The Top 100 Cheapest ETFs on the ASX - Because Fees Are the Only Certainty

I've added another ranking to OzFinn: the Top 100 ETFs on the ASX, ranked by management fee (MER), cheapest first. It's the same table you know from the Top 100 by AUM - returns over 1/3/5/10 years, after-tax toggle, 21 category filters - just sorted by the one number that never lies to you.

Fees are the only guaranteed number in investing

Every other figure on an ETF fact sheet is a forecast or a rear-view mirror. Past returns? No guarantee. Projected yield? An estimate. The index outlook? Nobody knows.

The fee is different. It's a contract. It will be deducted every single year, in bull markets and in crashes, whether the fund performs or not. John Bogle put it best: "In investing, you get what you don't pay for." Returns are uncertain, but costs are precise - so the one lever you fully control, you should pull hard.

And it compounds. On $100,000 invested for 30 years at 8% p.a., a 0.04% fee leaves you with roughly $990k. A 0.40% fee leaves you with roughly $900k. Same market, same risk - about $90,000 quietly handed to the fund manager over a fee gap most investors would dismiss as a rounding error. That's why the cheapest funds on this list charge 0.03-0.07%, and why that difference matters more than almost any other selection criterion.

Low fees as a stability signal

Here's the less obvious angle: sorting by fees doesn't show you the best ETFs - it tends to surface the most stable, boring, commoditised ones. And boring is a feature.

Why? Issuers can only afford rock-bottom fees on simple, at-scale products - broad market-cap index funds tracking the ASX 200, S&P 500 or MSCI World. Nobody runs a niche uranium-AI-crypto thematic at 0.05%; those need 0.50-0.95% to be worth the issuer's time. So a fee sort naturally filters out most of the gimmicks and filters in the plain building blocks - IVV, A200, IOZ, VAS, BGBL - the funds engaged in a genuine fee war between BlackRock, Vanguard, BetaShares and State Street. When giants compete on price for your core holding, you're the winner.

There's an incentive angle too. A high fee is a standing temptation for the issuer to market the story rather than the substance. A 0.04% fee only works as an honest, high-volume utility. Simple products, simple incentives.

What's on the screen

• Fees (MER) as the primary sort - the cheapest 100 of the ~400 ETFs on the ASX.
• Returns over 1, 3, 5 and 10 years, with the after-tax toggle so you can judge funds on what you'd actually keep at your marginal tax rate.
• 21 category filters - so you compare a cheap bond fund against bond funds, not against equity funds.
• AUM alongside the fee, which matters for the caveats below.

Have a look: ozfinn.com.au/etf/low-fees.

The obligatory precautions (read these)

• Cheapest ≠ best. Invert the question: how would you lose money buying only by lowest fee? By buying the wrong asset class cheaply. A 0.10% bond ETF and a 0.18% global equity ETF aren't competitors. Decide what exposure you want first, then pick the cheapest solid fund within that category.
• Low fee ≠ big fund. The stability argument works best when low fees and scale come together. Some funds on this list are tiny (single-digit millions in AUM), and small funds can be closed - handing you a taxable event you didn't ask for. Cross-check the AUM column.
• Watch teaser fees. A handful of new active funds launch with unusually low headline fees to gather assets. A short track record plus an atypically low fee for the strategy deserves extra scrutiny, not less.
• MER isn't the whole cost. Buy/sell spreads, internal turnover and tax drag all bite too. That's what the after-tax view is for.
• This is educational information and not financial advice. Do your own research or speak to a licensed adviser before investing.

Cheers,
Stan