Zero-spread accounts: where the cost went

A zero-spread account has not removed the cost of trading; it has moved it into commission. The only comparable figure is what a round turn costs in total, and it is checkable before you deposit.

Last verified 8 August 2026 · how we check

A broker advertising zero spreads has not found a way to trade for free. It has moved the cost from one line to another, usually into a commission charged per lot, and the account is cheaper or dearer than a standard one depending entirely on how those two numbers compare for the size you actually trade.

The comparison people make is between “spread” and “no spread”. That is the wrong pair. The right one is the total cost of a round turn on each account type, and both halves of it are published before you open anything.

What does “zero spread” usually mean in practice?

Three different things, and the marketing rarely distinguishes them.

Raw pricing plus commission. The broker passes through the price it receives from its liquidity providers and charges a fixed commission per lot per side. On major pairs in liquid hours the raw spread genuinely approaches zero. This is the model the phrase describes accurately.

“From 0.0 pips”. A minimum, not a typical. The lowest figure observed on the most liquid pair at the quietest moment of the session, presented as though it were the ordinary case. A broker quoting a minimum and a broker quoting an average are answering different questions, and only the second one is useful.

Zero spread on a shortlist of instruments. The headline applies to one or two pairs while everything else prices normally. Worth finding the list before assuming it covers what you trade.

How do you compare a zero-spread account against a standard one?

Convert both to the same unit: cost per standard lot per round turn.

On a standard account the cost is the spread, and a one-pip spread on a standard lot of a major pair runs to roughly ten units of the quote currency. On a raw account the cost is the raw spread plus commission both ways. If a broker charges a commission per side, the round turn is twice that, and it is a fixed amount regardless of how the spread behaves.

The two lines cross somewhere, and where they cross depends on the pair and the hour:

The raw account wins where the raw spread stays genuinely tight and your size is large enough that the fixed commission is small against the notional. It loses on small sizes, where a fixed per-lot charge is a heavier proportion, and it loses on instruments where the raw spread is not tight to begin with.

What is checkable before you deposit?

Four things, all of them written down somewhere by any broker willing to be compared.

The commission, per lot and per side. Stated as a number in the contract specifications or the account-types page. A broker that quotes commission “from” a figure without saying what moves it has told you nothing.

Average spread rather than minimum, with the window it was measured over. The useful form is an average over a stated period on a stated instrument. Where only a minimum is published, the honest reading is that the average is not flattering.

Whether the commission changes by instrument or account currency. It often does, and the headline figure is usually the friendliest case.

What happens around a data release. Raw pricing widens with the market, because it is the market. A broker advertising a fixed maximum spread is offering something different and should be read carefully, since a guaranteed cap has to be paid for somewhere.

What about the cost that does not appear on either line?

Spread and commission are the costs a broker publishes. Slippage is the one it does not, and on a tight-spread account it can be larger than both together.

The mechanism is simple enough. A quoted spread describes the price you are shown; the fill describes the price you get. Where the two differ, the difference is a cost, and it does not appear in any table on the account-types page. An account with a raw spread near zero and fills consistently a point or two away from the quote is dearer than a standard account that fills where it quotes.

This is why comparing brokers on published pricing alone reaches confident wrong answers. The published numbers are real and they are also the only part of the cost the broker controls the presentation of.

Two things are worth asking before the pricing comparison, and both are answerable. Whether the firm publishes any execution statistics at all, such as the share of orders filled at or better than the quote, tells you whether it expects that question. And whether the demo account prices the same way as the live one matters, because demo environments frequently show tighter spreads and cleaner fills than the live book. A comparison run on demo can be measuring something the live account never offers.

Why is the swap still the bigger number for some traders?

Cost per round turn dominates for anyone opening and closing inside a session. For anyone holding positions overnight, the financing charge usually overtakes it, and a zero-spread account offers nothing against that line at all.

A trader comparing two accounts purely on spread and commission, while holding positions for a week at a time, is optimising the smaller of their two costs. The overnight charge sits in the same contract specifications, one table away. If interest charges are the thing you need to avoid rather than reduce, that is a different account type entirely and we cover it under swap-free accounts.

Does a tight spread tell you anything about the broker?

Less than the marketing suggests, and something worth knowing all the same.

A genuinely raw feed means the broker is passing prices through rather than setting them, which usually indicates it is making money on commission rather than on the difference between your fill and its own book. That is a cleaner alignment. It does not on its own say anything about whether the firm is well capitalised, correctly licensed or likely to process a withdrawal promptly, and those questions decide far more.

The one inference that does hold: a broker publishing average spreads with a measurement window, alongside a commission stated per lot per side, is a broker that expects to be compared. One publishing a minimum and nothing else has made a choice about that too.

Why we check this

An account labelled zero spread tells you which line has been set to zero, not what the trade costs. Two brokers can both advertise it and differ by a multiple in what a standard lot costs to open and close.

Five things settle whether the account is cheaper for you specifically, and every one is published before you deposit:

• The commission per lot per side, as a number rather than a “from”
• The average spread and the window it was measured over
• Which instruments the headline covers, since it is often a shortlist
• How the cost behaves around a release, which is where raw pricing shows its shape
• The overnight financing rate, which outweighs everything above for positions held more than a day or two

We take those figures from the broker’s own contract specifications and record the date they were taken, because they move. We do not hold funded accounts, so this site does not report measured spreads or execution of its own; where a figure appears it is the firm’s published number, labelled and dated. See the methodology, and the advertising disclosure for how the site is paid.

Sources

• ESMA — Product intervention measures on CFDs and binary options
• FCA — Statement on ESMA product intervention measures