Fidelity's Zero-Fee Index Funds Are Still Rare — Here's What They Cost
Fidelity offers four index funds with no expense ratio at all. Understanding the full lineup helps you decide where costs actually matter.
What Fidelity’s Index Fund Lineup Actually Looks Like
Fidelity’s index fund catalog covers a wide range of territory — broad market exposure, growth stocks, value stocks, international equities, and emerging markets. The sheer size of that catalog can make it harder, not easier, to figure out where to start. Sorting the options by cost, one-year performance, and total assets under management produces a more manageable picture.
Three categories tend to matter most to individual investors: funds that charge nothing, funds that have returned the most over the past year, and funds that the largest number of investors have actually chosen to put money into. Those three groups don’t overlap as much as you might expect.
The Four Funds That Charge No Expense Ratio
In 2018, Fidelity introduced four index funds with a 0% expense ratio — something no other brokerage had offered at that point. Eight years later, zero-expense-ratio index funds remain rare. The only other broker currently offering them is E*TRADE. Fidelity’s four free funds, known as the ZERO family, are built on indexes that Fidelity created internally rather than licensed from outside index providers, which is what keeps the cost down.
As of June 3, 2026, here’s where each ZERO fund stood on one-year performance: the Fidelity ZERO Extended Market Index Fund (FZIPX) led the group at 35.50%, followed by the Fidelity ZERO International Index Fund (FZILX) at 34.01%, the Fidelity ZERO Total Market Index Fund (FZROX) at 30.05%, and the Fidelity ZERO Large Cap Index Fund (FNILX) at 29.46%. These aren’t marginal differences — a five-percentage-point spread within a single fund family, all charging the same fee of zero, is worth paying attention to.
There is one firm restriction. These funds are only available to investors who hold a Fidelity account directly. You cannot access the ZERO funds through another brokerage platform. For most self-directed investors building a Fidelity account from scratch, that’s a non-issue. For anyone consolidating accounts elsewhere, it’s worth knowing before you plan around these funds.
Why Zero Percent Still Means Something After 30 Years
The average expense ratio for an index fund in 2025 was 0.05%, according to Investment Company Institute data. That figure is already low by historical standards, and it’s easy to dismiss as inconsequential. The math over a long horizon tells a different story.
Consider an investor contributing $7,500 per year to an IRA over 30 years, with an assumed average annual return of 6%. At a 0.05% expense ratio, that investor gives up more than $6,400 to fees over the full period. That $6,400 would otherwise have remained invested and compounding.
A 0.05% fee is already near the bottom of the industry range. The ZERO funds charge nothing. For long-horizon accounts where compounding is doing the heaviest lifting, the difference between 0.05% and 0.00% adds up in ways that are easy to underestimate in year one.
The Five Funds With the Highest One-Year Returns
Performance rankings shift constantly, but the one-year numbers as of June 3, 2026, reveal something consistent about where gains have concentrated lately. The top five performing Fidelity index funds — excluding SAI and Flex funds, which are only available to clients of Fidelity’s paid advisory services — are led by the Fidelity Emerging Markets Index Fund (FPADX), which returned 59.25% over that period at an expense ratio of 0.075%.
Behind it: the Fidelity Small Cap Value Index Fund (FISVX) at 45.36% and 0.050%, the Fidelity Small Cap Index Fund (FSSNX) at 43.56% and 0.025%, the Fidelity Small Cap Growth Index Fund (FECGX) at 41.72% and 0.050%, and the Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Fund (FNCMX) at 41.65% with an expense ratio of 0.290%.
Three of the five top performers are small-cap funds. A small-cap company is generally defined as having a market capitalization between $250 million and $2 billion. These tend to be younger companies with higher growth potential, which is why they appear so often in short-term performance rankings. That same growth potential carries real downside risk — investing in a fund rather than a single stock reduces concentration risk, but small-cap funds can still experience sharper drawdowns than large-cap or total-market alternatives. An investor holding only small-cap exposure during a risk-off period would feel that asymmetry quickly.
The Nasdaq Composite fund (FNCMX) stands out for a different reason: at 0.290%, its expense ratio is significantly higher than anything else on this list. That’s still not expensive by active fund standards, but it’s more than ten times the cost of FSSNX. The one-year return difference between those two funds was less than two percentage points.
Where Most Investors Have Actually Put Their Money
One-year returns attract attention, but assets under management show where investors have committed capital over time. Fidelity’s three largest index funds by AUM are the Fidelity 500 Index Fund at $791.7 billion, the Fidelity Total Market Index Fund at $131.7 billion, and the Fidelity International Index Fund at $81.5 billion.
The gap between first and second is striking. The 500 Index Fund holds roughly six times more in assets than the Total Market fund. That concentration around S&P 500 exposure is consistent across the broader index fund industry — the S&P 500 has become the default benchmark for many long-term investors, and asset flows tend to follow familiarity.
Neither the 500 Index Fund nor the Total Market Index Fund appear in the top-five performance list. Their one-year numbers were outpaced by emerging markets and small-cap funds. That divergence is common: the funds most people own aren’t usually the same ones generating the highest returns in any given twelve-month window. Whether that gap reflects a sound diversification strategy or a missed opportunity depends entirely on how an investor weighs volatility against return.
Expense Ratios Across the Full Spectrum
The cost spread across Fidelity’s index fund lineup is wide. The ZERO funds sit at 0.00%. The Fidelity Small Cap Index Fund (FSSNX) charges 0.025%. The Fidelity 500 Index Fund charges its own fee (available on Fidelity’s site and worth confirming directly). The Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Fund sits at the high end of this group at 0.290%.
For context, 0.290% is still far below the average actively managed mutual fund, which typically charges above 0.50% and often higher. Within the universe of index funds, though, paying nearly 0.30% for Nasdaq exposure is a meaningful premium over what a broad-market fund charges for similar or overlapping holdings.
Investors building a portfolio from Fidelity’s lineup need to decide which trade-off matters more in their specific situation: minimizing fees across the board, maximizing recent performance, or sticking with the market-cap-weighted funds that most of the investing public has settled on. At $791.7 billion in assets, the Fidelity 500 Index Fund has a lot of company — but the ZERO Extended Market fund returned 35.50% in the past year at a cost of exactly nothing.
The data in this article reflects figures from Morningstar as of June 3, 2026, and is intended for general informational purposes only. Expense ratios, fund availability, and performance figures change over time. Nothing here constitutes personalized investment advice. Consult a qualified financial professional or visit Fidelity’s website directly before making investment decisions.