Nasdaq Wants ETP Issuers to Pay $50,000 a Year to Have Someone Quote Their Fund

Nasdaq has created a way for the issuer of a thinly traded exchange-traded product to pay the exchange to have a market maker quote it. The mechanism is a new optional listing fee of $50,000 a year per product, more than twelve times the standard $4,000 fee. In exchange, Nasdaq assigns one Quality Liquidity Provider to the product and pays that firm a monthly stipend plus enhanced rebates, provided its quotes meet published benchmarks. The filing, SR-NASDAQ-2026-068, was made on August 18, 2026 and published in the Federal Register on September 1 as SEC Release No. 34-106213.

It is already in force. Nasdaq filed the change as immediately effective and the 30-day operative delay was waived, so the programme runs while the public comment period is still open. Comments are due September 22, 2026.

The two fees

• Standard Annual Listing Fee: $4,000 per exchange-traded product. This is the existing charge and does not change.
• Premier Annual Listing Fee: $50,000 per product. This is new and optional, and it is what buys access to the Quality Liquidity Provider programme.
• Eligibility: only a Qualified Security — an ETP whose monthly average daily volume is 1,000,000 shares or fewer — can be enrolled.
• There may only be one QLP per Qualified Security.

What the market maker has to do to get paid

Nasdaq sorts eligible products into three Investment Strategy Groups, A, B and C, according to their typical National Best Bid and Offer spreads. Tighter-spread products sit in Group A and carry the hardest targets. The market quality metrics are the same in structure across the groups and differ in the thresholds.

• Time at the NBBO, with a minimum size of $5,000 notional: 50% for all three groups.
• Average notional depth within 25 basis points: $65,000 for Group A, $50,000 for Group B, $40,000 for Group C.
• Average spread: 25 basis points for Group A, 45 for Group B, 85 for Group C.
• A QLP must meet five of the seven market quality metrics to qualify for the incentives in a given month.

What the market maker gets

• A stipend of $3,000 per month in each of its assigned ETPs.
• Tape C rebates that scale with how many products the firm has been assigned: $0.00025 a share at 20 assigned ETPs, $0.00035 at 35, $0.0004 at 75, $0.00045 at 135, and $0.00055 at 200.

The tiering is the part worth reading twice. The rebate ladder rewards breadth rather than depth: a firm assigned to 200 illiquid products earns more than twice the per-share rate of one assigned to 20. That structure pushes toward a small number of large market-making firms taking on many mandates, rather than many firms each taking a few.

Why this exists

An exchange-traded product that almost nobody trades has a chronic problem: without a resting quote of reasonable size, the spread widens, which further discourages trading. Paying a designated firm to keep a quote up is the standard remedy, and versions of it have existed on U.S. and European venues for years. What this filing does is put the cost on the issuer rather than on the exchange, through the Premier listing fee, and set out in writing what the market maker must deliver in return.

This article describes an exchange fee filing and the mechanics of a market-making incentive programme. It is not a recommendation about any exchange-traded product, and the presence or absence of a designated liquidity provider is one of many features of any listed fund.