The cheapest MSCI World ETFs, ranked by TER

Most published rankings of MSCI World ETFs are a snapshot somebody took once and never revisited. Fees get cut, share classes launch, funds merge. The table below is read out of our database when this page loads, so it is the ranking as it stands today rather than the ranking as it stood whenever the page was written.

The fee spread is smaller than it looks

At the top of this table the difference between the cheapest fund and the tenth cheapest is a few basis points. On a 10,000 EUR position that is a couple of euros a year — real, but not the thing that will decide your outcome. The gap only starts to matter at the expensive end, where some share classes still charge several times the cheapest available fee for exposure to the same 1,400-odd companies.

So the honest advice is: do not agonise over the top five. Do check you are not holding something near the bottom.

Domicile is the part people skip

Nearly every fund here is domiciled in Ireland, with Luxembourg second and a handful in France. That is not an accident of geography — it is about withholding tax on the US dividends inside the index.

The US makes up roughly 70% of MSCI World by weight. An Irish-domiciled UCITS fund benefits from the Ireland–US tax treaty and suffers 15% withholding on those dividends; a Luxembourg fund generally suffers 30%. On a dividend yield of around 1.7%, that difference is worth something in the region of 0.15% a year — which is larger than the entire fee gap at the top of the table.

A Luxembourg fund charging one basis point less than an Irish one is, for most investors, the more expensive fund. The ranking above sorts on the published charge because that is the number funds actually disclose; read it with the domicile column next to it, not on its own.

Accumulating or distributing

Where we have it, the share class column says which. Accumulating funds reinvest dividends inside the fund; distributing funds pay them out. Which is better is a question about your tax residence, not about the fund — in some countries accumulating defers tax, in others (Germany's Vorabpauschale, for example) it does not defer as much as people assume.

Where the column shows a dash, our sources do not publish a policy for that listing. We would rather show the gap than guess.

What this table does not tell you

Three things worth saying plainly:

• TER is not total cost. Tracking difference — how far the fund actually lands from the index after securities lending, trading costs and tax — can be larger than the fee, and occasionally negative. A fund with a higher TER and better tracking can beat a cheaper one.
• Spread and venue matter if you trade. The same fund quoted in London, Frankfurt and Milan can carry visibly different spreads.
• Several listings can be the same fund. We collapse a fund's multiple venue listings into one row so a single fund cannot occupy five places in the ranking. The full comparison page linked under the table shows the listings behind each row.

If you want to slice this differently — by domicile, by size, by something other than fees — the fund pages carry the underlying data and the screener will filter on it.