What happens to my money if my forex broker goes bust?

There is no single answer, and that is the point. Compensation attaches to the legal entity that holds your account, not to the brand on the website. For a UK entity authorised by the FCA: Up to £85,000 per eligible person, per firm, for firms that failed on or after 1 April 2019 (FSCS). For a Cypriot entity authorised by CySEC: Up to €20,000 per covered client, and never more than 90% of the claim (Investor Compensation Fund). Professional clients are not covered. For Australian entities, and for the offshore registrations we track, we have established no compensation scheme — an absence in our records, stated as such rather than papered over.

Does a segregated account mean my money is safe if the broker fails?

No, and the two are routinely conflated. Segregation is an instruction about where client money sits while the firm is solvent. It is not a promise that the money will all be there when an administrator counts it — shortfalls are discovered precisely at failure, through error, misuse or the cost of the administration itself. A compensation scheme is the protection designed for that case: it pays covered clients when the firm cannot. A broker advertising segregated accounts has told you about the first and nothing about the second.

Am I covered by the FSCS if my account is with an offshore entity of a UK-regulated group?

The schemes are defined against the failed firm, not against the group or the brand. The FSCS states its limit per eligible person, per firm; the Cypriot ICF covers claims of covered clients of its member firms. If your account is held by a Seychelles, Vanuatu, Belize or BVI company, that company is not the member — however prominently the group’s UK or EU licence appears on the website. The entity named in your client agreement decides which scheme, if any, applies.

Is a broker with no compensation scheme unregulated?

No, and the distinction matters. An empty entry in our records means not established, never unregulated: offshore registrations in Seychelles, Vanuatu, Belize and the BVI are real registrations with real registers. What is true is that we have established no compensation scheme behind them, and that escalating a claim from another country against a failed offshore company is difficult in practice. That is a trade-off to make deliberately — usually in exchange for higher leverage — not one to discover during an administration.

What happens to your money if your broker fails

The question is usually asked as if it had one answer. It has several, and which one applies to you was decided on the day you opened the account — by which legal entity your agreement names, not by anything the brand did since. The same group failing on the same day ends one client’s story with a compensation payment and another’s with a claim in a foreign liquidation.

This page sets out what each jurisdiction’s scheme actually pays, from the scheme’s own pages, and states plainly where we have established no scheme at all — because an honest blank is more useful than a reassuring guess.

Segregation is not compensation

Nearly every broker’s marketing says client money is held in segregated accounts, and nearly every reader takes that as the answer to this page’s question. It is not. Segregation is an instruction about where the money sits while the firm is solvent. Failure is the case where instructions stopped being followed, or where following them was not enough — a shortfall is discovered by the administrator, not announced in advance. Compensation schemes exist for precisely that case: they pay covered clients when the failed firm cannot.

Negative balance protection is a third thing again, and worth separating because it appears in the same paragraphs of the same marketing pages. It stops your losses at your account balance while the firm is alive and your trades are moving. It says nothing about what happens when the firm itself is the failure. A jurisdiction can require it — the UK, EU and Australia all do, cited on their regulator pages — and still differ completely on what a failed firm’s clients get back.

The same failure, four different endings

Each figure below is read from the scheme’s own page, with the link and the date. Where a record shows nothing, that absence is the finding, and we say so rather than fill it.

United Kingdom — FCA

Financial Conduct Authority

Up to £85,000 per eligible person, per firm, for firms that failed on or after 1 April 2019 (FSCS).

FSCS — what we cover — read 2026-08-02

Cyprus — CySEC

Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission

Up to €20,000 per covered client, and never more than 90% of the claim (Investor Compensation Fund). Professional clients are not covered.

Two limits inside that sentence deserve reading twice: the ceiling applies to your total claims against the firm, not per account, and clients categorised as professional are outside the fund entirely — a categorisation some brokers invite clients to opt into for higher leverage.

