Trading cost calculator
What does your forex broker actually cost you?
Not what it advertises — what it charges you. Put in your own spread, commission and swap, straight off your platform, and see the year priced end to end. Nothing is guessed, nothing is looked up in a database that went stale six months ago.
Your trading costs you
$2,160
a year — 21.6% of a $10,000 account, at $9.00 per round-turn lot across 240 lots.
What you trade
$10.00 per pip per lot
$2,160
per year
pipsTypical pips on your platform
Left out of the total while blank.
Left out of the total while blank.
Against other brokers’ advertised rates
These are each broker’s own published “from” rate on EUR/USD, read on the date shown. A “from” rate is the tightest figure a broker has ever displayed, on its most liquid pair, in its quietest hour — treat it as a floor that reality cannot beat, never as what you would actually pay.
Advertises 0.1 pips on Raw Spread · source read 2026-08-02
$240
$1,920 below yours
- · Your figures are used exactly as entered. Nothing is sent anywhere — the calculation runs in your browser.
- · Slippage and requotes are real costs this cannot model. Neither can anyone else’s calculator.
- · Spreads widen around news and at rollover; the number on your platform at 3pm is not the number at 11pm.
Who protects your money
9 regulators and jurisdictions, with the leverage caps, compensation limits and negative-balance rules each one actually imposes — every figure cited to the authority that set it.
Broker regulation check
34 brokers and which authorities they name, with links to the public registers so you can confirm it yourself in a minute.
Don’t know your numbers?
Your platform already records what you are charged. Three places to read it, and the two units that make people enter a figure ten times too large.
Trading calculators
Position size, pip value and margin — all deriving pip value from real contract specs, not assuming $10.
How the number is produced
No black box. Four lines of arithmetic, applied per instrument and summed:
spread cost = lots x spread in pips x pip value
commission = lots x commission per round-turn lot
swap = lots x nights held x nightly swap rate
annual cost = 12 x monthly total, summed over instrumentsPip value is derived from contract size, pip size and quote currency rather than hardcoded, so EUR/USD prices at $10 per standard lot while USD/JPY prices near $6.47 — a difference that quietly distorts most cost comparisons. Swap rates are signed: a credit reduces your cost instead of adding to it.
Why we ask you instead of telling you
Most comparison sites keep a database of broker spreads. We tried to build one and stopped, because the honest version cannot be maintained: brokers do not publish typical spreads in any machine-readable form, most block automated access outright, swap rates live inside the trading platform and change weekly, and a figure that is three months stale is worse than no figure at all — it looks authoritative and is wrong.
Your platform, on the other hand, shows the exact terms of your account, right now, for free. Reading them takes under a minute and produces an answer that is correct rather than approximately plausible. Where we do quote a broker’s pricing, it is that broker’s own published rate, linked and dated, and labelled as the marketing floor it is.
Questions
- How do I work out what my broker costs me per year?
- Annual cost = yearly volume in lots x (spread cost + commission + swap). Spread cost per lot is the spread in pips multiplied by that instrument’s pip value — $10 per pip on a standard EUR/USD lot, about $6.47 on USD/JPY, $1 per one-cent tick on a 100oz gold contract. Commission is charged per round-turn lot. Swap is charged per lot for every night a position stays open, which is why holding time changes the answer so much.
- Where do I find my spread, commission and swap?
- All three are in your trading platform. In MetaTrader 4 or 5, right-click the symbol in Market Watch and choose Specification: it lists the current spread, the commission, and the swap rates for long and short separately. Those numbers are exact for your account, which is why this calculator asks for them instead of guessing from a database.
- Why not just compare brokers’ advertised spreads?
- Because an advertised “from 0.0 pips” is the tightest figure a broker has ever shown, on its most liquid pair, in its quietest hour. It is a floor, not a price. Worse, it ignores commission and swap entirely — a raw account at 0.0 pips plus $7 per lot costs more than a commission-free account at 0.6 pips, and no headline rate tells you that.
- Is a pip always worth $10?
- Only on standard lots of USD-quoted pairs. A USD/JPY pip is worth roughly $6.47 per lot because the quote currency is yen and must be converted back to dollars. On gold, one $0.01 tick on a 100oz contract is worth $1 — so a spread quoted as “20” costs $20 per lot. This calculator derives pip value from each instrument’s contract size, pip size and quote currency, which is why its numbers disagree with calculators that hardcode $10.
- Do you store what I enter?
- No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or to anyone else.