FCA regulated forex brokers

The three UK entities

The brokers we track that hold FCA authorisation, with the entity and register number each publishes. Six of the nine are licensed elsewhere and are absent from this page rather than marked unregulated.

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Entity names and register numbers are as each broker publishes them, read on 24 August 2026; the rules and the compensation limit come from the FCA and the FSCS directly. Six of the nine brokers we track hold no UK authorisation and are licensed elsewhere.

What the FCA requires of a broker

The UK made ESMA's temporary CFD restrictions permanent, and the list is short enough to check against any account you are offered. Firms must limit leverage to between 30:1 and 2:1 depending on the underlying asset. They must close out a position when funds fall to 50% of the margin needed to maintain it. They must guarantee that a client cannot lose more than the total funds in the CFD account. They must stop offering monetary and non-monetary inducements to encourage trading. And they must publish a standardised risk warning stating the percentage of their retail accounts that lose money.

That last rule is why every broker page in Europe carries a figure like 74% or 83%: it is not marketing candour, it is a requirement, recalculated quarterly over the preceding twelve months.

The FCA estimated these protections stop nearly 400,000 people a year from risking more than their original stake, worth between £267m and £451m of protection annually. Whatever one thinks of the rules, they are the reason a UK account behaves differently from an offshore one carrying the same brand.

What the FSCS pays, and what it does not

If an authorised firm fails and cannot return your money, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme covers up to £85,000 per eligible person per firm for failures after 1 April 2019. The older £50,000 figure still quoted on many comparison pages applies to failures between 2010 and March 2019 — worth knowing, because it is the single most repeated stale number in this niche.

It covers the firm failing. It does not cover losing money on trades, which is the far more common way to lose money at a regulated broker, and it does not follow you if the same group later moves your account to an entity outside the UK.

Alongside the scheme sits a rule that matters before anything fails: client money segregation. Under the FCA's client assets rules a firm must hold client money separately from its own, in client bank accounts, normally by the next business day after receipt, and the segregation exists specifically so the money can be identified and returned if the firm collapses.

The catch is the same as everywhere: which entity gets you

All three brokers here run other companies. Tickmill's UK entity sits beside CySEC, South African and Seychelles ones — and its $30 welcome account is issued by the Seychelles company, whose terms bar EU citizens, because a UK or European entity could not offer it at all under the inducements ban. FxPro's UK company cannot offer crypto CFDs to retail clients while its Seychelles and Bahamas companies can. Fortrade routes visitors between six entities by location.

So “FCA regulated” on a homepage is a statement about the group, and the only statement that matters to you is on the account opening page. If your application routes to an offshore company, none of the rules above applies to your account — not the leverage cap, not negative balance protection, not the FSCS.

There is a straightforward way to see which one you are getting: the risk warning percentage. A UK or European entity must display it; an offshore one usually does not.

Checking a firm on the FCA register

FCA numbers are six-digit reference numbers — 717270, 509956, 609970 — and the Financial Services Register is public. The entry shows the firm's status, its permissions and its trading names, and it is the only place worth checking: clone firms copy websites, documents and licence numbers, but they cannot alter the register's own contact details.

Take the phone number and address from the register entry and use those, rather than the ones in the email or on the site that reached you. That single habit defeats the most convincing scam in this industry.

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