10 Best UK Forex Brokers In 2024 [FCA Regulated List] (2024)

Written byJustin Grossbard

Edited byLaura Wolfe

Fact Checked byRobert Payne

What Changed?

Each month we update average spreads data published by the brokers the retail brokers lose %

Fact Checked

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Pepperstone’s appeal starts with its competitive pricing, offering you a choice of how you want to pay the spreads. The standard account has no brokerage commissions and an average spread of 1.12 pips for the EUR/USD.

If you want even tighter spreads, the Razor account is an excellent choice with a £2.25 per side commission and provides an ECN-like pricing environment. Spreads for the EUR/USD pair average 0.1 pips which is among the best in the industry.

Regardless of which account you choose, our tests show Pepperstone offers one of the fastest execution speeds (avg. 77ms), ensuring your trades are executed almost instantly. Execution speed is vital to getting the price you want and avoiding slippage, so it’s good to see Pepperstone shine in this.

You can use four trading platforms – MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader and TradingView to trade the 62 forex pairs on offer and their impressive overall product range. Offering over 1,200+ financial instruments, including equities, commodities, and indices.

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OANDA is our top pick for the most trusted broker in the UK due to the use of regulators in many territories. Tier-1 regulators include FCA, NFA/CFTC, and ASIC, showcasing its reliability and trustworthiness.

We found the OANDA Trade platform particularly beneficial as you can set your trade sizes, which is perfect for lowering your risk if you are a beginner. Alternatively, OANDA allows you to trade forex on TradingView, giving you access to a platform with advanced charting tools with OANDA’s markets and low spreads.

OANDA is one of the most regulated forex brokers in the UK, with licenses to provide trading services worldwide. We give OANDA one of the highest trust scores because the broker has regulation from multiple Tier-1 financial regulators.

Tier-1 regulators include:

• FCA – UK,
• NFA/CFTC – US,
• MAS – Singapore,
• CIRO – Canada,
• ASIC – Australia;

The broker offers Metatrader 4, TradingView and their own OANDA Trade. OANDA Trade will appeal to beginner trades because it has a guaranteed stop-loss order for risk management.

eToro has the most user-friendly way to simplify copy trading with its eToro CopyTrader platform, making it accessible regardless of your knowledge of the markets.

A key feature that makes it easy for “non-traders” is the built-in risk-management tool that cuts your investments with a trader if you’ve lost a percentage of your capital with them. If the trader is underperforming, you can avoid further losses from their poor performances (saving you money).

With its unique focus on social trading, eToro provides a network for connecting with and copying other successful traders. This is a huge advantage if you are new to trading or looking to diversify your strategies.

eToro’s CopyTrader feature lets you copy the trades of top traders globally directly into your account. You can see each trader’s current and past performance, helping you find the right trader to copy.

This transparency and ease of management make it incredibly appealing, especially if you’re keen on learning from others’ experiences. With over 30,000,000 active traders worldwide on eToro, the options for copy trading are vast and varied. You can copy based on returns, the number of followers, and preferred markets, offering a personalised trading experience.

Plus500 has an excellent trading app as it is well designed to manage trades and analyse the markets on the go. For me, the +insights service is a top feature with trader sentiment indicators and price alerts, which send a notification to your phone and email.

With over 1,200 markets and average spreads of 1.7 pips on EUR/USD, plus500 combines variety with affordability with its services.

We tested the Plus500 trading app and were impressed with the user-friendly design and speed at which the trading app worked on my phone. A feature we were impressed with was the +insights service, which includes trader sentiment indicators and price alerts. These tools are invaluable, especially if you are a beginner, as they provide insights into market trends and notify you of significant price changes.

Another feature of the trading app is its risk management tools, specifically the guaranteed stop-loss orders (GLSO). Not all brokers provide this, but we think it’s an excellent tool – especially if you are trading in volatile environments where your risk will be capped.

The broker also has decent average spreads from 1.7 pips on EUR/USD with commission-free trading across its range of CFDs, which is essential if you want to minimise costs. Plus, there are no fees for deposits or withdrawals, making Plus500 a low-cost broker with a decent trading app.

Eightcap is a newer broker than the others on this list but has earned the reputation of having the lowest spreads in the industry. We tested this and found that the standard account has average spreads of 1 pip for EUR/USD, GBP/USD and EUR/USD. These spreads make them some of the most competitive for commission-free trading.

IG Group has the largest range of financial instruments available in the UK, with an exceptional choice of 17,000+ markets. The markets cover popular markets like forex, stocks, commodities and indices but also offer other ways to trade through futures and options trading.

When opening an account, you’ll get the standard account (spread-based and commission-free), with an average spread of 1.13 pip on EUR/USD. They are not the cheapest spreads in our testing.

