Vanguard Digital Advisor

Vanguard Digital Advisor is Vanguard’s automated investing service for personal investors. This page collects the fees Vanguard prints for it. The screenshot is the public page at https://investor.vanguard.com/advice/robo-advisor. The visible heading is “Automated investing with Digital Advisor,” with the sentence “Get your time back with Vanguard’s powerful, easy-to-use automated investment tool.” The fee numbers are not in that hero. They are in Vanguard’s footnotes on its advice pages and in the Digital Advisor brochure.

Gross fee, then net fee

Vanguard says enrollments require at least $100 in each Vanguard Brokerage Account that will be enrolled. For a taxable account, Vanguard’s robo-advisor page says the entire balance must be in the settlement fund at enrollment. For traditional, Roth, or rollover IRAs, the balance must be in allowable investment types or the settlement fund. Those are enrollment conditions, not the annual fee.

The gross advisory fee on an enrolled brokerage account is 0.20% a year for the all-index option and 0.25% a year for the active/index mix. Vanguard then subtracts revenue that Vanguard or an affiliate retains from the portfolio, such as revenue from Vanguard funds, and the result is the net advisory fee the client pays. Vanguard’s “what it costs” page says the annual net advisory fee is approximately 0.15% across enrolled accounts for a typical portfolio, which it also describes as about $15 a year for every $10,000 invested. The brochure describes the all-index net fee as approximately 0.15% to 0.16%, and says the actual net fee varies with the holdings, the account type, and the investment setting. Plan participants can see a different gross fee. This page is about the brokerage-account schedule, not a workplace plan.

The gross fee does not include fund, ETF, or collective-trust expense ratios. Fees paid to a fund’s third-party managers are not part of the revenue credit, because they are not Vanguard revenue. A portfolio of active funds can therefore cost more than the net advisory fee alone. Vanguard also says there is no advisory fee for the first 90 days. The waiver starts when the first account’s enrollment is complete and ends after the close of the first billing period, which Vanguard describes as generally 90 days. Vanguard says it emails before that period ends, and that a client can unenroll without a penalty.

Money market or similar cash in the settlement fund is excluded from the gross-fee calculation. The fee is assessed on the average daily balance of the other securities. It is deducted from the account, and Vanguard says clients do not pay it out of pocket as a separate check.

Arithmetic, marked as ours

On $10,000, 0.15% is $15. That matches Vanguard’s own “about $15 per $10,000” description of the approximate net fee. It is not a quote for every portfolio. On $80,000, the same 0.15% approximation is $120 a year. The gross fee on an all-index $80,000 account, before the revenue credit, is 0.20%, or $160. The gross fee on an active/index mix at 0.25% is $200. The net fee is the gross fee minus the credit, so a reader who stops at $160 or $200 has not finished Vanguard’s formula. None of these figures include the underlying fund expenses, and none of them is a Vanguard projection of account growth.

The $100 enrollment minimum is not a fee. It is the amount Vanguard says must be in the account to enroll. An account can meet that minimum and still owe no advisory fee during the first 90 days.

What the image shows

The screenshot is Vanguard’s hero: the red V, the “Get started” button, and the heading named above. It does not show a fee table, a performance chart, or an account balance. There is nothing in the image to misread as a rising or falling line. The prices in this review are the ones Vanguard writes in the advice-page footnotes and the brochure. If those pages and the hero ever disagree, the brochure’s fee section is the one to follow.

No account was enrolled. The 90-day waiver was not timed on a personal clock. The credit that turns 0.20% into a net fee near 0.15% was not recomputed from a sample portfolio, because that credit depends on the actual holdings. Mintcanopy is repeating Vanguard’s description of the typical case, and saying that the actual net fee varies.

How this differs from the other two schedules on this site

Fidelity Go’s March 30, 2026 brochure charges no advisory fee under $25,000 and 0.35% on the entire balance at $25,000 and above. Schwab Intelligent Portfolios publishes no advisory fee and no commissions, and discloses a cash allocation that generally ranges from 6% to 30%. Vanguard Digital Advisor publishes both a gross fee and a net fee, plus a 90-day waiver and a $100 enrollment minimum. Those three sentences are the comparison. They are not a ranking. A lower approximate net fee is not, by itself, a reason to ignore the enrollment rules or the extra fund expenses.

The page a reader should reopen is https://investor.vanguard.com/advice/robo-advisor together with the Digital Advisor brochure. The hero in the screenshot is only the front of that site. The footnotes under Vanguard’s fee sentences are part of the same publication, and they are where the 0.20%, 0.25%, and approximate 0.15% figures are tied to portfolio type. Personal Advisor is a different Vanguard service, with a higher gross fee and a higher balance requirement. The screenshot and this note are about Digital Advisor only. A reader who is quoted 0.35% or 0.40% is being quoted the other service, and that quote should be checked on Vanguard’s Personal Advisor page rather than against the Digital Advisor hero.