CySEC — Investor Compensation Fund — read 2026-08-05

Australia — ASIC

Australian Securities and Investments Commission

Our ASIC record carries no compensation entry, and its summary states the reason: Australia has no statutory compensation scheme equivalent to the UK’s FSCS. This from a jurisdiction whose conduct rules — leverage caps, negative balance protection, both cited on the ASIC page — otherwise match the strictest available. Those rules protect the account while the firm trades; they do not pay anyone when it stops.

Where nothing is established

For the registrations below, our records carry no compensation entry. An empty record means not established, never “unregulated” — these are real registrations, and several run public registers. What we have not found is any scheme that pays their clients on failure, and the practical difficulty of pursuing a claim in these jurisdictions from abroad is part of what the higher leverage is priced in.

Financial Sector Conduct Authority South Africa — no compensation scheme established
Financial Services Authority Seychelles Seychelles — no compensation scheme established
Vanuatu Financial Services Commission Vanuatu — no compensation scheme established
Financial Services Commission Belize Belize — no compensation scheme established
Financial Services Commission British Virgin Islands British Virgin Islands — no compensation scheme established

The scheme attaches to the entity, not the brand

Read the wording the schemes use about themselves. The FSCS states its limit per eligible person, per firm; the ICF covers claims of covered clients of its member firms. Neither says anything about groups or brands, because neither covers them. A broker group holding a UK licence, a Cypriot licence and a Seychelles registration is three counterparties wearing one logo — and when one of them fails, only its own clients are inside its jurisdiction’s scheme.

This is the asymmetry the comparison tables flatten. Two clients of the same brand, trading the same platform at the same spreads, hold claims against different companies in different countries — one ends the failure with a cheque from a statutory fund, the other with a creditor’s claim in a liquidation they cannot attend. Nothing about the accounts looked different while the firm was alive.

Finding out which case is yours

It takes one line of one document: the client agreement names the legal entity your account is opened with, and that entity’s jurisdiction decides everything above. The four-step check walks through it — find the entity, search the regulator’s own register for that exact name, read the permissions, then establish what protection follows. Doing it before depositing costs about two minutes. Doing it after a failure is called litigation.

Questions

What happens to my money if my forex broker goes bust?: There is no single answer, and that is the point. Compensation attaches to the legal entity that holds your account, not to the brand on the website. For a UK entity authorised by the FCA: Up to £85,000 per eligible person, per firm, for firms that failed on or after 1 April 2019 (FSCS). For a Cypriot entity authorised by CySEC: Up to €20,000 per covered client, and never more than 90% of the claim (Investor Compensation Fund). Professional clients are not covered. For Australian entities, and for the offshore registrations we track, we have established no compensation scheme — an absence in our records, stated as such rather than papered over.
Does a segregated account mean my money is safe if the broker fails?: No, and the two are routinely conflated. Segregation is an instruction about where client money sits while the firm is solvent. It is not a promise that the money will all be there when an administrator counts it — shortfalls are discovered precisely at failure, through error, misuse or the cost of the administration itself. A compensation scheme is the protection designed for that case: it pays covered clients when the firm cannot. A broker advertising segregated accounts has told you about the first and nothing about the second.
Am I covered by the FSCS if my account is with an offshore entity of a UK-regulated group?: The schemes are defined against the failed firm, not against the group or the brand. The FSCS states its limit per eligible person, per firm; the Cypriot ICF covers claims of covered clients of its member firms. If your account is held by a Seychelles, Vanuatu, Belize or BVI company, that company is not the member — however prominently the group’s UK or EU licence appears on the website. The entity named in your client agreement decides which scheme, if any, applies.
Is a broker with no compensation scheme unregulated?: No, and the distinction matters. An empty entry in our records means not established, never unregulated: offshore registrations in Seychelles, Vanuatu, Belize and the BVI are real registrations with real registers. What is true is that we have established no compensation scheme behind them, and that escalating a claim from another country against a failed offshore company is difficult in practice. That is a trade-off to make deliberately — usually in exchange for higher leverage — not one to discover during an administration.