IG Group has several platforms, including MetaTrader 4 and their own IG Platform. The broker doesn’t offer anything different to its competitors with MT4, but the IG Platform is one of the better proprietary platforms than its peers (second only to CMC Markets).

While exploring the IG Platform, We were impressed with its simplicity; the design is focused on the charts and doesn’t hinder your vision with widgets like the news. You’ll also find it has a series of 20+ built-in indicators that cover the more popular indicators. However, it lacks that you cannot add your own indicators like you can on MT4.

We like CMC Markets as their CMC Next Generation platform is excellent for trading CFD like their 338 currency pairs. The platform has useful tools to help you find new ideas when trading CFDs along with 150 technical indicators and a pattern recognition tool, which alerts you to emerging and completed patterns in popular markets.

This tool is beneficial if you are a beginner and can be used to help you learn technical analysis and find new trades.

Founded in 1989 with headquarters in London CMC Markets has 3 types of trading accounts. A Standard account with average spreads of 1.12 pips for the EUR/USD currency pairs and an FX active for low-spread trading with average spreads of 0.5 pips for EUR/USD. This account has an average spread of 0.5 pips but commission is its selling point with $2.50 USD per lot. You can also spread bets if this is your preferred type of derivatives trading.

When using The Next Generation (NGEN) platform, We were impressed with the advanced tools, including a pattern recognition tool that used chart and candlestick patterns to find potential trading ideas.

We liked that you could set alerts for the tool to notify you when a pattern has been completed, allowing you to analyse the chart to validate the idea. It’s quite a decent tool if you are a beginner and need some inspiration to find trading ideas.

XTB’s demo account comes with a generous virtual balance of £100,000, giving you plenty of virtual funds to practice and improve. We found XTB’s demo account useful for testing strategies; the time and funds provided are more than its competitors.

Using a demo account from XTB is an ideal method if you are a beginner learning to trade, as it provides a risk-free environment with live price feeds. XTB provides over 4,500 markets and allows you to demo their xStation5 platform or MetaTrader 4.

XTB is a top broker that provides a good demo account experience, allowing you to test new strategies or learn the market with virtual funds in a risk-free environment. Demo accounts are essential when you start trading, so XTB provides a generous £100,000 virtual balance, allowing you plenty of room to make mistakes and grow an account.

You can use the demo account on their proprietary platform, xStation 5, which gives you access to over 5,500 financial instruments including forex, indices, commodities, and share CFDs. Alternatively, XTB also offers MetaTrader 4 as a demo platform, allowing you to utilise MT4’s best features, like automating trades and its technical indicators with XTB’s markets.

When you’re ready to move from the demo to live trading, XTB offers various account types to suit different trading preferences. The broker provides commission-free forex trading and competitive spreads, with an average spread of 0.9 pips for EUR/USD, making them an attractive option.

City Index is our top choice for no-commission trading. Spreads averaged 0.7 pips on EUR/USD, 1.1 for EUR/GBP and 1.1 for GBP/USD with their standard account which are all very competitive. We also like their trading platform – City Index Platform, which includes unique tools to improve your trading along with MT4 and TradingView.

Combining the low spreads with a small initial deposit of $150 makes City Index accessible if you want to break into forex trading on a smaller budget.

Owned by the NYSE-listed StoneX group, who also own Forex.com, City Index is a top choice for beginners in forex trading, mainly because of its low spread-only accounts and beginner-friendly features. If you are a new trader, starting with a broker that makes learning and trading simple is key, and City Index does just that.

One advantage of City Index is its low spreads, starting at just 0.7 for EUR/USD, among the lowest compared to other UK brokers. This means you pay less for each trade, a real benefit when you’re just starting and trying to keep costs down. Plus, the low initial deposit of $150 to open an account is significant for beginners who might not want to commit much money immediately.

The broker provides their own Web Trader trading platform, with charting tools with a good selection of indicators and easy-to-use risk management tools like the guaranteed stop loss order. We like their performance analysis tool, which lets you easily track your trading data and act as a performance coach to help your trade better.

FxPro has exceptional customer service that answered my technical questions quickly and gave solid reasoning, highlighting that the representative was knowledgeable. The broker provides customer service through live chat, email, and phone, making reaching out to them immediately easy.

FxPro provides a good trading experience with a selection of popular trading platforms and decent trading fees, including variable or fixed spreads and commission-based trading.

In our testing for the top forex brokers in the UK, FxPro provided the best customer service overall, with prompt and knowledgeable responses available via live chat, email and phone. We like to test the customer service of all the brokers because we know if something goes wrong while you have a position open – chaos can happen.

FxPro also provides an excellent overall trading experience with various platforms, including MetaTrader 4 and 5, FxPro Platform and cTrader. They are all similar, and the main difference is the user interfaces and accessibility to customised tools; only the FxPro platform prevents you from using custom indicators and automated trading.