The Best Brokers for Tax-Loss Harvesting
Some brokers provide tax-loss harvesting services to all users, and many robo-advisor services do too. A few also offer direct indexing.The investing information provided on this page is for educational purposes only. NerdWallet, Inc. does not offer advisory or brokerage services, nor does it recommend or advise investors to buy or sell particular stocks, securities or other investments.
Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy that can reduce your investment-related tax bill — especially if you're in a higher tax bracket. It can also put some money back in your pocket if your portfolio isn't exactly doing well this year.
However, harvesting losses can also be pretty complicated — there are rules and lots of gotchas to watch out for. One of the more common mistakes to avoid: you can’t sell an investment for a loss and then immediately buy back into it. That’s called a “wash sale,” and it invalidates any potential tax deduction.
If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, several of the investment platforms we review offer a solution: tax-loss harvesting tools that make it much easier to take advantage of this money-saving strategy. A few even make it possible for ordinary investors to take advantage of direct indexing — a powerful form of tax-loss harvesting that was once only available to the rich.
Robo-advisors with automated tax-loss harvesting services
Several of the robo-advisors we review offer a feature that periodically performs automated tax-loss harvesting sales and reinvests the proceeds in a similar investment to the one sold during the 31-day wash sale period.
Some robo-advisors offer tax-loss harvesting to all accounts that meet their general minimum balance, while others have a higher minimum to be eligible for tax-loss harvesting. You generally have to opt in to the service, and it may have an additional fee.
Below is a list of the robo-advisors we review that offer automated tax-loss harvesting, in order from lowest to highest minimum.
Betterment: $10 minimum to start investing.
Vanguard Digital Advisor: $100 minimum to open an account.
E*TRADE Core Portfolios: $500 minimum to open an account.
Merrill Guided Investing: $1,000 minimum to open an account.
Robinhood Strategies: $3,000 minimum for tax-loss harvesting.
Fidelity Go: $25,000 minimum for tax-loss harvesting.
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios: $50,000 minimum for tax-loss harvesting.
Company | NerdWallet rating | Fees | Promotion | Learn more |
|---|---|---|---|---|
$10 minimum to start investing | 5.0/5 Reviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 0.25% or $5/month. | Get up to $2,000 when you open and fund a new investing account. Terms apply. | |
$100 minimum to open an account  Vanguard Digital AdvisorReviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 4.8/5 Reviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 0.15% per year (approximately) | No advisory fees your first 90 days of Vanguard Digital Advisor investment management (Enrollment requires a Vanguard account with a minimum of $100) | |
$500 minimum to open an account  E*TRADE Core PortfoliosReviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 4.5/5 Reviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 0.30% management fee | None no promotion available at this time | |
$1,000 minimum to open an account  Merrill Guided InvestingReviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 4.3/5 Reviewed in: Oct. 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 0.45% management fee | None no promotion available at this time | |
$3,000 minimum for tax-loss harvesting  Robinhood StrategiesReviewed in: October 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 4.9/5 Reviewed in: October 2025Period considered:Aug. - Oct. 2025 | 0.25% $250 annual fee cap for Robinhood Gold members | None no promotion available at this time | |
Brokers with tax-loss harvesting tools
A couple of the self-directed brokerage accounts we review also offer tools to help you identify tax-loss-harvesting opportunities. Unlike the robo-advisors above, these brokers don’t automate the process — you have to push the button to place the order.
Interactive Brokers
Tax-loss harvesting tools: IBKR’s Tax Loss Harvest Tool scans your account not just for positions that are at a loss but also for individual lots (purchase amounts) that are at a loss. It then calculates the total loss that selling them would generate, queues up a sale order, and suggests replacement investments.
In classic Interactive Brokers style, it’s an extremely sophisticated and capable tool that might be a bit intimidating to navigate for a beginner, as it shows a lot of information on one screen and offers many filters to adjust.
Other things to know: Interactive Brokers’ whole shtick is that it’s an incredibly powerful investment platform. It has the widest investment selection and feature set of any broker we review, making it a great choice for advanced traders who want an advanced platform, but beginners might be intimidated. Read our full Interactive Brokers review to see what we mean.
2026 Best-of Award winner: Interactive Brokers is NerdWallet's pick for the best online broker for advanced traders. Interactive Brokers' IBKR Lite is a strong option for frequent traders: The broker offers international trade capabilities, no stock-trading commission and a quality trading platform.
Fidelity
Tax-loss harvesting tools: Fidelity offers a tax-loss harvesting calculator that can compute the short-term and long-term losses you’d realize from selling an unprofitable investment, given your income tax and capital gains tax brackets. If you decide you want to proceed, it can queue up a sale order for you.
However, it doesn’t suggest replacement investments, leaving it up to you to figure out what to do with the proceeds and how to avoid a wash sale.
Other things to know: Fidelity is a NerdWallet favorite thanks to its huge investment selection, easy-to-use interface and smooth customer service experience, although some advanced traders may be miffed about its options trading fee and lack of support for futures trading. Get the full scoop in our full Fidelity review.
2026 Best-of Award winner: Fidelity is NerdWallet's pick for the best online broker for beginning investors and the best app for investing. Fidelity is one of the largest and most well-established brokerages, and it shows. Fidelity charges no trading commissions, offers an extensive set of no-fee, no-minimum index funds. It also stands out for its top-notch research tools, a renowned trading platform and very strong customer service.
