The UK's Best Stocks and Shares ISA Accounts Reviewed

Hargreaves Lansdown, or HL for short, is a huge name in the UK investing scene. They themselves are a publicly traded company on the FTSE 100, boasting 2,000+ staff and £120billion under management across 1.7million clients. That's some scale!

While HL's fees aren't the cheapest out there, they do offer a fantastic user experience. The HL mobile app is not as feature rich as their desktop website, but it does the job just fine, letting you track your investments and trade on the go.

AJ Bell is another industry powerhouse with a long history and FTSE 250 presence of their own. Their Trustpilot page boasts thousands of reviews averaging over 4.5 stars. Mobile apps cater to both iOS and Android users. Fees and charges are fairly typical for the market.

AJ Bell makes a great alternative to HL for someone looking for a highly trusted name with a strong investing platform.

Nutmeg is a pioneer in the category of robo-investing. The firm was awarded Boring Money Best Buy ISA 2022.

Their minimum deposit of £500 is at the high end of the market.

The Nutmeg system lets you choose between four investment styles: Fully Managed, Smart Alpha, Socially Responsible and Fixed Allocation. Each come with difference fees and market exposure to suit your preferences.

Stocks and shares ISAs allow for tax free gains, but you'll still probably encounter some costs along the way. Depending on your aims and investing plans, these costs could eat into your asset value a fair bit.

Platform costs

This is your baseline cost to use the platform. You'll either find it charged as a monthly fee (e.g. Freetrade charges £4.99 per month) or as a percentage of your asset value per year (e.g. AJ Bell charges 0.25% per year). Many others have no platform costs - Trading212 being one example.

Fund trading costs

Many UK investors prefer to invest in funds - big bundles of shares in many companies - rather than picking individual shares. Certain stocks and shares ISA accounts have separate free structures for funds, and many charge no fees. Those that do, tend to charge a fixed fee of a few pounds per transaction.

Share trading costs

If you'd rather pick individual shares to buy and sell, you'll typically have to pay a slightly higher cost per transaction, often around the £10 mark. You can find ISAs that don't charge for this - again, Trading212 don't charge any fees for this at the time of writing.

Most stocks and shares ISAs are accessible through both mobile app and website. In some cases you might need to visit a branch or apply by telephone, but this is far less common in 2023. So while this isn't much of a factor, it's still worth checking!

Time to think about where you might invest your hard earned cash. Depending on which provider you open an account with, you may have access to different shares in different countries, or different funds.

• unit trusts

• investment trusts

• exchange-traded funds

• individual shares

• corporate and government bonds

If you want to buy US shares with your ISA funds (think Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc), you will first need to complete a W-8BEN form and submit your request to your chosen platform provider. You'll also be on the hook for some taxes on dividends and income you earn from any US shareholdings.

You can pay up to £20,000 per year across all types of ISAs. So you could put all of this into a stocks and shares ISA; you could put £10k into one, and £10k into a cash ISA; or any other combination. You also don't need to hit the limit, but you will need to deposit more than any minimum amount. Learn more about this year's ISA allowances.

All accounts tend to have some kind of minimum deposit. Some will be very achievable, like £1 at Trading212. Others will be more lofty, such as £500, or £25/month, at AJ Bell. This might be a big factor for you, depending how far along your investing journey you are.

You can only take out one ISA of each type per tax year, but in many cases you can transfer your accumulated ISA balance from one provider to another. This can often be done online, but sometimes requires a paper form to be submitted. You may need to speak to both your current provider and your new one to get things lined up.