UK Spread Betting Statistics

Compiled on 1 Aug 2026 from each broker’s own published average spreads. Figures are as the broker states them, in points, and are not our own execution measurements.

Industry Average Spread By Currency Pair

The mean across all 17 accounts, pair by pair, with the tightest published figure beside it.

EUR/USD is the cheapest pair at 1.0 points and the one where accounts differ least. USD/SGD is the most expensive at 3.6 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 17 accounts priced below the industry average on every one of the nine pairs.

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.

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: 7 of 14 offer them. Four firms have confirmed they do not, and three 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: 3 of 14 publish one. Only OANDA, 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 11 have not said.
• Brands no longer offering spread betting: 6 of the 20 we have reviewed. Three have withdrawn from UK retail service, two remain FCA-authorised but publish no spread betting product, and one has no UK entity able to take retail clients. Each was checked against the firm’s own property on 25 Aug 2026 and 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.

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.

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.

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

Each figure is the average spread the broker itself publishes for that pair, read from its own UK pricing page on 1 Aug 2026. We compile these rather than measure them: they are the broker’s advertised average, not a spread we have observed on a live account, and what you pay moves with the session. Nothing here is an execution test and nowhere do we call it 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; the platform comparison ranks the same accounts on cost. This page is information rather than financial advice.