Remember Robinhood's $65 Million PFOF Fine? The Market Just Paid $1 Billion in a Quarter

US options payment for order flow (PFOF) reached $1.004 billion in the second quarter of 2026, the first time a quarterly total has crossed the $1 billion mark and a 23.6% increase on the prior three months, according to a Best Execution aggregation compiled by Global Trading from public routing disclosures. The figures come from Rule 606 filings under Regulation NMS, which require broker-dealers to disclose where customer orders are routed and what venues pay for them. The implied Q1 total was roughly $812 million, meaning market makers paid about $192 million more in the following quarter. Annualized, the pace implies just over $4 billion a year for options orders.

Broker revenue keeps climbing

Robinhood reported $342 million of options revenue for Q2 2026, up 29% year over year and equal to 44% of its $776 million in transaction-based revenue — more than equities and crypto combined. Charles Schwab booked $434 million in options trading revenue for the same period, 62% higher year on year, though that figure bundles commissions with order-flow income and is not directly comparable to the industry PFOF tally. Schwab attributed a 28% rise in total trading revenue, to $1.18 billion, to stronger order-flow income, rates, volumes and product mix.

Webull offers a third data point: options revenue rose 57% to $88.4 million as customers traded 213 million contracts, 68% more than a year earlier. Its 2025 annual report showed equity and options PFOF contributed $304.1 million, or 53.3% of total revenue.

The PFOF model, which helped fund commission-free trading, has long drawn scrutiny over the tension between a broker's routing revenue and its best-execution duty. In 2020 the SEC found Robinhood made misleading statements and omissions about PFOF between 2015 and late 2018 and that customers lost $34.1 million from inferior execution prices; the firm paid $65 million without admitting or denying the findings. Erin E. Schneider, then director of the SEC's San Francisco Regional Office, said at the time that "innovation does not negate responsibility under the federal securities laws."

Global Trading tied the quarterly rise to the emergence of agentic retail trading. Robinhood launched accounts for third-party AI agents in May, starting with equities before adding options; by its Q2 earnings report, almost 100,000 customers had opened agentic accounts holding more than $100 million in assets under custody, though the firm did not break out the volume or revenue they generated. CEO Vlad Tenev said on the July earnings call that the offering had been expanded so options could be traded through agents as well. Rule 606 reports, however, do not identify whether an order was placed by a human or a machine, so the data cannot quantify how much of the 23.6% increase came from AI activity.

Regulation remains split. PFOF is still permitted in the US subject to disclosure and best-execution obligations, while the final national exemptions under the European Union's general PFOF ban lapsed on June 30, 2026.