What does it cost to tokenize a real asset in Europe? The full 2026 cost stack.

That is the headline, and the rest of this guide is the itemization behind it, because the headline alone is not enough to plan a raise. The reason the answer comes in layers rather than one number is that the three behave differently: the setup is a fixed-ish cost that you amortise over the raise, the running cost is a small annual drag, and the cost of capital is the real economic price of the money and runs for the life of the deal. A platform that quotes you only a setup fee, or an advisor who quotes only a percentage, is showing you one layer and hiding two.

The number that actually matters for a decision is the all-in cost of capital: the setup amortised over the raise, plus the running cost, plus the yield, compared against what the same capital would cost as bank debt or equity. Hold that figure, not any single line. The sections below build it from the ground up.

The setup is what it costs to build the structure: to form the vehicle, draft the documents, stand up the tokenization, value the asset, and run the structuring work. Six main lines, with typical 2026 ranges for a mid-size European real-asset raise.

Read the ranges the right way. The five fixed lines (everything except the success fee) total roughly €50,000 to €175,000 for a clean mid-size deal. The success fee is proportional: at 1 to 3 percent of capital raised, on a €10M raise that is €100,000 to €300,000, and it is usually the single largest line in the whole setup. So the all-in one-off lands around 1.5 to 5 percent of the raise, weighted heavily by the success fee and by how expensive the chosen jurisdiction is.

Two of these lines deserve a note. The tokenization platform usually has both a flat setup fee and a basis-point charge on the raise; the percentage is what makes platform choice a real cost decision, and the platforms comparison guide walks the trade-offs. And the advisory success fee is structured deliberately so the advisor is paid mostly when the raise actually closes, which aligns incentives but also means it is the line that scales with the size of the deal. The full advisory breakdown, who pays what and where the math gets ugly, is in the advisor fees guide.

Once the raise closes, the structure has to be run: accounts filed, the asset audited, the registry maintained, investors reported to. This is the smallest of the three layers in euro terms, but it runs every year for the life of the deal, so it belongs in the model.

Excluding any fund wrapper, the running cost totals roughly €20,000 to €60,000 a year, which on a €10M raise is about 0.2 to 0.6 percent annually. That is a manageable drag for a deal of this size, and a much heavier one for a small deal, which is the same fixed-cost logic that drives the minimum size discussed below.

The fund-wrapper exception

The ranges above are for a plain SPV. If the structure is wrapped in a regulated fund with an external AIFM, a depositary, and a fund administrator, the annual cost rises materially, commonly by 0.5 to 1.5 percent a year on top. That wrapper buys real things (institutional oversight, a single regulated subscription, compliance-mandate fit for certain investors), and it is worth its cost in specific situations and pure overhead in others. The full analysis of when the AIFM layer earns its fee is in the AIFM-wrapped SPV guide. For most direct real-asset raises to professional investors, the plain SPV running cost is the relevant number.

The setup and the running cost are the cost of the structure. The cost of capital is the cost of the money, and over the life of a deal it is almost always the largest of the three. It is the yield the business pays investors on the tokenized interests, every year, for as long as the raise is outstanding.

Where it sits is predictable. It is above senior bank debt, because investors in a tokenized SPV take more risk than a secured bank with a first charge and covenants. And it is below equity, because investors get a defined, asset-confined return rather than a permanent share of the company and its upside. Within that band, a stabilised income-producing asset (a let warehouse, a contracted energy installation) carries a lower yield, and a higher-risk or development asset carries a higher one.

The yield you have to offer is set by what the investor nets after their own tax and cost cascade, not by what you would like to pay. An investor judging your deal is looking at the net-in-pocket figure, which runs roughly 60 to 75 percent of the gross headline once SPV tax, withholding, and their own costs are taken out. If you want to understand the number from the other side of the table, which is exactly what lets you price a raise that actually places, the honest yield cascade guide walks the full gross-to-net path.

Take a business that owns a let industrial warehouse and wants to raise €10M against it through a tokenized SPV, structured as a plain SPV (no fund wrapper) and placed to professional investors. Here is the cost stack as real numbers, using mid-range assumptions.

