Brokers

It depends on what you buy. Lightyear is Estonian-licensed, trades and holds ETFs free, charges €1 an order on euro-denominated stocks and bonds, and is the only non-bank that submits investment account data to the Tax Board automatically. LHV and Swedbank suit anyone wanting Baltic shares and a bank in one place — Swedbank trades Baltic shares free at any size, LHV free up to 100 trades a month. Interactive Brokers is cheapest at scale but produces no Estonian tax report.

In principle yes. The Tax Board's definition covers an account held at a credit institution, payment institution, e-money institution or investment firm anywhere in the EEA or the OECD, which covers Interactive Brokers, Trading 212, Revolut and XTB. But none of them publishes an Estonian tax report, so you reconstruct table 6.5 yourself from activity statements, and no Tax Board page names any of them. Treat the eligibility as a reading of the definition rather than a ruling, and keep your statements.

LHV trades Baltic shares free up to 100 a month and foreign shares at 0.13999999999999999% with a €5 minimum. Swedbank trades Baltic shares free with free custody at any size, and foreign shares at 0.13999999999999999% with a €3.90 minimum, cut from €9.90 on 1 July 2025. Lightyear charges nothing on ETFs, €1 an order on euro-denominated instruments, and 0.1% on US shares capped at $1, with 0.35000000000000003% currency conversion. SEB publishes no reachable securities price list.

Yes. Lightyear Europe AS holds an Estonian investment firm operating licence granted by Finantsinspektsioon on 4 March 2022, covering reception, transmission and execution of securities orders plus safekeeping and linked currency exchange, and extended on 4 March 2024 to investment advice, dealing on own account and lending to investors. It appears in the Estonian investment firms register, and it is the only non-bank on this page that submits investment account data directly to the Tax Board.

File the US tax residency form, and check that your broker actually applies the treaty. US dividends are withheld at 30% by default and 15% under the treaty, and on a dividend-paying US portfolio that gap dwarfs every commission difference on this page combined. Lightyear provides the residency form free. LHV applies the 15% treaty rate, but only for shares bought on the three main US exchanges — NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX. Swedbank describes preferential Nordic rates without publishing the figures, and SEB publishes nothing on it.

For most people, the conversion — because it recurs on every purchase and the commission often does not. A €500 monthly buy costs €0.50 in conversion at 0.1% and €2.50 at 0.5%, and that difference repeats for as long as you keep investing. The published margins are 0.35% at Lightyear, 0.15% at Trading 212 and 0.5% at XTB. Revolut, LHV, Swedbank and SEB do not publish an FX figure for investing at all. Buying euro-denominated instruments avoids the question entirely.

Investor compensation follows the licence, not the platform or where you live. LHV, Swedbank and SEB are supervised in Estonia as credit institutions and Lightyear Europe AS as an Estonian investment firm, so the Estonian scheme is the one in play. The foreign platforms contract you with a foreign entity: Interactive Brokers through IBKR Ireland under the Central Bank of Ireland, Trading 212 through Trading 212 EU GmbH under BaFin, Revolut through Revolut Securities Europe UAB under the Bank of Lithuania, and XTB through XTB S.A. under the Polish supervisor. That means the Irish, German, Lithuanian or Polish scheme rather than Estonia's. One caveat: Estonia's register of cross-border investment services providers cannot be searched reliably, so it yields no entry either way for the four foreign firms.

Not on the face of the rules. An investment account may sit at a credit institution, payment institution, e-money institution or investment firm anywhere in the EEA or the OECD — a widening that took effect retroactively from 1 January 2024, and the reason a foreign broker can host one at all. What changes is not where the account lives but who does the bookkeeping: none of Interactive Brokers, Trading 212, Revolut or XTB publishes an Estonian tax report, so table 6.5 becomes yours to reconstruct date by date from activity statements, and the compensation scheme stays the one attached to that firm's licence rather than Estonia's. Two things are worth settling before anything else. Only an Estonian tax resident may use an investment account at all, and ceasing to be resident later closes it and crystallises the whole deferred liability here. And the account only becomes an investment account when you declare it — see the next answer.

No, and this is the commonest misreading of the whole system. What makes an account an investment account is the declaration you make in table 6.5 part I of your return — the account number, the institution, the opening date. Swedbank and SEB sell a product under that name; the product is a convenience and the declaration is the law. What the four Estonian providers give you is the report that fills the table: LHV and Swedbank generate it in the internet bank and you send it before you submit the return, SEB offers a declaration helper at filing time, and Lightyear's reaches the Tax Board by itself. One consequence people miss — once you have used an investment account, filing a return stops being optional and becomes compulsory, including in a year when you did nothing, which the form handles with a checkbox.

Lightyear is the only provider priced on this page for crypto, at 0.45% an order, and the only route here that puts crypto and shares inside the same declared account. But whether crypto qualifies at all turns on the provider rather than the coin. Crypto bought through a MiCA-authorised crypto-asset service provider has been a financial asset since 1 January 2025: it can sit inside an investment account, and losses offset gains and carry forward. Crypto acquired anywhere else is ordinary property — it cannot go in, only profitable disposals are declared, and losses there cannot be taken into account at all. So check the provider's authorisation in the European or Estonian register rather than assuming. Note also that the Tax Board's own site still hosts a February 2022 news article saying crypto may not be bought through an investment account; the current guidance is what applies.