Every account we rank is marked on six criteria, each out of 10, and carries one overall score out of 100. The criteria are the same on every review, so a mark means the same thing wherever you see it.
Our spread bet content is supported by broker partners, who pay us on a retainer basis rather than per referral. This page is information rather than financial advice.
How We Score, Step By Step
Each criterion is marked out of 10 for every account in our UK spread betting platform comparison, and the marks are published on that account’s own review. The names below are the names on those tables.
Since 24 September 2026, every overall score on this site is computed rather than typed. Five of the inputs come from our scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026, trading cost, trading experience, trading platform, trust and range of markets, each out of 10, and since 28 September 2026 the customer service mark is computed from our support test under the rule set out in step 6 below. The score out of 100 is the sum of those marks divided by 60 and multiplied by 100, rounded half up, with no criterion weighted. Brokers with the same score share a place. Before 24 September 2026 each published score was a stored figure that the six marks did not add up to: for eleven brokers it matched the sheet’s own overall column and for three it did not. Our build now recomputes every score and place from the marks and stops if a published figure differs.
1. Trading Cost
- What we measure
- What a bet costs to place and to hold. It covers the spread, inactivity fees, funding and withdrawal charges, and overnight financing.
- The instrument
- The mark comes from our scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026. Our monthly read of the spread figures each provider publishes for spread betting on nine currency pairs began on 18 Sep 2026, after the mark was set. Costs a provider does not publish are marked as unpublished on its review rather than estimated.
- Cadence
- Spreads re-read monthly from each broker's own site; current read 18 Sep 2026. Fee schedules last checked on 22 Sep 2026.
- The dataset
- the monthly spread read
2. Trading Experience
- What we measure
- What it takes to open an account, fund it, place an order and get your money back out. The leverage available to a professional client sits here, where a provider offers that category.
- The instrument
- Accounts opened with the provider, and the provider’s own published account and withdrawal terms.
- Cadence
- Account and withdrawal terms last checked on 22 Sep 2026.
- The dataset
- the account and withdrawal terms in each review
3. Trading Platform
- What we measure
- Which platforms actually carry the spread betting account, and what they let you do. That means charting, order types, alerts and the mobile app alongside the desktop one. A platform a provider offers on another product does not count here.
- The instrument
- Each provider’s own platform pages, read for the spread betting account specifically, and hands-on use of the platforms themselves. We publish no performance figure for any of them.
- Cadence
- Platform pages last checked on 22 Sep 2026. App test dated 22 and 23 August 2026; no repeat schedule.
- The dataset
- the app test dataset
4. Trust
- What we measure
- Whether the firm is authorised, and which company you are actually contracting with. How long it has been operating, where it is based, and what its own customers say about it in public.
- The instrument
- The authorised entity name and Firm Reference Number from the FCA Register, with the date we read it. All of them are published in full on our FCA regulation page. Third-party review scores are cited as those platforms display them, with a capture date.
- Cadence
- Each register read carries its own date on every review.
- The dataset
- UK spread betting regulation
5. Range Of Markets
- What we measure
- What you can bet on: currency pairs, indices, shares, commodities, bonds and ETFs. It also covers whether a provider carries a market you would otherwise open a second account for.
- The instrument
- Counts taken from each provider’s own site.
- Cadence
- Market counts last checked on 22 Sep 2026; each count carries its own date.
- The dataset
- the directory of broker reviews
6. Customer Service
- What we measure
- How you reach support, when, how long it takes, and whether the answer is about the product you hold. The provider’s own education material sits here too, since the first line of support for most questions is a page rather than a person.
- The instrument
- One timed query to each provider through its primary support channel (live chat, phone or email), with the minutes to first response and whether it was resolved recorded.
- Cadence
- There is no fixed schedule; the mark changes only when a new support test is recorded, and each review dates its test.
- The dataset
- the service section of each review
Since 28 September 2026 the Customer Service mark is computed from our support test rather than set on the scoring sheet. The mark is read from the time to first response, in the bands in the table below, and 3 is taken off when the query was not resolved. Each broker’s mark currently rests on one contact, made between 24 and 27 August 2026, and each review prints the number of contacts and the date beside the mark.
| First response | Mark out of 10 |
|---|---|
| Up to 10 minutes | 9 |
| 11 to 120 minutes | 7 |
| 121 to 240 minutes | 5 |
| Over 240 minutes | 3 |
| Query not resolved | 3 taken off |
How To Use These Checks To Pick A Broker
- Check the firm’s FCA register entry and the company you would contract with. The FCA regulation page lists all 14.
