Compare ETFs side by side

The ongoing charge is not the ranking. It is one of four costs and frequently the smallest. A fund a few basis points dearer can be cheaper to own if your broker trades it for nothing, or if its domicile recovers more of the withholding tax lost on US dividends before the money ever reaches you.

Domicile is doing more than it appears. It decides which tax treaty the fund itself can claim on the dividends it receives — an Irish fund holding US shares recovers roughly half of what an untreatied one loses. That happens inside the fund and has nothing to do with where you live, which is why it is so easy to miss.

Accumulating or distributing is a tax question, not a preference. Before tax the two are equivalent: the distributing fund's price falls by exactly what it pays you. Which one wins depends entirely on the country toggle at the top of this page, and the answer genuinely differs across the four.

What this cannot tell you. It does not rank funds, because a ranking would have to assume a country, a broker, a holding period and a contribution pattern. Those are inputs, not constants — which is what the calculators are for.