UK Spread Betting Statistics

Compiled on 1 Aug 2026. Figures are as the broker states them, in points, and are not our own execution measurements. They are not all averages: read on 5 Sep 2026, 5 of the 13 accounts here publish a static per-pair figure for a UK spread betting account, and of the rest, 1 publishes a static table that prices a different product, 5 publish a minimum only and 2 quote live. What each brand publishes gives the row for every one.

Industry Average Spread By Currency Pair

The mean across all 13 accounts, pair by pair, with the tightest published figure beside it. The harvest prices currency pairs only; the indices and commodities each broker lists are counted in the list below with the date each was read.

EUR/USD is the cheapest pair at 1.0 points and the one where accounts differ least. USD/SGD is the most expensive at 3.2 points, and the gap between the tightest and widest account on it exceeds the whole EUR/USD range. Cost differences between brokers live outside the majors.

Pepperstone is the only one of the 13 accounts priced below the industry average on every one of the nine pairs.

• Pepperstone: 20+ indices, 40 commodities (read 25 Aug 2026)
• Spreadex: 30+ indices (read 25 Aug 2026)
• Capital.com: 35+ indices (read 25 Aug 2026)
• IG: 69 indices, 35 commodities (read 25 Aug 2026)
• ThinkMarkets: 18 indices*, 3 commodities* (read 25 Aug 2026)
• City Index: 40+ indices, 20+ commodities (read 25 Aug 2026)
• Trade Nation: over 40 indices (read 25 Aug 2026)
• CMC Markets: over 80 indices, 100+ commodities (read 25 Aug 2026)
• FxPro: 19 indices* (read 25 Aug 2026)
• ActivTrades: 17 commodities* (read 25 Aug 2026)
• Spread Co: 12 indices* (read 25 Aug 2026)

Values marked * are counts we made from the instrument list each broker publishes, read on 25 Aug 2026; unmarked values are the broker’s own published figures.

What Each Brand Publishes About Its Own Spreads

What a firm publishes about its own pricing is a fact about the firm, and it is the fact the table above had been assuming. On 5 Sep 2026 we read 16 UK spread betting brands one at a time, each on its own UK property and nothing else. Of the 16, 5 publish a static per-pair figure for a UK spread betting account. Of the rest, 2 publish a static table that prices a different product, 5 publish a minimum only, 2 quote live and 2 publish nothing.

One brand per read, on the brand’s own UK property and on no comparison site, 5 Sep 2026. A brand with no UK spread betting account keeps its row: what it publishes, and for which product, is part of the answer rather than a reason to leave it out.

What the middle column means, in the words the record itself uses:

• An average. A published mean over a stated period.
• A fixed spread. The spread is fixed and published as such.
• A target spread. A spread the firm states it aims to execute at.
• A typical spread. Published as “typical” with no stated method.
• A minimum only. A minimum only, “spreads from X”.
• Quoted live. Quoted live, no static figure.
• No figure. Nothing published, or no UK spread betting product at all.

The account we rank #1 publishes no spread betting average at all. Pepperstone carries a figure for 5 of the 9 pairs on its UK costs page and every spread column on that page is a minimum. It does publish one complete nine-pair average table, and its own copy prices that table for a CFD account, so it is a figure for a different product and no page here may borrow it.

The one published average in the set is dated by its own footnote. An IG average covers 8 of the 9 pairs, and the footnote above the table reads: “Average spread (Monday 00:00 - Friday 22:00 GMT) for the 12 weeks ending 8th January 2021.” That is the only mean over a stated period among the 16 brands read, and the period has not moved in the five years since.

The industry average now covers only brands a UK reader can buy from, and three came out of it on 5 Sep 2026. AvaTrade, Admirals and Markets.com each publish pricing of some kind, and there is no route to open a spread betting account in the UK with any of them, so the row a reader measures an account against was partly priced for products that reader cannot buy. The average is the mean of 13 accounts now rather than 16.

Month-On-Month Spread Changes

First published on 1 Aug 2026. We update it periodically rather than to a schedule, and every table here carries the date it was compiled. Month-on-month changes appear in this section once a second harvest exists to compare against: a trend drawn from one reading is a chart of one point.

We publish no forecast of where spreads go next and no estimate of the market’s size or direction. Spreads move with liquidity and with each broker’s own pricing decisions, neither predictable from a table of past averages. What the table does answer is what an account cost on a stated date.

