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 has low spreads, averaging 1.12 pips on EUR/USD for its standard account (no-commission) and averaging 0.1 pips on EUR/USD on its RAW account. After opening a live account with Pepperstone, we found that its spreads were better than advertised on its RAW pricing account.

We discovered this after our head analyst, Ross Collins, tested the RAW account to see how often Pepperstone offered 0.0 pip spreads on EUR/USD. To our surprise, zero-pip spreads were offered 100% of the time (outside rollover). Our test found the industry average to be 94% when using ECN or no dealing desk brokers.

As you can imagine, this is very impressive as it means you will only be paying a small commission for every trade, helping you cut down on your trading fees.

We also like to test the execution speed of a broker as it is a good indicator of the broker’s quality and the likelihood of getting slipped, which can be costly in volatile markets.

Our analyst ran the tests and discovered that Pepperstone’s limit execution speed is 77ms, which placed it in second place, only slightly behind BlackBull Markets, which achieved 72ms.

We think this pairing of fast execution speeds and zero-pip spreads on EUR/USD makes Pepperstone an excellent candidate if you scalp the markets.

Pepperstone ReviewVisit Pepperstone

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 was established in 1996 and was one of the pioneers in providing online trading services to the public. Our tests revealed that five tier-1 regulators, including the Financial Conduct Authority (UK) and ASIC, regulate OANDA. For us, the broker’s age and number of regulators provide huge trust signals, which is why we scored them 100/100 for the Trust category.

While exploring the live account, we also found that OANDA had excellent spreads for a no-commission trading account. The standard account averaged 0.6 pips on EUR/USD and 0.9 pips on GBP/USD, which is almost as competitive as some RAW pricing accounts.

For trading platforms, OANDA provides several, including the leading third-party platforms MT4 and TradingView, but it is the OANDA Trade platform that interests us. TradingView’s advanced charting tools include 80+ indicators covering all the popular indicators such as Ichimoku Clouds, SuperTrend indicator, and Pivot Points.

We also liked its easy access to third-party tools directly within the OANDA Trade platform, such as AutoChartist, providing you with automatically generated trading ideas across multiple markets. Typically, these tools are not available directly from within the platform.

However, if you want to use custom indicators, you’ll have to use MetaTrader 4 or TradingView directly, as the OANDA Trade platform does not support custom indicators.

We were disappointed that OANDA didn’t offer share CFDs, which let it down a touch in our review. However, the excellent trading platforms, low trading costs, and strong regulatory approvals helped overcome this negative.

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).

eToro is known for its Copy Trading features and with over 20 million users, it is one of the largest copy-trading communities.

While using the eToro CopyTrader platform, we understood why it is one of the best platforms for copy trading after experiencing its unique search engine to find copy traders. The platform goes into greater detail than any other copy trading platform we’ve used, highlighting the strike rate of a trader to profit and which assets they are best with.

We also liked that eToro generates a risk score for each trader you can copy. This feature gives you a quick overview of how much risk the copy trader takes on, which you might find useful to avoid high-risk traders.

With eToro’s main focus on their exceptional copy trading tools, you may find eToro lack in standard features one would expect to find on a good trading platform like MetaTrader 4. This is okay if you are copy trading, but it’s not the best when trading the markets manually, as its charting is limited compared to other platforms.

If copy trading is a priority for you, then we think eToro is best in class for the tools. However, if you want to research and trade the markets yourself – you should consider other choices like Pepperstone or City Index.

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.

Out of all the brokers we’ve tested, Plus500 has the best trading app offering a full charting experience on your mobile with 119 indicators, 21 drawing tools, and 13 chart types. We like how well-designed the charts are and how they pack so much detail for the small mobile screen, allowing us to view the indicators and prices clearly without zooming in.

The app is responsive and fast when switching between charts, while other trading apps we’ve tried felt clunky and slow, so it’s a breath of fresh air using Plus500’s app. A nice added touch was the haptic feedback when switching between the charts, which is useful if you accidentally swipe to another chart.

The app shares most features from the desktop version, taking a page out of the TradingView book – however, the charting analytics don’t sync between the platforms, which we thought was disappointing.

Aside from the app’s good looks, one of its better tools is +insights, which captures all of Plus500’s client data to generate trending assets based on buying and selling pressure. We think this tool is helpful if you can’t quite determine the current market strength, and it can give you an idea based on other trader’s orders.

The mobile app lets you access all of Plus500’s 1,200+ markets, covering stocks, forex, indices, and commodities.

Eightcap has gone all in on using TradingView as their sole trading platform choice in the UK, allowing you to benefit from the best charting package available across all the platforms. TradingView gives you access to over 100+ technical indicators, 50+ drawing tools, and 17 chart types, providing an excellent environment if you rely on technical analysis.

Setting up the Eightcap account with TradingView was straightforward and took a few clicks, thanks to the broker’s integration. Because of this integration, it allowed us to transfer our analysis from our TradingView account to our new Eightcap account, including all of the support and resistance levels we’ve saved. We thought this helped save time compared to MetaTrader 4, where you must start fresh each time.

This also meant all of our customised technical indicators are automatically installed and worked, making it one of the most hassle-free broker platform setups we’ve tested.

