We Checked 17 Brokerages. The Median Cash Sweep Pays 0.02%, Not the 3.40% Sitting One Click Away.

Here's a number worth sitting with: across the 11 brokerage bank-sweep programs SwitchWize checks every day, the median default cash-sweep rate is 0.02% APY. The median money market fund available at those same firms, in the same account, usually one settings screen away, pays roughly 3.40%. On $100,000 of cash sitting idle, that's the difference between earning about $20 a year and about $3,400 a year.

That gap isn't a typo, and it isn't unique to one firm having a bad quarter. It's how the industry is generally built. What varies, a lot, is exactly how bad the gap is at any given firm, and that's the part most people never see, because nobody's statement puts the sweep rate next to the fund rate on the same page.

How we know this

SwitchWize built the Brokerage Cash Sweep Index by pulling each firm's own published rate disclosures directly, refreshed daily. Not survey estimates, not a single reporter's snapshot: the actual PDF rate sheets, disclosure pages, and rate-table endpoints that Merrill, Fidelity, Schwab, and the rest publish for their own clients, read the same way a client would read them.

That matters for one reason in particular. A number like "brokerages pay next to nothing on cash" is easy to say and hard to verify, because most published coverage of this topic leans on a handful of headline rates from a specific point in time. Tracking it daily, firm by firm, with each rate's actual "as of" date attached, turns it from an impression into a number you can check yourself and watch move.

The full picture, firm by firm

Every row below is that firm's lowest-balance, standard brokerage-account sweep rate, the rate a typical client with a modest uninvested cash balance actually earns by default, unless noted otherwise. Rates and dates are current as of this article's last verification.

Ten of the 11 tracked bank-sweep firms (all but Wells Fargo Advisors) have current, dated, unambiguous rates and make up the 0.02% median. Wells Fargo Advisors is shown here too, with the specific reason it's excluded, rather than left off the page.

Two firms we dropped from this comparison entirely, not just flagged: Robinhood's published rate is dated February 2026 with no visible newer figure and no formal disclosure mechanism to trust that an unchanged date means an unchanged rate. Pershing (BNY) never discloses whether its rate is APY or simple interest, a real enough ambiguity that showing it alongside APY-labeled competitors would be misleading. Both are genuine data-quality calls, not an accidental gap.

Three more firms don't fit this table at all, because they don't run a traditional bank-sweep program the same way:

• Interactive Brokers pays interest directly on cash rather than sweeping it to a bank: 0% under $10,000, then 3.13% (Pro) or 2.13% (Lite) above that, as of Aug. 26, 2026.
• Vanguard's default settlement fund is itself a money market fund (VMFXX), currently yielding about 3.63%–3.69%, not a bank sweep at all.
• Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions, an RIA-custody platform rather than a retail brokerage, runs its own tiered program from 0.36% up to 0.90% at $2 million-plus.

Worth naming plainly: these three are genuine counter-examples to "sweep accounts always pay next to nothing." Vanguard, in particular, defaults its clients into something closer to the fund rate rather than the sweep rate, by design.

Why the gap exists

A bank-sweep program and a money market fund are built to do different jobs for the firm offering them, and that's the mechanical reason the rates diverge.

A bank sweep moves client cash into a deposit account at a partner bank (often an affiliate of the brokerage itself). That deposit funds the bank's own lending and investing activity, and it's priced the way any bank prices a deposit: relative to what the bank needs to pay to attract funding, not relative to prevailing market rates for short-term cash. A money market fund is a different animal entirely: a professionally managed, SEC-registered security holding short-term instruments like Treasury bills, priced close to those instruments' actual market yield.

Put simply, the sweep is a funding product; the fund is an investment product. They're allowed to pay very different rates because they aren't actually the same thing, even though both can hold cash you haven't invested yet.

What we can't verify right now

One firm named at the start of this piece isn't in the table above: Morgan Stanley. SwitchWize identified the endpoint Morgan Stanley's own site uses to publish these rates and fully documented its structure using historical, publicly archived snapshots. Live access to that endpoint is currently blocked by the site's own automated bot-defense, confirmed from two separate networks. Rather than work around that block, the rate is marked unavailable here, the same way it's marked on the live Index. A number we can't verify isn't a number worth publishing.

What this means for you

• Find the actual rate on your own sweep account. It's usually under "cash management," "core position," or "account features," not on the trade screen.
• Check whether a money market fund is available in the same account. At most firms this is a standard trade, not a separate application or a new account, and it typically settles within a business day.
• Compare against outside options too, including a high-yield savings account or a dedicated cash management account, especially for money that isn't tied to near-term investing decisions.
• Re-check periodically. These rates move with the broader rate environment and don't all move together; the live Index tracks the current number at each firm daily, with full tier-by-tier detail beyond the headline rate shown here.

The point of this piece isn't that any one firm is doing something wrong. It's that "brokerage cash" isn't one product with one rate, it's several different products that happen to share a name, and the only way to know which one you're actually in is to go look.

Rates and dates above reflect SwitchWize's Brokerage Cash Sweep Index as of September 2, 2026, and will move over time; treat this article's figures as a dated snapshot and the live Index as the current number. This article is educational and is not financial or investment advice.

Related reading: the cost of leaving cash in a low-yield sweep, brokerage cash sweep vs. bank savings, and money market funds vs. high-yield savings.