Fidelity Investments

Is Fidelity safe?

For holding investments, yes. Your account is with Fidelity Brokerage Services, and your securities are held by National Financial Services (NFS), its sister company, which had $12.6 billion of net capital at the end of 2025. Fidelity's excess SIPC policy is unusually generous: $1 billion for all customers together and no per-customer limit on securities. We score Fidelity 87/100.

Two things hold the score back. FMR LLC, the owner, is private and publishes no audited group accounts. And in August 2024 a criminal exploited weak access controls to copy identity documents of about 77,000 people, which Massachusetts fined Fidelity for in 2026.

How are my investments protected at Fidelity?

The protection starts with segregation. NFS must keep customer cash and securities apart from its own, and at 31 December 2025 it held $24.6 billion in segregated reserve accounts for customers. If NFS failed, customers would get their own securities back first.

If anything were missing, two layers of cover apply:

Layer	Limit	Covers
SIPC	$500,000 per customer, of which $250,000 cash	Missing securities and cash after a broker failure
Excess of SIPC (Fidelity's policy)	$1 billion aggregate; no per-customer limit on securities; $1.9 million cash per customer	What SIPC does not pay

Neither layer covers market losses or fraud while the firm is still operating. Fidelity says its policy is the largest excess SIPC protection available in the industry. Its aggregate cap is larger than Charles Schwab's $600 million and Interactive Brokers' $150 million.

Cash depends on your core position. A money market core position is a fund, covered by SIPC if the broker fails, not by the FDICDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary. The FDIC-Insured Deposit Sweep Program places cash at program banks within FDIC limits, and any overflow goes into a government money market fund.

How strong is Fidelity financially?

Strong, but you have to take more on trust than with a listed broker. NFS files an audited statement of financial condition with the SEC each year. PwC audited the 2025 one, which shows net capital of $12.6 billion, 16.7% of customer debit balances and $11.1 billion above the minimum.

For the group, Fidelity publishes an annual report but not audited consolidated accounts. It reported $37.7 billion of revenue and $12.7 billion of operating income for 2025, with $18 trillion of assets under administration. The report says these figures differ from FMR LLC's consolidated statements. The Johnson family controls FMR, and the company has been private for its whole history. We score financial strength lower than for Interactive Brokers or Schwab for that reason, not because of any sign of weakness.

What happened in the 2024 data breach?

In July 2024 a criminal opened two Fidelity brokerage accounts using stolen identities. Between 17 and 19 August, the attacker used a customer feature for retrieving document images. By manipulating the image identifiers, they pulled up documents belonging to other people. According to the Massachusetts Securities Division, those documents included Social Security numbers, account numbers, passport and driver's licence numbers, dates of birth and, in some cases, images of credit cards.

About 77,000 customers and other individuals, such as customers' relatives, were affected, including 2,768 in Massachusetts. Fidelity sent notices from around 9 October 2024 and offered two years of credit monitoring. No customer accounts were taken over in the incident. In April 2026 Massachusetts fined Fidelity Brokerage Services $1.25 million and ordered an independent review of its controls.

What else is on Fidelity's record?

Little, for a firm with $18 trillion under administration. Fidelity Brokerage Services has 24 regulatory events on BrokerCheck and NFS has 47, mostly old or small. The recent ones: $1.65 million in 2023 from FINRA and Massachusetts over weak checks on applications to trade options and use margin; $600,000 from FINRA in 2025 because an employee could reach stock plan account data without proper supervision for nearly eight years; and $2.46 million paid by NFS to the SEC in 2020 for failing to deliver prospectuses in some offerings from 2005 to 2017.

How to keep your Fidelity account safe

• Set up a passkeyPasskeyA way to sign in without a password. Your device holds a key tied to one website or app and unlocks it with your fingerprint, face or PIN.More in the glossary or another strong login factor, and turn on the money transfer lock if you do not move money often.
• Read alerts and statements. The Customer Protection Guarantee requires you to report unauthorised activity promptly, within 30 days of the information reaching you.
• Activity by anyone you gave your credentials to counts as authorised and is not covered.
• If you were notified about the 2024 breach, freeze your credit and watch for new accounts opened in your name.
• Fidelity Crypto is a separate account at a trust bank and has no SIPC cover.

How we scored it

Investor protection (93) is Fidelity's strongest factor because of the size of its excess SIPC policy. Regulation (93) and conduct (84) are solid. Financial strength (86) is held back by private ownership and the lack of audited group accounts, and account security (72) is the weakest factor because of the 2024 breach.