Execution Test Dataset (August 2026)

We timed 210 orders across 14 brokers between 18 and 27 August 2026. The fastest median fill was OANDA at 88 ms.

The same rows carry a slippage figure per order, published as Spread Betting Slippage: 210 Orders Timed at 14 UK Brokers (August 2026).

This is the dataset behind the execution table on our spread betting platforms page: 210 timed live orders across the 14 ranked brokers, placed 18 to 27 August 2026 on EUR/USD and the FTSE 100.

The orders file carries one row per order with its date, time, platform, instrument, order type, stake, fill time, slippage and whether it was requoted or rejected. The protocol file records how each account was funded and where its timestamps were read from. Every figure in the table below is computed from the first of those two files at build time, and both are in the downloads below.

Timed on live funded accounts, EUR/USD and the FTSE 100, 18 to 27 August 2026. Fill times came from each platform’s own order log or trade history. OANDA recorded the fastest median at 88ms and ThinkMarkets the slowest at 237ms; 10 of the 210 orders were requoted or rejected. The p90 is the linear-interpolated ninetieth percentile, rounded. The full protocol is on our methodology page. Each broker’s sample size is 15 timed orders, drawn from 210 orders across the 14 brokers.

App Test Dataset (August 2026)

The app test dataset captures what we saw when we installed every broker’s iOS and Android app on two devices with live funded accounts. We used an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 18.6 on 22 August 2026 and a Google Pixel 8 running Android 15 on 23 August 2026.

For each of the 28 installs we recorded taps from login to trade, price alerts, in-app guaranteed stop placement and any issues logged. The full per-install dataset is downloadable here. A full comparison of the apps sits on our spread betting apps page.

Download The Raw Data

Four files, every row as it was recorded. Nothing on this page is derived from anything not in them.

• Monthly spread harvest (CSV, 13 accounts) — one row per account, the nine per-pair figures and the nine-pair mean, dated 2026-08-01. Blank cells are figures the broker does not publish.
• Execution test, every timed order (CSV, 210 rows) — date, time, platform, instrument, order type, stake, fill time, slippage and whether the order was requoted or rejected.
• Execution test, per-broker protocol (CSV, 14 rows) — how each account was funded and where its timestamps were read from.
• App test, every install (CSV, 28 rows) — device, OS, app version, tap count, alert result, in-app GSLO outcome and any logged issue.

The harvest file is generated from the same data the tables above render, so the download and the page cannot disagree. The two execution files and the app file are the raw records as they were captured.

Citing This Data

You are welcome to reference any of the data on this page with attribution. Please use these exact citation forms. For the monthly spread harvest: “Spread-Bet.co.uk monthly spread harvest, August 2026”. For the execution test: “Spread-Bet.co.uk execution test dataset, August 2026”. For the app test: “Spread-Bet.co.uk app test dataset, August 2026”.

All datasets link to the methodology page that documents how each was produced: the spread harvest method, the execution testing protocol and the app testing protocol.

What UK Spread Betting Firms Disclose

Every FCA-authorised firm offering spread bets must publish the share of its own retail clients who lose money. Collected across the 14 firms we track on 25 Aug 2026, the range is wider than the single figure usually quoted.

• Retail accounts losing money: 61% to 76.6%. The lowest disclosed figure is Spreadex’s at 61%; the highest is OANDA’s at 76.6%. Each figure is the firm’s own published disclosure, read from its UK site on 25 Aug 2026.
• Guaranteed stop-loss orders: 8 of 14 offer them. Four firms have confirmed they do not, and two have not stated a position either way, so we leave those unmarked rather than assume. How each charges the premium differs, and our stop-loss guide sets out the models.
• Minimum stake per point: 4 of 14 publish one. Only OANDA, IG, CMC Markets and Spread Co state a per-point minimum on their own UK site. A comparison site quoting one for every broker is quoting something the other 10 have not said.
• Brands no longer offering spread betting: 6 of the 20 we have reviewed. One has withdrawn from UK retail service, two remain FCA-authorised but publish no spread betting product, and three have no UK entity able to take retail clients. Each was checked against the firm’s own property between 25 Aug 2026 and 5 Sep 2026, and each is listed in our spread betting broker reviews directory.

Retail leverage is capped at 30:1, negative balance protection means an account cannot go below zero, and crypto derivatives have been off-limits to UK retail clients since 6 January 2021. Our regulation page covers what those rules mean in practice.