If you are using TradingView for the first time, you can customise the platform and choose from thousands of indicators available for free. You’ll find that Eightcap offers some of the lowest average spreads on TradingView, where our tests found the EUR/USD average of one pip on the standard account.

We think Eightcap is a solid choice if you want to focus on popular markets like forex majors. Yet, if you seek a wider range of products, then Eightcap is limited compared to its peers, with 600+ instruments available.

IG Group is one of the largest brokers we’ve reviewed, with an impressive range of 17,000+ markets to choose from, which is a lot considering the average broker offers 2,000+ markets. The main markets covered are all major stock exchanges, forex pairs, commodities, indices, ETFs, and bonds.

We liked that the broker also offers future and options markets, which the other brokers lack. For example, on the IG Trading Platform, the options market was easy to access, and the platform seamlessly adapted its interface to show the call and put option pricing.

We’re a fan of this as other brokers that have option markets tend to provide another platform to trade them, such as AvaTrade’s AvaOptions platform.

You may wonder if it is necessary to have such a wide range of markets. For most traders, it isn’t. However, if you are an experienced trader with a consistently profitable trading strategy, accessing more markets to find more opportunities is necessary.

To access its vast range of markets, the broker also gives you access to four trading platforms:

• MetaTrader 4 platform,
• ProRealTime,
• IG Trading Platform, and
• L2 Dealer.

We tested all the platforms and found that the IG Trading Platform had some impressive and unique features built in, such as access to the Signal Centre. These ideas are generated automatically, and we like that you can click a button to copy the order, including stop and take profit levels, to execute the trade idea quickly.

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.

Like IG Group, CMC Markets offers an impressive range of financial instruments, but we found that CMC offered a superior range of currency pairs compared to IG Group. In fact, it was over 338 currency pairs compared to IG’s 100.

We like that CMC Markets offers a wide range of markets, giving you ample trading opportunities all in one account, which is especially useful if you day trade different markets. CMC Markets offers over 10,000 trading products which include:

• 338 forex pairs
• 9,000+ stocks,
• 82+ indices,
• 15 commodities,
• 55 bonds and treasuries, and
• 1,000+ exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

CMC Markets offers an excellent trading platform developed in-house called NGEN. The platform has over 115 technical indicators and drawing tools, with 12 different chart types to trade from, which is the most out of all the proprietary platforms we’ve tested.

We like that the platform also has a suite of tools that make finding trades easier for you. For example, the NGEN platform has a chart pattern scanner, which looks for patterns like wedges and will alert you if they are emerging or have been completed. This scanner is an excellent tool for beginners, as you’ll be able to learn how to find chart patterns while trading them in real time.

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.

If you are looking for a solid Forex demo account, XTB is our top pick with its generous balance of £100,000, way more than you need to practise with. You can use the demo account for free on the MetaTrader 4 and XTB’s xStation5 platforms. We like that the account does not expire as long you don’t leave the account dormant for 30 days.

It took us just 3 minutes to sign up for a demo account Just provide your email, country of residence, name and phone number, create a password and select an account type. The standard account type is for retail traders, while professional traders can use a Pro account.

CFD trading with XTB includes 71 Forex pairs, 33 indices, 1977 shares, 171 ETFs and 27 commodities but you can also trade shares and ETFs. When trading Forex, we found the average spread to be 0.91 pips for EUR/USD which is very decent.

The broker has a low minimum deposit, which we look for in a broker, making it suitable when you are ready to transition from the demo to a live trading account. However, we had to request access to the MT4 platform, which we are not fans of; this just added friction to getting started.

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.

If you are happy to pay for slightly wider spreads to avoid commissions, then City Index is an excellent pick.

One of the tests we like to do is to get the top five major pairs we test with (EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, AUD/USD and USD/CAD) and add up the spreads to get an overall average spread. City Index had an average spread of 1.24 pips in our tests, way lower than the 1.52 pip average.

We find this gives you a better idea of the spreads while trading forex. Some brokers make EUR/USD cheap but have expensive spreads for other major pairs, which can distort the overall pricing.

However, if you like to focus on EUR/USD, City Index impressed us with one of the lowest spreads available with no commission. Offering a spread of 0.7 pip, which is below the industry standard.

City Index Trading platform, MetaTrader 4 and TradingView are available with City Index. The City Index platform comes with a guaranteed stop-loss order and Performance Analytics by Chasing Returns, which is like a trading mentor that we think can make you a better trader. We like the features of guardrails that allow you to study your performance daily.

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.

We like that FxPro provides 24/5 customer support via Live Chat, and connecting with support took less than 30 seconds when we tested it. The best way we like to test the support is by asking technical questions, and we found the responses impressive.

Usually, there is a delay from support while they go and look up the answer, but the conversation we had was direct and fluid. This gave us the impression that the support customer understood the product – a big plus in our books.

While reviewing FxPro, we used the cTrader platform, essentially the MetaTrader 4 and 5 platforms combined with a better interface but with less of a community behind it. The cTrader is easy to use and has 65+ indicators pre-installed into the platform, which is more than MT4, and it allows you to program your own custom indicators.

Plus, it takes advantage of FxPro’s Direct Market Access, allowing you to see the open and pending orders from the liquidity provider. We’re a fan of brokers providing this, as it can be used as an excellent tool to gauge market strength and supply/demand zones.