Account opening now free under the age of 25
Despite all the headline numbers about Indian markets growing, we’re still quite small. Compared to the pre-pandemic base, we’ve grown tremendously, but there are still just about 9 crore unique investors in India (out of 140 crore people). Thanks to the bull market in the last 4 years, capital markets are more mainstream than ever, but we need more Indians to invest.
One important data point that we track internally is the percentage of young users entering the markets. While it’s hard to figure this out at an industry level, only ~15% of Zerodha customers are under the age of 25. In our 13-year journey, we’ve done a bunch of things to make it easy for young and new investors to start trading:
- Great platforms and tools for people new to the markets.
- One of the few brokers to allow free investing in stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and government bonds.
- Simple and easy-to-understand educational material on all things markets through Varsity.
We have now also removed the ₹200 trading account opening fee for customers under 25 years of age to encourage young people to think about investing early.
We’ve been debating this internally for a while now — whether the account opening fee we charge was a barrier for youngsters to start investing. The account opening fee was the actual cost of opening and maintaining an account — KYC, documentation, eSign, human verification, etc. Without the account opening fee to recover these costs, the business could potentially be pressured to recover those costs in other ways since, when we started, we were bootstrapped.
One of the greatest hacks to build wealth is to start investing early. The obvious reason is more time equals more compounding, which means more wealth. But I think there’s a more underappreciated reason. Most of your investment learning will come from making mistakes. And the best time to make mistakes is when you have the least amount of money, i.e., when you are young. So open your Zerodha account, put in whatever little money you can afford to lose, and make all the mistakes now. By the time you grow in your career and start earning more, you will be well prepared to build wealth the right way. 🤞
Hai I’m 19 i opened account one year before. Now can I enable f& o for free?
Hi Kiran, there are no charges for activating the F&O segment.
Hi I am trying to open my account but it still asking for RS 200 to pay for the account opening charge.
Please do help.
Hi Rohit, we’re sorry about this. Could you please create a ticket on: https://support.zerodha.com/ with details of the issue, so we can have this resolved at the earliest?
Is the commodity account opening charge also waived off
After all that drama of claiming that there are actual costs involved, not taking it would force you to think about making customers overtrade etc, you guys do this?
Don’t hide business decisions (clearly done to get more users since Zerodha is no longer number 1 in India as per NSE stats) as something that is done solely for the benefit of users. This sounds extremely scummy.
Will these guys get notifications to do intraday and F&O now? You have to recover costs somehow right?
I am 21 years old but I opened my account with Zerodha one year ago. Will I be eligible for a refund. Also what happens when one is 25 years old, do you charge account opening fee then or is it free
Hi Arnav, if you have opened the account a year ago you will not be eligible for a refund. Anyone under the age of 25, as the title suggests, will not be charged an account opening fee.
what about the account maintenance charges ? will that be also free ? please let me know . And one more thing, its great that you did it free because the only reason i as a student was not opening account on zerodha was its account opening charges. so, now i’ll open it.
Hi Shreyash, AMC will be applicable. However, if you fall under the BSDA category you won’t be charged AMC, more on what BSDA is here.
Very Much Appreciate steps for Young Investors Sir. God Bless You
How to open AC for daughter who is minor. Can I use same account no for this purpose?
Hi Abhay, we’ve explained the minor account opening process here. You must use the bank account details of the minor.
Fear of jio. 😂😂😂😂🤣😂😂
Then refund my 300 rupees as I comes under 25 age
Hi Ankit, your account was opened last year, you will now not be eligible for a refund.
What about the person whom age is under 25 and opened the account before this scheme will we get the refund ?
great step it gives lot of improvement in the user base in india .thank u and keep improving kite platform