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. All six marks come from the scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026: trading cost, trading experience, trading platform, trust, range of markets and customer service, each out of 10. Each mark is an editorial judgement against the providers’ published terms and pages. 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 it covers
- 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 Costs a provider does not publish are marked as unpublished on its review rather than estimated.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 it covers
- 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
- 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 it covers
- 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. The site publishes no performance figure for any platform or app.
- Cadence
- Platform pages last checked on 22 Sep 2026.
- The dataset
- the platform details in each review
4. Trust
- What it covers
- 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 it covers
- 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 it covers
- The support channels and hours the provider publishes, and whether its published help material covers the spread betting account 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
- An editorial judgement recorded on the scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026 against each provider’s published terms and pages.
- Cadence
- There is no fixed schedule: the mark changes only when the scoring sheet is re-marked.
- The dataset
- the score table in each review
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 covers this check.
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 The Site Reads And Assesses
The monthly spread read is the one dataset we re-read on a monthly schedule. We read the spread figure each provider publishes for spread betting on its own UK site, and date each read. The FCA retail-loss figures and the broker trust reads are dated reads of published sources. Register details, account status, fees and market counts come from the providers, the FCA Register and other public sources, each with its date. Third-party ratings are cited as their platforms display them, with a capture date.
| 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 |
| The six criterion marks | Editorial judgements recorded on the scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026, against each provider’s published terms and pages, for trading cost, trading experience, trading platform, trust, range of markets and customer service. | Assessed |
| The overall score and the place | Computed from the six marks by our build, never typed. | Computed |
| App performance scores | No app performance figure is published anywhere on this site, and the Corrections section further down this page records what was withdrawn on 9 October 2026. | Not published |
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.
How Pages Are Made
Every guide, review and comparison page is compiled from the site’s dated data files, and its byline names the person who compiled it, shown as “Compiled by”. Those files are the broker records, the spread reads, the FCA Register reads and the trust reads, each with its read date. The prose is drafted by an AI language model from a brief of those facts; automated build checks compare published figures with those files. A “Fact checked by” or “Edited by” line appears only where a named person has signed off that page on a recorded date, and no page carries one at present.
Corrections
On 9 October 2026 the site withdrew the results of three August 2026 tests it had published, because they could not be verified against account records. The execution test covered 210 orders at 14 brokers between 18 and 27 August 2026, and the app test covered 28 installs on 22 and 23 August 2026. The customer service test covered 14 support contacts between 24 and 27 August 2026. Every figure and mark from the tests was withdrawn, the Customer Service marks returned to the scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026, and every score and place was recomputed. The four downloadable files of the execution and app tests are no longer published, and their former addresses lead to this correction.
Corrections are published on the page that carried the error rather than filed somewhere quieter. Most pages, including every guide, review and comparison page, show an Updated stamp linking to one short note near the foot naming the latest change to what the page states. 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
Broker partners pay the site on a retainer basis rather than per referral, and the marks and the ranking are not for sale.
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 move only when a mark moves. All six marks come from the scoring sheet of 26 Aug 2026, and none 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.
