All offers / Investing / Webull / Is the free stock real?
Yes, the shares are real. No, you are probably not getting twenty of them.
So who gets the twenty? On Webull’s own promotions page today, a new depositor of $100 or more gets 10 fractional shares, and the famous 20 shares is what the person who referred you collects. Webull publishes no odds for what the shares are worth, and three of its live pages give two different value ranges.
What Webull’s own pages said today
We read four live Webull documents on the same afternoon. They do not tell the same story.
| Promotions centre, the page in Webull’s own nav | 10 shares for $100+, each $3 to $300 |
|---|---|
| Deposit landing page | 3 shares for $100, 20 for $500+, each $3 to $3,000 |
| Help article, Free Stock Value | $3 to $3000, deposit and referral alike |
| Help article, Free Stock Allocation Rules | No values, no odds, no share count |
The promotions centre reads: “Make an initial deposit of $100 or more today to receive 10 fractional shares, each valued between $3-$300. T&Cs apply.” The deposit landing page runs a two-row table, “$500+” against “20 Free Fractional Shares” and “$100 – $499.99” against “3 Free Fractional Shares”, and states “Each share is valued between $3 - $3,000”. Webull’s help centre article Free Stock Value gives a table of its own: Initial Deposit Bonus Promotion, $3-$3000; Referral Bonus Promotion, $3-$3000. None of the four carries a last-updated date, and none carries an end date.
The 20-share headline is mostly somebody else’s reward
The promotions centre card is headed “20 Free Fractional Shares Per Referral”, and the body says your friend deposits $100 or more, then “you get 20 fractional shares, each valued between $3–$300. Refer up to 10 friends.” The “you” in that sentence is the existing customer doing the referring. The new arrival, on that same page, gets 10.
- The person who referred you20 shares
- You, depositing $100 or more10 shares
Both figures from the same Webull promotions centre page, read July 27, 2026.
There is a second route to 20 shares: the deposit landing page pays 20 shares for an initial deposit of $500 or more. So “20 free stocks” is true in two situations, neither of them opening an account with $100.
Webull’s referral help article adds the gate on the referrer’s side: the bonus can be claimed “once they have opened a brokerage account and their first deposit has settled”, and you must “Confirm that the invite status is ‘Deposit Settled’ and that your referral has never had a Webull trading account before.”
What one share is worth, and why nobody can tell you
A fractional share is a slice of a share rather than a whole one. The reward is a slice of a real listed company, drawn from a pool Webull describes in Free Stock Allocation Rules as “stocks with a minimum market capitalization of $2.5 billion from U.S.-based companies listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ”. That article is the closest thing to current rules Webull publishes, and it contains no probabilities.
Webull has published odds before. An older terms page, still hosted, whose stated offer period was “04/11/2023 00:00ET - 11/30/2023 00:00ET”, sets out an account-opening pool with the same $3 to $300 band as today’s promotions page and breaks it down: “Stock in the $3/share - $10/share range, approximately 1:1.02; stock in the $11/share-$50/share range, approximately 1:52.63; stock in the $51/share - $150/share range, approximately 1:1111.11; stock in the $151/share - $300/share range, approximately 1:10000.” The same document says plainly that “Stock allocation is random and determined by an algorithm.”
That document is nearly three years out of date and describes a promotion that has closed, so it does not govern anything you sign up for today. It is the only time Webull has shown its working: the bottom band is essentially certain, and the top band is roughly one in ten thousand.
Our estimate, and it is ours
Webull gives a range and no odds, so any dollar figure, including ours, is a guess. Ours: assume nearly every share lands in the low single digits, and plan on roughly $3 to $10 a share. That puts 10 shares at somewhere around $30 to $100 and 20 shares at somewhere around $60 to $200.
The deposit, and where the 12-month clock actually is
$100 is the lowest deposit Webull attaches to the shares on either live page. The widely repeated claim that the free shares carry a twelve-month maintenance period needs a correction: we found it somewhere else.
The line “Maintenance Period: 12 Months ( T&Cs Apply).” does appear on the deposit landing page, but it sits immediately under a completely different table, headed “Deposit More, Get More”, which pays a cash bonus against “Net Qualifying Funding Amount”: $100 for $5,000 to $24,999, rising through the tiers to $7,500 for $1,000,000 or more. We found no published maintenance requirement attached to the fractional shares themselves.
Five things to sort out before you deposit
- Claim it within 30 days or it evaporates. Both live help articles say the same thing: “You have 30 days to claim your free stock; after this period, the offer will expire.” It waits in the app under My Rewards until you tap it, and Webull does not reissue an expired one.
- Expect the shares late, and expect the timings to disagree. Free Stock Allocation Rules says the stock “will be credited to your account within five business days after being awarded”. Claiming Your Rewards says it “will be deposited into your Webull brokerage account within 15 business days after the date you claimed the offer reward”. Plan for the longer one.
- The fractions cannot leave with you. Webull’s Fractional Shares Addendum is explicit: fractional shares “are unrecognized, unmarketable, and illiquid outside the Webull Financial platform; (ii) are not transferrable in-kind; and (iii) may only be liquidated and the proceeds withdrawn or transferred out.” Move to another broker later and the slivers get sold, not carried across.
- A reverse split turns your share into cash. The same allocation article: “If the stock undergoes a corporate action, such as a reverse split, you will receive cash instead of fractional shares within ten business days of the action’s completion.”
- Write down what arrives, and what it was worth that day. Webull’s older program terms said “the value of all Webull Financial LLC offers received may be reported as Other Income on Form 1099-MISC”. The current help articles do not repeat that, which is not the same as it not applying. More in are sign-up bonuses taxable.
So is it worth doing?
If you wanted a brokerage account and $100 was going in regardless, then yes, take the shares. They are real, the account is a genuine registered broker-dealer, and the trade is fifteen minutes for a few tens of dollars.
If the account only exists because of the offer, we would think harder: the share count depends on which Webull page you landed on, the value is a range with no odds behind it, and the reward cannot be carried to another broker if you change your mind.
Chasing $500 for the twenty-share tier is the version we would skip. The extra four hundred dollars buys ten more slices of the same unpriced pool.
Related reading
What we found across every offer
Every one of these is read from the company’s own document and dated. See all 59 questions we have answered.