The fee for registering securities with the SEC falls by more than a third on 1 October, and it falls because a forecast went up

Eighty-seven dollars per million.

That is the fee for registering securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1 October, under an order the Commission signed on 21 August and filed for public inspection at 8.45 on Tuesday morning. The rate in force today is $138.10. It falls by $51.10, which is 37.0 percent.

Nobody decided to charge less.

The rate is a quotient, not a decision

Section 6(b)(2) of the Securities Act does not let the Commission pick a number. It prescribes the arithmetic: take the amount Congress has told the Commission to collect, divide it by the Commission's own estimate of how much will be registered, and that is the rate. Both inputs moved this year, and they moved by very different amounts, which is where the whole of the fall comes from rather than from any change of policy toward the people paying.

The numerator is indexed to inflation. The Commission used the consumer price index for all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted, at 333.952 for June 2026 against 322.561 for June 2025, giving a multiplier of 1.03531. Applied to the fiscal 2026 target of $887,800,554, that produces a fiscal 2027 target of $919,148,792. Congress is asking for 3.5 percent more money.

The denominator did something else entirely. The Commission's baseline estimate of the aggregate maximum offering prices for fiscal 2027 is $10,561,145,911,745. The equivalent figure in last year's order was $6,430,224,001,056. That is 64.2 percent more paper expected through the door.

Divide the target by the estimate and the result is 0.0000870309, which rounds at the seventh decimal place to 0.0000870. The order states it as $87.00 per million.

What the change is worth

A company registering $500m of securities pays $43,500 in fiscal 2027 against $69,050 in fiscal 2026, a saving of $25,550. At $1bn the fee goes from $138,100 to $87,000.

The rate reaches further than registration. The ordering clause applies it to section 6(b) of the Securities Act and to sections 13(e) and 14(g) of the Exchange Act, which cover an issuer repurchasing its own securities, tender offers, and specified proxy solicitations.

The number underneath the number

The denominator is a forecast, and the order publishes the whole of it rather than just the conclusion. Appendix A carries monthly aggregate maximum offering prices back to 2016, month by month, with the number of trading days in each, alongside the projected months running from August 2026 to September 2027. The largest actual month in that series is March 2026, at $1,133,172m.

The statute asks only that the resulting rate be reasonably likely to produce collections equal to the target. It does not ask that the forecast be right.