So a €10M warehouse raise costs roughly €430,000 one-off (about 4.3 percent of the raise, with the success fee and the platform percentage the two largest lines), about €40,000 a year to run, plus the yield paid to investors for the life of the deal. Move the success fee to 1 percent and a cheaper jurisdiction, and the one-off drops toward 2.5 to 3 percent; move to a Luxembourg fund wrapper for an institutional investor base and both the setup and the annual cost rise.

The point of running it as euros rather than percentages is that it makes the trade-offs visible. The biggest controllable line is the success fee, which is the cost of getting the raise actually closed; the second is the platform percentage, which is a real platform-choice decision; and the running cost, while it recurs, is small relative to the capital. None of it changes the dominant term, which is the yield. This is the same shape of cascade an investor sees from the other side, walked in full in the yield cascade guide.

The ranges in this guide are typical. Where a specific deal lands inside them, or outside, is driven by five factors.

Jurisdiction. A Romanian SRL is cheap to form and run; a Luxembourg or Maltese structure costs more in both setup and annual overhead, in exchange for regime features some investors require. The jurisdiction choice is the single biggest lever on the fixed cost, and the EU jurisdiction comparison guide sets out the trade-offs.

Asset complexity. A single clean income-producing asset is straightforward to value, diligence, and structure. A portfolio, a development asset, a cross-border asset, or one with a complicated tenancy or offtake structure adds legal and diligence cost at the front.

The investor base. A private placement to professional investors avoids a full prospectus and its cost; a broader or retail-facing offering can trigger prospectus requirements and additional compliance, which is a material cost line. Whether your raise needs a licence or a prospectus at all is the subject of the MiCA and CASP licensing guide.

The fund wrapper. A plain SPV is far cheaper than a regulated fund with an external AIFM and depositary, in both setup and annual cost. The wrapper is worth its cost only in specific situations, covered in the AIFM guide.

Documentation readiness. The cheapest deal to structure is the one where the title is clean, the financials are organised, and the operating data is clear. Gaps in any of those add legal and advisory time, and the cost of fixing a weak asset is the most underestimated line in the whole exercise.

Most of the setup cost is fixed, not proportional. The legal structuring, the offering documentation, the platform setup, the valuation, and the incorporation cost roughly the same whether you raise €2M or €15M. That is the single most important thing to understand about the economics of tokenization cost.

Watch what fixed cost does at different raise sizes. A €120,000 fixed setup (before the success fee and cost of capital) is 6 percent of a €2M raise, 2.4 percent of a €5M raise, and 1 percent of a €12M raise. The same absolute cost goes from punishing to trivial purely as a function of size. Below a certain threshold, the fixed overhead is simply too large a percentage of the capital to make the structure worth building.

As a rule of thumb, the asset or cash flow needs to be worth roughly €5M or more for the economics to work, and the comfortable range is €5M and up. This is why a scoping phase checks raise size against the fixed overhead before any structuring spend: a raise too small to carry the fixed cost is one of the most common reasons a tokenized deal should not proceed, and finding that out early saves far more than the scoping fee. The full list of what kills a raise is in the how-businesses-tokenize guide.

The cost of tokenizing only means something next to the cost of the alternatives for the same capital. Three honest comparisons.

Bank debt is usually the cheapest per euro. It also comes with covenants, a conservative loan-to-value cap that limits how much you can raise, and a single lender's risk appetite. If the bank will lend the full amount you need on terms you can live with, it is often the right first call.

Equity has no setup cost in the tokenization sense, but it is the most expensive form of capital there is, because it sells a permanent share of the company and all of its future upside for a one-time injection. Cheap to arrange, dear to live with.

Tokenization sits in the middle. It has a real setup cost (the 1.5 to 5 percent above) and a cost of capital above senior debt, but it raises against a specific asset without selling the company, reaches a broader investor base than one bank, and preserves your banking capacity for later. The decision is never which is cheapest in isolation; it is which fits the raise, the asset, and the amount needed. That decision, made before the first investor conversation, is the subject of the financing comparison guide.