land on the same broker apps that route everything we do through their own order-handling pipes. So this is a reasonable week to look at our own broker once and ask a small but specific question. How much does the broker actually earn from each order we place, broken out by what kind of order it is? The answer is filed quarterly. Almost nobody opens it.

What we know

The Q1 2026 round of payment-for-order-flow filings (PFOF, the fee a market maker pays the broker for routing the trade to them, which is the line item that explains why a fill price can drift a few cents from the headline midpoint) came in at roughly $1.19 billion across US retail brokers, according to a Global Trading aggregation of broker-filed Rule 606 reports. Robinhood entities combined for $560 million, up 65% year-over-year. Charles Schwab brought in $355 million. On the other side of the same trade, the wholesale market makers reported the matching payouts in their own filings.

The interesting line is not the aggregate. The interesting line is the breakdown by order type, because that is where the broker incentive lives.

The mechanism that decides it

SEC Rule 606 requires the broker to split every quarterly disclosure into four mandatory categories: market orders, marketable limit orders, non-marketable limit orders, and “other”. For each category, the broker reports the average per-share rebate it received from each market center. When the Q1 2026 filings are added up, the per-share economics look like this. Market orders paid brokers about 0.19 cents per share. Marketable limit orders paid about 0.67. Non-marketable limit orders paid about 1.70. That is roughly a ten-times spread.

The stratification is not arbitrary. A market order is the cheapest fill for a wholesaler: no quote competition needed, just hit the touch and capture the spread. A non-marketable limit order sits away from the touch and provides displayed contra-side liquidity that wholesalers can price-improve against, so they share more of the spread back. The order type is the lever. So when an app makes a one-tap default a market order, or surfaces a “limit at last price” preset that becomes a non-marketable limit, that is not just a usability call. It is a fee-revenue call dressed as one.

What to do today

1. Find the page.

   Search "[broker name] Rule 606 quarterly report" or "[broker name] order routing disclosure". Every regulated US broker has this page. Many bury it under Disclosures or Legal.

2. Open the latest quarter PDF.

   The machine-readable version is for software. The PDF is for humans. Pick the PDF.

3. Find the per-order-type page.

   Sections are labeled by stock universe (S&P 500 stocks, non-S&P 500 stocks, options). Inside each is a table broken into the four categories: market, marketable limit, non-marketable limit, other.

4. Read the rightmost column.

   The rebate is reported as average net payment per 100 shares from each market center. Convert to per-share by dividing by 100. A line that reads 17.0 is 0.17 cents per share.

5. Compare against what we actually place.

   If our default behavior is one-tap market orders and the report shows market-order rebates close to zero relative to limit-order rebates, the gap is what is being captured by the wholesaler instead of returning to us as price improvement.

6. Re-run the test next quarter.

   Filings post about one month after each calendar quarter ends. The April-through-June quarter posts around the end of July.

One quiet thing

This is one quarterly disclosure, not a complete picture of broker quality. The 2026 amendments to the related execution-quality rule add monthly reports from large brokers starting August 1, which will let us pair routing economics with price-improvement data side by side. Until then the routing report is what we have. The useful thing about it is that nobody is asking us to take their word for any of it. The numbers are public, every quarter, in plain sight.