Available to Trade vs Settled vs Withdrawable Cash

Available to trade, settled cash, and withdrawable cash are three answers to three different questions about the same money. Available to trade tells you how much the broker will let you spend on a new purchase right now. Settled cash tells you how much has completed settlement and can pay for a trade you may want to sell again before the next settlement date. Withdrawable cash tells you how much can leave the account today. After a stock sale, a deposit, or an open order, these figures routinely differ, and the right one to read depends on what you are about to do.

Each balance grants a different permission

Available to trade is the purchasing limit. Fidelity's account balance definitions describe it as the amount available to buy securities in a cash account without adding money, reduced when a buy order is placed and increased when a sell order executes. That second point is the source of most confusion: at Fidelity, the proceeds of a sale count toward buying capacity the moment the trade fills, a full business day before they settle. In a margin account, the equivalent figure is usually called buying power and can also include credit from the broker.

Settled cash is money that has completed the settlement process. Most US stock and ETF trades settle on T+1, the first settlement business day after the trade date, a standard that took effect on May 28, 2024 and is described in FINRA's guide to settlement cycles. Fidelity defines settled cash as the amount you can buy and sell in a cash account without creating a good faith violation, which is the most practical definition an active trader will find.

Withdrawable cash is the money-movement limit. It excludes unsettled sale proceeds and adds its own tests: deposits still in collection, cash reserved for open orders, collateral, and margin requirements. Interactive Brokers' definition of cash available for withdrawal notes that it can be lower than the total cash balance when cash supports a margin requirement or, in a cash account, when part of the balance is proceeds from trades that have not yet settled.

These are not separate pools of cash but calculations over the same account, so the same dollar can appear in more than one field. The three numbers should never be added together.

Why a sale changes the balances at different times

A sale changes the account at once, but shares and cash change hands on the settlement date. Brokers decide how much of that gap they will bridge.

Fidelity lets an unrestricted cash account trade with unsettled proceeds, so available to trade jumps immediately while settled and withdrawable cash wait for settlement. Its account FAQ states that sell proceeds reach cash available to withdraw on the settlement date. Robinhood's settlement and buying power guidance takes the opposite approach for cash accounts: they cannot trade with unsettled funds and must wait one trading day after a stock or options sale. Robinhood margin accounts can use unsettled proceeds right away. Neither approach is the regulatory rule; each is a broker's policy on how to handle the settlement gap.

What the regulation does say is what happens next. FINRA's guidance on frequent intraday trading, updated in June 2026, reminds cash-account traders to pay for intraday purchases with settled funds and defines a good faith violation as buying a security with proceeds that have not settled and then selling it before those proceeds settle. Buying and selling a security before paying for it at all is free-riding under the Federal Reserve's Regulation T. A broker accepting the purchase therefore answers only one question, whether the position can be opened. It does not answer whether the position can be closed today without a violation.

Margin accounts avoid good faith violations because the broker finances the timing difference, but the proceeds are still unsettled. Withdrawing money that has not settled, or more than the account's available cash, typically draws on margin credit, and interest accrues on the resulting debit. That is why a margin account's buying power can sit far above both its settled cash and its withdrawable cash.

One trading day in a cash account, step by step

Consider a hypothetical cash account at a broker that, like Fidelity, lets unsettled proceeds count toward new purchases. The trader starts Monday with $6,000, and all three balances show $6,000.

At 9:45 a.m. ET, the trader buys 100 shares of ABC at $40.00, a $4,000 purchase fully paid with settled cash. Settled cash now shows $2,000, as does withdrawable cash, since buy orders reduce it on the trade date. At 11:15 a.m., ABC is at $42.00 and the trader sells all 100 shares for $4,200. This round trip is fine: ABC was paid for with settled funds before it was sold.

Immediately after the sale, the account shows three different numbers. Available to trade is $6,200: the $2,000 of settled cash plus $4,200 of unsettled ABC proceeds. Settled cash is still $2,000, and so is withdrawable cash. The ABC proceeds settle on Tuesday.

At 1:30 p.m., the trader buys 100 shares of DEF at $30.00, a $3,000 order. The broker accepts it because $6,200 is available to trade, but only $2,000 of the cost is covered by settled money and the remaining $1,000 comes from ABC proceeds that will not settle until Tuesday. If DEF rallies that afternoon and the trader sells it on Monday, the sale happens before the purchase was fully paid with settled funds, and the broker is likely to record a good faith violation. Waiting until Tuesday, when the ABC proceeds settle, removes the problem. The rules and broker penalties behind these violations are covered in hi2morrow's guide to good faith violations after T+1.