- Confirm the spread betting account is still open to UK clients. The reviews directory marks brands with no account to open.
- Compare the spread figure each broker publishes for spread betting at your own stake. The numbers are on the statistics page and spread betting calculator.
- Read what kind of spread figure the provider publishes before trusting the comparison. The disclosure table is on the statistics page.
- Check whether a guaranteed stop is offered and on what terms. Each review covers this.
- Check the platform and app carry the spread betting account and do what you need. The spread betting apps page and app test cover this.
What The Numbers On A Review Mean
Three scales appear on a review page and they measure different things.
- A criterion mark is out of 10. It is one of the six above, for one account.
- The overall score is out of 100. It is our assessment of the whole account, and it is what our ranking is ordered by. Rank 1 is the highest score, and the order is strictly the score order with nothing else in it.
- The rating in the page’s structured data runs from 1 to 5. That is schema.org’s scale rather than ours: it is the same overall score expressed on the scale search engines read, and every review declares the scale alongside the value so it cannot be read as anything else.
What We Test, And What We Only Assess
Our dated first-party tests cover execution timing, support responses and app features. The monthly published-spread read is separate from those tests, drawn from each ranked provider's own UK site. Everything else on a review is verified, assessed or computed, and the table sets out what sits behind each kind of claim.
| What we claim | What is behind it | How we describe it |
|---|---|---|
| Published spreads | Our own read of the spread figure each provider publishes for spread betting across the nine pairs, last read 18 Sep 2026, with the kind of each figure on record. | Read |
| FCA entity and reference number | Read from the FCA Register, with the date recorded and published beside it. | Verified |
| Whether an account is still open to UK clients | Read from the provider’s own UK spread betting page, with the date recorded. | Verified |
| Guaranteed stops, minimum stake, minimum deposit, inactivity fees, market counts | Each provider’s own UK pages, last read on 22 Sep 2026. A small number of figures are held pending review. | Assessed |
| Five criterion marks | Our own scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026, for trading cost, trading experience, trading platform, trust and range of markets. | Assessed |
| Customer Service mark | Computed from our own support test of 24 to 27 August 2026 under the published rule, one contact per broker, with every row published. | Tested |
| The overall score and the place | Computed from the six marks by our build, never typed. | Computed |
| Execution fill speed | Our own timing of 210 live orders placed across the 14 FCA-regulated spread betting brokers between 18 and 27 August 2026, read from each platform’s own order log. Every row is published. | Tested |
| App taps to trade, price alerts, in-app guaranteed stops | Our own testing of 28 installs across the 14 ranked brokers, on an iPhone 15 Pro and a Google Pixel 8, 22 and 23 August 2026, on live funded accounts. Every row is published. | Tested |
| App performance scores | No dated test with a recorded device, operating system and method exists, so no figure is published anywhere on this site. | Not published |
Execution Speed Testing
We opened live funded spread betting accounts at all 14 FCA-regulated brokers we rank. Each account held between £250 and £500. All orders were placed from London over a fibre 500Mbps ethernet connection. We measured fill times using each platform’s own order log and trade history timestamps. The test covered 15 orders per broker, 210 orders in total. Instruments were EUR/USD and the FTSE 100. Order types were market open, market close, stop triggered and limit filled. Testing ran from 18 to 27 August 2026. Medians are computed directly from the raw rows. The full per-order dataset is published on our statistics page.
The p90 column beside each median is the linear-interpolated ninetieth percentile of that broker’s 15 fills, rounded to the nearest millisecond. With 15 readings there is no single ninetieth percentile, and the candidate methods disagree by enough on the slowest brokers to change which one you would quote, so the method is stated rather than left for a reader to guess. A median says what a normal fill looked like; the p90 says what a bad one looked like, and the gap between them is the figure worth reading.
What this test does not measure is worth stating too. It is a fill-time measurement on EUR/USD and the FTSE 100 from one London connection over ten days. It is not a measure of price quality, of how a broker behaves in a gap, or of what you would see from another country or another line. A faster median does not make a broker better, and the ranking on this site does not move on it.
The slippage recorded on the same orders, broken down by order type, is published on our spread betting slippage page.
App Testing
We ran the app tests on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 18.6 on 22 August 2026 and a Google Pixel 8 on Android 15 on 23 August 2026, using live funded accounts with each of the 14 brokers. That gave us 28 per-install data points. We recorded the exact app version numbers on both platforms. For every install, we measured the fewest taps needed to go from a logged-in state to a placed trade, tested whether price alerts triggered correctly, checked whether a guaranteed stop-loss order could be placed from within the app, and noted any crashes, hangs, interface glitches, or missing functions. The full per-install dataset, including every app version, tap count, alert result, GSLO outcome, and logged issues, is published for download alongside this page.