How Profitable Is Spread Betting?

Nobody can answer that with a figure, because no UK provider publishes one. The disclosure the rules actually require runs the other way: every FCA-authorised firm must state the share of its own retail clients who lose money, and none is obliged to say what the rest made. The absence is the finding. A comparison site quoting a win rate, an average return or a profitability percentage for spread betting is quoting something no firm in this market has published, and our own datasets do not fill the gap either, because they measure spreads, execution and apps rather than client outcomes. What you can read from the loss disclosures above is the floor, and what you cannot read from them is how much anyone lost or how long they traded.

Third-Party Statistics

The figures below come from other organisations. We have not verified them and they are not part of the dataset above; each is given with the source that published it and the period it covers, so you can judge how current it is.

Three of these are more than a decade old and each keeps its year rather than being presented as current. The BeGambleAware series is the only recent participation measure we know of, and it counts spread betting as a share of gambling rather than of investing, which is a narrower base than it first appears.

Who Spread Bets In The UK

There is no official count of UK spread bettors. The FCA does not publish one and the firms disclose client outcomes rather than client numbers, so anyone quoting a market size is estimating. What the table above supports is narrow: participation is small as a share of gambling, skewed male, and unmeasured since the pandemic.

How Big Are UK Spread Betting Companies?

No UK spread betting firm publishes its client count, revenue or market share. A ranking of providers by size would be an estimate rather than a measurement, and this page does not publish one.

The disclosures do support one thing plainly. Between 61% and 76.6% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading spread bets and CFDs with the providers we compare, and that band is the whole distribution across the 14 firms rather than a selection from it. Our guide explains what that figure measures.

A Short History Of UK Spread Betting

Financial spread betting began in 1974, when Stuart Wheeler founded Investors Gold Index, later IG Index, to let British clients take a position on the price of gold at a time when they were barred from trading it for speculation. The bet was structured as a wager, which is why the product is taxed as one and why it is still confined largely to the UK and Ireland. Profits are free of UK capital gains tax and stamp duty for most UK retail traders, depending on their circumstances, as our tax page explains where the UK exemption stops.

The market stayed small until online platforms in the late 1990s turned a telephone business into a retail one. The most recent structural change came from the regulator: the FCA’s 2019 rules capped retail leverage, required negative balance protection and made the loss-percentage disclosure mandatory, which is why every broker page here carries one.

How This Data Is Compiled

Every figure here is one the broker itself publishes for that pair, read from its own UK pricing page and transcribed on 1 Aug 2026. We compile these rather than measure them: they are the broker’s own published number, not a spread we have observed on a live account, and what you pay moves with the session. The spread tables are not an execution test and nowhere do we call them one. The execution dataset above is the separate, timed measurement, and the two never share a figure.

Most of them are not averages, and this note used to say they all were. Read on 5 Sep 2026, 5 of the 13 accounts in the table publish a static per-pair figure for a UK spread betting account, and of the rest, 1 publishes a static table that prices a different product, 5 publish a minimum only and 2 quote live. That is a gap between what this dataset says it is and what its sources publish, and we are stating it rather than closing it. The figures stand as they were transcribed on 1 Aug 2026, and what each brand puts on its own site is set out row by row in what each brand publishes.

One account came out of this table on 27 August 2026, and the averages moved with it. ActivTrades was the one row here whose spreads the provider does not publish anywhere: its UK pricing page quotes live under a note that the pricing is indicative, so that row could only have come from our own reading of that widget, on a date nobody recorded. We asked what it was collected from and got no answer, and a figure whose method cannot be stated is not one we publish — labelling it was a way of publishing it. The row is gone, its nine figures are gone from the ActivTrades review too, and the industry averages moved from the mean of 17 accounts to 16. It is restorable the day ActivTrades publishes a static average, or the day we record a dated method for collecting the live one.

The Avg column and the industry average row are computed at build time from the figures beside them, and the build fails if a stored average disagrees with the numbers it averages. That check exists because it caught one: until 26 August 2026 the averages published here covered eight of the nine pairs while being described as nine-pair figures.

The dataset is free to cite with attribution to spread-bet.co.uk and a link to this page. For the underlying pricing pages, the broker reviews name the source for each firm; our spread betting platforms UK page ranks the same accounts on cost. This page is information rather than financial advice.