Platforms with direct indexing services
How does tax-loss harvesting work if your portfolio is composed mostly of index funds? Well, there’s actually a special strategy for that. Suppose you own an S&P 500 ETF. Through that ETF, you are invested in the S&P 500 index’s 503 constituents.
Some of those stocks have positive returns for the year, and others have negative ones. With an ETF, you can’t harvest individual stock losses that are dragging down the ETF’s performance because you can only buy or sell the whole ETF.
But what if you reconstructed that ETF yourself by buying fractional shares of all 503 companies individually, in the same weighting as the ETF? In that case, you’d have an investment that behaves just like an S&P 500 ETF, but you’d also be able to tax-loss harvest individual stocks within the S&P 500.
This is called direct indexing, and it’s a powerful but often expensive and time-consuming strategy that usually requires opening an advisor-managed account with a six-figure minimum.
However, two of the investing platforms we review — one self-directed broker (Public.com) and one robo-advisor (Wealthfront) — offer integrated direct indexing services with much lower minimums.
Public.com
Tax-loss harvesting tools: Public.com offers the lowest minimum account balance for direct indexing for any platform we review: Just $1,000.
Direct indexing can provide tax savings on ETF investments, but it isn’t applicable to individual stock positions. However, Public.com’s recently released AI agents (more on those below) may be able to automate tax-loss harvesting on the rest of your portfolio.
Other things to know: Public.com is a trailblazer in AI-assisted brokerage services. It offers “generated assets” — basically custom ETFs that you can create with an LLM-style text prompt — and it recently rolled out AI brokerage agents that can help you develop investment strategies and even place trades for you. On top of that, it also charges no fee for options trades, and even pays customers a rebate for each option contract traded out of its payment-for-order-flow revenue.
However, Public.com doesn’t offer mutual funds, and also has a relatively narrow list of account types — no managed accounts, custodial accounts or international accounts, for example. You can learn more by checking out our full Public.com review.
Public provides free stock and ETF trades, pays you to trade options, and gives traders access to crypto and bonds, as well as a high-yield cash account. The platform will appeal to traders looking for a low-cost options broker and access to many types of assets.
Wealthfront
Tax-loss harvesting tools: Wealthfront offers direct indexing portfolios for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 indexes for a minimum of $5,000. Direct indexing is available on other indexes as well for accounts with a balance of $100,000 or more.
On top of that, Wealthfront offers automatic daily tax-loss harvesting services to all taxable automated investing accounts by default, for free.
Other things to know: Wealthfront earns high marks from our reviews for its automated investing strategies, DIY stock investing offerings and high-yield cash management account. However, it has a $500 account minimum and doesn’t offer any access to human advisors. See our full Wealthfront review for more info.
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2026 Best-of Award winner: Wealthfront is NerdWallet's pick for the best robo-advisor for portfolio options. Wealthfront is our highest-scoring robo-advisor thanks to its blend of automated investment portfolios and DIY stock investing portfolios, its wide variety of account options, excellent tax strategy and low management fee. Wealthfront's only weak spots are its account minimum ($500) and its lack of access to human advisors.
Tax-loss harvesting is only applicable to taxable investment accounts. Another way to avoid capital gains taxes is to invest in a tax-advantaged account, such as an IRA.
Other ways to harvest tax losses
Working with an advisor
The brokers and robo-advisors above provide automated tax-loss harvesting services, but you can also have a person do it for you, the old-fashioned way, if you work with a financial advisor. (Working with an advisor can also offer benefits beyond just tax-loss harvesting, such as financial planning help.)
Many of the financial advisor firms we review offer tax-loss harvesting, and a few even offer direct indexing, although there may be high minimum balances for those services.
(Fidelity gets another mention here because its Managed FidFolios accounts provide direct indexing with a minimum investment of just $5,000, but they are a separate product from the Fidelity Go robo-advisor service and Fidelity’s self-directed brokerage accounts.)
Manually harvesting tax losses
Technically speaking, you can harvest tax losses in any self-directed brokerage account if you’re willing to do the entire thing yourself.
This involves looking at the year-to-date returns of all your investments, choosing which negative-return investments to sell, and then avoiding wash-sale rules if you plan to repurchase them. (That means waiting at least 31 days before repurchasing, and/or substituting them with different investments before then.)
If you’re interested in the DIY approach, check out our overview of tax-loss harvesting.
Using a HIFO or MinTax selling method
Some brokers give you a choice of different methodologies for determining which specific shares of your investments get sold first when you place a sale.
The most common default selling method is first-in-first-out (FIFO), where the first shares bought are the first shares sold. Some brokers only allow FIFO selling. But others allow you to switch to more tax-efficient selling methods, such as highest-price-in-first-out (HIFO), or an algorithmic tax-minimization method called MinTax.
SoFi Active Investing and M1 Finance get an honorable mention here because they use the MinTax selling method by default. This isn’t quite tax-loss harvesting per se, but it’s better than nothing.
Methodology
NerdWallet's ratings for brokers and robo-advisors are weighted averages of several categories, including investment selection, customer support, account fees, account minimum, trading costs and more. Our survey of brokers and robo-advisors includes the largest U.S. providers by assets under management, plus notable and/or emerging players in the industry. Factors we consider, depending on the category, include advisory fees, branch access, user-facing technology, customer service and mobile features. The stars represent ratings from poor (one star) to excellent (five stars). Ratings are rounded to the nearest half-star.