What this test does not measure is worth stating here too. It is two handsets, one of each operating system, on the builds that shipped in the third week of August 2026. It says nothing about how an app behaves on an older phone, on a weak connection, or after an update we have not seen, and a lower tap count is a convenience finding rather than a reason to open an account.
Where The Data Behind A Review Comes From
The monthly spread harvest
We read, on each provider's own UK site, the spread figure it publishes for spread betting on nine currency pairs, and we store each figure with its kind and its window. On 18 Sep 2026 we read every broker, and we re-read every site each month. The five kinds are average, typical, fixed, target and minimum. Average, typical and fixed figures count towards a pair's average of the brokers that publish one, because a fixed spread is the price paid, and each pair's average states the number of brokers behind it. Minimums and targets never count and are never compared with an average, because a floor and an intention are not prices. Where a broker publishes more than one window for a pair, we take the main-session figure. The full detail is in the full method and the table.
A broker's nine-pair average is the arithmetic mean of the nine figures printed beside it, and it exists only where the broker publishes a comparable figure on all nine pairs. Each pair's average of the brokers that publish one is the mean of the comparable figures published for that pair, with the count of brokers behind it shown beside it, so you can add up the table and get the number in the sentence.
How We Compare Spread Betting Costs Between Brokers
To see how spread betting costs compare, we multiply each provider's published spread figure for spread betting (points) by your stake and monthly bet count. The nine-pair average across the brokers that publish one, drawn from the comparable figures published on 18 Sep 2026, is 1.79 points.
At £5 a point and 20 bets a month, the five-broker nine-pair average of 1.79 points costs £8.95 per bet and £179.00 a month. Only two brokers publish a comparable figure on all nine pairs: Pepperstone and Spread Co. Their nine-pair spread figures range from 1.7 to 2.26 points, so monthly costs run from £170.00 to £226.00. These are the figures as we read them on 18 Sep 2026, and they are not all published averages. The named rows are on the statistics page.
Whether the account still exists
We check whether each brand still offers a UK spread betting account at all, on the brand’s own UK site, and we store the answer with its date. That is why our broker reviews directory carries six brands with no account to open alongside the fourteen that have one.
How We Cite Other People’s Ratings
We publish Trustpilot and TradingView scores exactly as those platforms display them, with the date we captured them, and we never recalculate an average from a star breakdown. We do not cite regional profiles with fewer than a hundred reviews.
App store ratings are storefront-specific, so an Apple App Store or Google Play rating only appears on a UK page here if the capture came from the GB storefront. A rating taken from the US storefront is a rating of a different audience’s experience.
What Happens When We Get Something Wrong
Corrections are published on the page that carried the error rather than filed somewhere quieter. Most pages show an Updated stamp and a “What Changed?” note naming the actual change. The stamp moves when a claim changes for a reader: a figure corrected, a statement added, a statement removed. It does not move for a layout change, and it never moves to make a page look fresher than it is.
If you think something here is wrong, our contact page reaches us, and a specific claim with the page it is on gets checked against its source.
Money, And Why It Does Not Move A Score
Some of the links on this site are affiliate links.
The ranking is strictly ordered by the overall score. The shortlist of alternatives on a review is the top of that same ranking with the page’s own subject removed. Providers we have an arrangement with get the same treatment when the data is unflattering, and several reviews here lead with the thing their subject is worst at.
Our Methodology: FAQs
Do The Criterion Marks Add Up To The Overall Score?
Yes. Since 24 September 2026 the overall score out of 100 is the six marks added together, divided by 60 and multiplied by 100, rounded half up, with no criterion weighted. Brokers with the same score share a place, so two brokers can be joint sixth and the next broker is eighth.
How Often Are These Scores Updated?
Scores are computed from the six marks and move only when a mark moves; five marks come from the scoring sheet and the customer service mark from the support test, and neither is re-marked monthly. Spreads are re-read monthly, and every page states the date of the read it shows. Entity details, product status and published fees were last checked on 22 Sep 2026, and each carries the date it was last read.
What Does It Mean When A Review Leaves A Figure Out?
It means the provider does not publish that figure on its own UK spread betting pages and we could not confirm it from a primary source. An absent row on a review is a fact about what has been confirmed. The alternative is a number carried across from a competitor or from the same provider’s CFD account, and both of those have been found on this site and removed.