At a broker with Robinhood's cash-account policy, the same afternoon would look different. The $4,200 would not count toward new purchases until the next trading day, so the account would accept a DEF order of only $2,000 on Monday. The trade would be smaller, but it could not create a good faith violation.

If the trader had skipped the DEF purchase, the $4,200 would become settled on Tuesday and, absent any other holds, withdrawable the same day. A request to withdraw is then a separate process with its own processing cutoffs and bank transfer time, so settlement is the earliest date the money can leave, not the date it reaches your bank.

Deposits, open orders, and collateral hold back withdrawable cash

Settlement is only one test for a withdrawal. The most common other one is a deposit hold. Brokers often let you trade with money that is still being collected from your bank, but not withdraw it. Schwab explains in its guide to account balances and available margin that recent deposits may show as available to trade yet stay unavailable to withdraw until an initial hold period ends. Robinhood says a standard bank transfer can take up to five business days to become available, while its deposit guidance notes that Instant Deposits may let you trade with part of a pending deposit right away. Interactive Brokers places a three-business-day withdrawal hold on deposits made by wire or bank check, and Fidelity lists a normal collection period of seven business days for checks and electronic transfers. These are broker policies, and they run independently of T+1: a trade can settle on schedule while the deposit that funded it is still on hold.

Open orders are the second test. Robinhood's withdrawal guidance states that cash held for pending orders is excluded from withdrawable cash and that the orders must be canceled before that money can be withdrawn. A trader with $4,000 of collected cash and a resting buy limit that could cost $2,500 may see only $1,500 available to withdraw.

Options collateral, margin requirements, and account restrictions work the same way: the cash remains in the account but is already committed. Fidelity adds one more nuance in the other direction: its withdrawable balance can include eligible money market funds held outside the core position, so withdrawable cash is not always a simple subset of settled cash.

When the usual pattern breaks

The first exception is the calendar. T+1 counts settlement business days, not calendar days or market days. A Friday sale normally settles Monday, but a Monday market holiday pushes settlement to Tuesday, and so does a bank-only holiday on which stocks trade normally. On Columbus Day, October 12, 2026, the exchanges were open but nothing settled, so a sale on Friday, October 9, 2026 did not settle until Tuesday, October 13, and Veterans Day, November 11, 2026, works the same way. For cash-account traders, that is an extra day on which available to trade and settled cash disagree. The full calendar and a worked Columbus Day scenario are in hi2morrow's explanation of whether stock sale proceeds settle after a Friday or a holiday.

The second is labeling. "Settled funds," "cash available to trade," "funds available," "cash + borrowing," and "buying power" are not standardized terms, and the same label can use a different formula at another firm. Some screens also still carry terms from the pattern day trader era: FINRA's new intraday margin standards took effect on June 4, 2026, but brokers are switching accounts over through a transition period that runs to October 2027. Read the broker's written definition rather than assuming a familiar label means what it meant elsewhere.

The third is product and account type. Mutual funds, foreign securities, new issues, and trades with an agreed nonstandard settlement date can follow different timelines, so the settlement date on the trade confirmation outranks any rule of thumb. A restricted cash account also behaves differently: after repeated violations, Fidelity's cash-account trading rules exclude unsettled sale proceeds from available to trade entirely.

For margin accounts, the separate question of why buying power itself moves between the close and the next open is covered in hi2morrow's guide to why buying power changes overnight.

How to choose the right balance before you act

Start from the action, not from the largest number on the screen:

1. Decide what you are about to do: open a position, possibly sell it the same day, or move money to your bank.
2. Identify where the cash came from: a settled balance, an unsettled sale, a recent deposit, or margin credit.
3. For a purchase you might exit before the next settlement date, check that settled cash covers the full cost; available to trade alone is not enough in a cash account.
4. For a withdrawal, read the withdrawable field and look for deposit holds, open orders, and collateral before assuming the settlement date releases the money.
5. If the fields still do not reconcile, ask the broker which transactions and holds make up each figure and when the restricted amount becomes available.

Alexander Styopin's professional view: the most expensive habit in a cash account is treating the headline buying figure as free capital. In practice, the funding question should be settled before the entry, not after it: if there is any chance you will want out of a trade the same day, fund it only with settled cash, even if the platform offers more. Traders who rotate capital daily should also keep the bank-only holidays on their calendar, because those are the days when a routine Friday-to-Monday rotation quietly turns into a violation.

Educational material only. Not investment or legal advice. Balance labels, settlement handling, deposit holds, cash-account rules, and withdrawal timing vary by broker, account type, and security.

Author: Alexander Styopin, hi2morrow analyst and economist with 25 years of experience in the US stock market