Robinhood's ACATS Transfer Bonus: What the Multi-Year Hold Costs

Robinhood periodically offers to pay you a percentage of whatever you move into it from another brokerage — 1%, 2%, sometimes more, depending on the campaign. That’s real money on a real transfer: move a $100,000 account and a 2% offer is $2,000. But the mechanism behind it is a transfer bonus, not a referral bonus, and it runs on different rules than the Robinhood referral gift stock and IRA match this site has already covered. Those are worth understanding on their own before you move a life’s worth of savings for a headline percentage.

What an ACATS transfer actually moves

ACATS stands for Automated Customer Account Transfer Service, an electronic system run through the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation that lets one broker-dealer send your account’s positions to another without you selling anything first. Per FINRA’s overview of customer account transfers, you file a transfer request with the receiving firm (Robinhood, in this case), and your old broker — the “carrying firm” — has one business day to validate it. The whole process typically takes a few business days.

The point of ACATS is that your stocks, ETFs, and cash move as-is. You don’t have to sell your position in a taxable account and trigger a capital gain just to change brokers. That’s genuinely useful independent of any bonus, and it’s why “how do I move my account” questions predate transfer bonuses entirely.

The percentage match is paid on your own money

This is the detail that gets lost in “up to 3%” marketing: a transfer bonus isn’t free money in the way a referral gift stock is. Robinhood isn’t giving you anything for signing up — it’s paying you a fee to park assets you already own at its brokerage instead of somewhere else. The percentage is real, but it’s a percentage of your own portfolio, which means it scales with how much you’re moving, not with how many friends you invited. Someone moving $5,000 and someone moving $500,000 are eligible for the same headline rate, but the second person is the one for whom the offer is worth actually reading the terms over.

Robinhood doesn’t publish one fixed bonus rate. Current offer terms state plainly that “the Bonus Rate may vary by customer and is not stated in these Terms” — it’s shown to you in the app once you’re invited into a specific campaign. Treat any number you see on a coupon site (including this one, if we’re not careful) as illustrative, not a guarantee of what you’ll be offered.

The multi-year hold that comes with it

Here’s the part that matters more than the percentage: the bonus isn’t fully yours the day it lands. Robinhood’s transfer-bonus terms build in an earn-out — a period during which the bonus can be partially or fully reversed if you pull the transferred assets back out. In a January 2026 version of the offer terms, that period runs a full five years after the bonus is credited, with a shorter 90-day initial hold before you get access to a one-time 60-day grace window for penalty-free withdrawals. An earlier version of Robinhood’s general ACATS bonus terms — a flat 1% match — specified a two-year earn-out instead. The exact length is set per campaign; what’s consistent across every version is that there is one, and it’s measured in years, not weeks.

The account types eligible are also narrower than they sound. Robinhood’s terms restrict the offer to self-directed individual or joint taxable brokerage accounts — retirement accounts and Robinhood-managed accounts (Robinhood Strategies) don’t qualify. If your $100,000 is sitting in an IRA, this specific bonus isn’t the one to chase; that’s the IRA match territory covered separately.

What happens if you leave early

If you withdraw from the account during the earn-out window, Robinhood doesn’t just cancel the unpaid remainder — it charges back a proportional share of the bonus you’ve already received. The math is based on how far the withdrawal drops your account below the transferred value plus the bonus: pull out an amount that puts you back near your original transferred balance, and expect a proportional slice of the bonus clawed back, on top of whatever ordinary transfer-out fee your next move costs. If there’s cash in the account, Robinhood deducts it there first; if there isn’t, the charge can hit the outgoing bank account or a margin balance instead.

This is the same category of fine print covered in our referral clawback explainer — a payout that looks final on day one but is actually provisional for years. The difference here is scale: a clawed-back $10 gift card is annoying, and a clawed-back percentage of a six-figure transfer is a number worth planning around before you initiate anything.

Turning the headline percentage into a number you can actually compare

The way to evaluate one of these offers honestly is to divide the bonus by the hold period, not just look at the top-line rate. A 2% bonus locked for five years is roughly 0.4% of extra annual return, before accounting for whatever Robinhood’s own fee structure, product lineup, and available order types cost you relative to your current broker over those same five years. A 1% bonus with a two-year earn-out is closer to 0.5% a year. Neither number is nothing, but neither is close to the “free 2%” framing the marketing implies, and both assume you don’t touch the money — which, over a multi-year window, is a real commitment for anyone who might need liquidity, want to rebalance into a different broker’s product, or simply change their mind.

The bonus is also taxable. Robinhood’s terms state the value of the reward — and any amount charged back — may be reported on a 1099, the same treatment referral and deposit bonuses get; see our referral bonus tax explainer if you want the fuller mechanics of how that gets reported.

Who this is actually worth it for

A transfer bonus makes the most sense for money you were planning to consolidate somewhere anyway and are comfortable not touching for the length of the earn-out — think a rollover you’re not going to need for emergencies, not a brokerage account you actively trade in and out of. If you’re on the fence about which broker to use long-term, evaluate that decision on its own merits — fees, order execution, product availability — and treat the transfer bonus as a modest tiebreaker, not the reason to move. Read the specific terms shown in your app before you initiate anything; the number and the hold period are what your account actually got offered, not what a campaign from a different month looked like.