US investors have never had cheaper access to the market: the average ETF dollar now pays 0.13% a year. The industry, meanwhile, has moved its launch effort almost entirely to active products, with the median new fund charging 0.69%. The money is starting to follow.
The United States now has roughly as many ETFs as listed companies, and the two things most often written about them are both true: fund fees keep falling, and new funds keep getting more expensive. To be fair, a 0.60–0.70% median fee on recent launches is still progress relative to many older cohorts of active mutual funds. But sheer launch volume does not make the menu better, and it certainly does not make choosing from it easier for the typical investor. The contradiction sits in the word "average". This note rebuilds the full fee distribution from the primary source — every fee an ETF discloses in its prospectus and every census form it files with the SEC, from 2010 to 2026.
Sort the funds into five fee buckets — 3,820 of the 3,954 report both a fee and assets — and count three things for each: funds, assets, and the fee revenue those assets produce.
Funds charging under 0.10% are 8% of the shelf and hold 73% of the money. This is the cheap core built by Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street, where the price war happened. Funds above 0.50% are the reverse case: more than half the shelf, about a twentieth of the money. Revenue evens the picture out. The 0.50–1.00% bucket alone earns $4.6B a year, roughly as much as the entire $9.5T core.
Investors in aggregate pay very little, because the money concentrates in a few dozen cheap funds. The industry still makes three quarters of its fee income on the rest of the shelf.
"ETF fees keep falling" is true of the asset-weighted average, the fee paid by the typical dollar. The fee charged by the typical fund has sat near half a percent for fifteen years and has drifted up since 2020. The two lines below come from the same prospectus filings; only the weighting differs.
Trackers with longer asset records, Morningstar and ICI among them, show the asset-weighted line falling through the 2010s before settling near current levels. The median never joined that decline. Fees compressed where investors moved their money; the rest of the shelf never repriced. And the shelf kept growing: 3,954 funds in the fiscal-2025 census against about 2,000 in 2019, with 250–670 organic launches a year against roughly 100–200 closures.
The census marks each fund's first filing, which gives a reliable launch ledger from 2020. Launches nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025. Their composition changed more: the share that are actively managed (no index, a manager's discretion, often an options overlay) rose from 44% to 85%.
Pricing follows the mix. The median fund launched in 2011 charged 0.53%; the median 2025 launch charges 0.69%, about five times what the average invested dollar pays. The decomposition matters: index launches have cost a fairly flat 0.40–0.50% throughout, while active launches drifted from about 0.55% to 0.70%. Most of the rise in the blended line comes from the mix flipping to 85% active.
For the investor this is, so far, a story about the shelf rather than the portfolio: index funds still hold fourteen of every fifteen dollars. But the active side is compounding. Active ETFs held $44B in mid-2019 and hold $872B now, a twentyfold rise over a period in which index assets grew two and a half times. Each of those dollars also earns the sponsor more: at current fees, active funds collect about a quarter of industry revenue on 6.7% of assets.
Half the shelf, a fifteenth of the money. The natural question is who is doing the launching.
It would be tidy if the expensive shelf belonged to boutiques while the giants tended the core. The ledger says otherwise. For each of the ten largest sponsors, the chart compares the asset-weighted fee of the funds it ran before 2020 with the median fee of what it has launched since. Mutual funds converted into ETFs, a large flow at Dimensional, JPMorgan and Fidelity, are excluded along with other transfers of existing assets; what remains is new product.
Eight of the ten price new product above their existing book. The exceptions are the two retail price-fighters, Schwab and Invesco. The step is smallest where the cheap-core franchise is largest: Vanguard's eleven launches in six years come in at a median 0.10%. It is widest where the sponsor is building an active franchise: JPMorgan launches at 0.35% and Fidelity at 0.46%, each more than twice its book.
| Sponsor | Launches '20–'25 | Median launch fee | Share of sponsor's AUM | Share of sponsor's revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanguard | 11 | 0.10% | 0.1% | 0.2% |
| BlackRock · iShares | 155 | 0.20% | 1.3% | 2.0% |
| State Street · SPDR | 35 | 0.15% | 0.9% | 1.4% |
| Schwab | 9 | 0.05% | 3.4% | 1.8% |
| Invesco | 58 | 0.22% | 3.6% | 2.4% |
| Dimensional | 25 | 0.24% | 25.1% | 31.2% |
| JPMorgan | 43 | 0.35% | 52.1% | 65.4% |
| First Trust | 156 | 0.85% | 29.1% | 34.9% |
| VanEck | 28 | 0.49% | 2.3% | 2.4% |
| Fidelity | 40 | 0.46% | 11.6% | 23.1% |
| All '40 Act ETFs | 2,623 | 0.60% | 4.3% | 15.4% |
Funds launched in 2020–25 hold 4% of industry assets and already earn 15% of industry fees. At JPMorgan they are most of the business: JEPI and JEPQ, the 0.35% options-income pair launched in 2020 and 2022, hold about $58B between them, and the post-2020 range produces two thirds of the firm's ETF fee income. Fidelity's launches produce 23% of its fee income on 12% of its assets; First Trust earns a third of its fees on launches priced at a median 0.85%. Even at Vanguard and BlackRock, where new funds barely register, the revenue share runs ahead of the asset share.
None of this required repricing the old funds. The old funds stay cheap, and the new revenue is built beside them.
It exists because most money sits in a few dozen funds priced under 0.10%, and that price is open to anyone. The median fund still charges 0.50%; nothing about the trend moves your money to the cheap side on its own.
The median 2025 launch charges 0.69%, and 85% of launches are active. A brand known for cheap funds tells you little about its new ones: Fidelity's pre-2020 book averages 0.19%, its launches since come in at 0.46%.
The funds the price war repriced are the older, larger ones. When offered a new fund, the useful comparison is the incumbent in the same family with similar exposure, which is usually several times cheaper.
Everything above is computed from raw SEC structured datasets — no commercial fund databases. Universe and assets: Form N-CEN census filings, 2018Q3–2026Q1 (fund counts use trailing-four-quarter windows; assets are fiscal-year average net assets). Fees: prospectus Risk/Return XBRL summaries, 2010Q4–2026Q1; a fund's fee is the net expense ratio where a fee waiver exists, otherwise the gross ratio, taken as the median across share-class values of the latest filing. Launches: a fund's first-ever N-CEN filing (reliable from 2020). Sponsor brands group the SEC's legal trusts (e.g. five iShares trusts → BlackRock).
Data and pipeline: SEC DERA structured data sets (N-CEN, N-PORT, Risk/Return). Analysis code reproducible from the raw quarterly files.
This is independent research commentary, written for general information. It is not investment advice, an offer, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, and it takes no account of anyone's individual circumstances. A fund's fee is one attribute among many; nothing here implies that any fund named is a good or bad investment.
All figures are the author's calculations from public SEC filings, may contain errors, and describe a moment in time — fees, assets and product lineups change. Sponsor, fund and index names (Vanguard, BlackRock, iShares, State Street, SPDR, Schwab, Invesco, Dimensional, JPMorgan, First Trust, VanEck, Fidelity, JEPI, JEPQ and others) are trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification only; nothing here implies affiliation with, or endorsement by, any of these firms. If you find an error in the data or the method, the underlying filings are public and the author would rather hear about it than not.