Best Forex Brokers in the USA 2026: The Only Six You Can Legally Use

The best forex brokers USA traders can legally use are six firms: GAIN Capital Group LLC trading as FOREX.com, OANDA Corporation, tastyfx LLC, Trading.com Markets Inc, Charles Schwab Futures and Forex LLC and Interactive Brokers LLC. Four hold the Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer registration. There is no compensation scheme behind any of them, and NFA rules forbid a dealer from telling you your funds are segregated.

The list of the best forex brokers USA traders can legally use is six firms long. Not six good
ones picked out of a longer list. Six in total, and that is the entire market. Four hold the Retail
Foreign Exchange Dealer registration that lets a firm act as your counterparty, and two more hold
retail forex customer money as futures commission merchants without carrying that designation.

That is the whole market: GAIN Capital Group LLC, trading as FOREX.com,
OANDA Corporation, tastyfx LLC, Trading.com Markets
Inc, Charles Schwab Futures and Forex LLC and Interactive Brokers
LLC. Every other broker you have seen advertised either cannot accept you or is not
supposed to be trying.

This page does not rank them. It publishes what the regulator publishes about each one, including
two enforcement orders and the capital figures the CFTC collects every month, and then explains the
part of the American system that almost nobody tells you about.

What the CFTC publishes about all six

Every month the Commodity Futures Trading Commission publishes financial data filed by every
futures commission merchant and retail forex dealer. The figures below are from the report headed
Selected FCM Financial Data as of July 31, 2026, compiled from reports filed by
1 September 2026. They are not marketing numbers and the firms do not choose them.

Firm	Registration	Adjusted net capital	Required	Customer money held
GAIN Capital Group LLC (FOREX.com)	FCM and RFED	$82,904,419	$29,706,083	$204,121,663
OANDA Corporation	FCM and RFED	$33,191,483	$26,783,414	$132,445,959
tastyfx LLC	RFED only	$67,394,162	$21,997,522	$49,950,447
Trading.com Markets Inc	FCM and RFED	$24,180,804	$20,000,000	$2,872,026
Charles Schwab Futures and Forex LLC	FCM, not RFED	$301,491,825	$50,909,395	$55,996,755
Interactive Brokers LLC	FCM, not RFED	$10,238,479,537	$1,956,489,317	$26,190,990

The last column is the CFTC’s own measure of how much client money each firm is holding. Its
definition is worth reading once, because it is the number that matters later in this page:

“the total amount of funds at an FCM, RFED, or FCMRFD that would be obtained by combining
all money, securities and property deposited by a retail forex customer into a retail forex account
or accounts, adjusted for the realized and unrealized net profit or loss.”

Those six figures add up to $471,577,840, which is the total printed in the same report. That is
how we know the table is read correctly, and it is also how you can check it yourself.

Two things stand out, and neither appears on any comparison site we have seen.

Trading.com Markets sits exactly on the floor. Its requirement reads
$20,000,000, which is the minimum dollar amount the CFTC sets for a firm engaged in retail forex. It
holds $24.2m against it. Every other firm’s requirement is calculated above the floor because of the
size of its book.

OANDA holds the thinnest cushion of the four dealers, roughly $33.2m of capital
against a $26.8m requirement, while holding $132.4m of customer money. Hold that thought for the
enforcement section.

One thing this table does not mean. Adjusted net capital is not a fund set aside to repay
customers, and a firm with more capital than another is not holding your money more safely because
of it. What the figure measures is how much room a firm has above the minimum its regulator demands.
That is useful, and it is not the same as cover.

The two we have researched, ranked

Two of the six now carry a full review on this site, so they can be ranked. The other four are
named below and are not ranked, because we have not researched them yet and a comparison page that
quietly omits that distinction is doing the reader a disservice.

Both entries below clear the two rules this site enforces in code: a broker cannot hold a ranked
position unless it sits at or above our Neutral band, and unless we hold a published cost figure
attributable to the entity a US client actually contracts with, not a sibling company abroad.

Your money is not segregated, and the regulator forbids them saying it is

This is the part that surprises people who have traded elsewhere, and it is the single most
important thing on this page.

If you trade forex in the United Kingdom, client money sits under FCA client asset rules and the
Financial Services Compensation Scheme covers up to 85,000 pounds if the firm fails. In Australia it
is segregated without a compensation scheme. In the United States there is no compensation scheme
for retail forex and the funds are not segregated in the way futures customer funds are.

The National Futures Association does not merely decline to provide that protection. In its
Forex Transactions: Regulatory Guide, under NFA Compliance Rule 2-29, it tells member firms
what they are not allowed to tell you. A member:

“may not represent that forex funds deposited with a Member are ‘segregated'”

or that they are

“given special protection under the bankruptcy laws.”

Read that against the marketing of any offshore broker, which will promise segregation in the
first paragraph and mean very little by it. The American regulator has banned the claim outright.

Dealers are required to hold assets at qualifying institutions covering the amounts owed to
retail forex customers, so this is not an absence of rules. What is absent is the two things a
British or European trader takes for granted: segregation in the strict sense, and a scheme that
pays out if the firm goes under.

We are going to stop short of telling you exactly where you would rank as a creditor in a failure,
because NFA’s own published guidance does not say and we are not going to invent it. What is
established is enough to change a decision: there is no compensation scheme, the funds are not
segregated, and the firm may not tell you otherwise. That is why the capital table above is worth
reading rather than skipping.

The two firms carrying enforcement orders

We checked the enforcement record rather than the registration summary. Two of the six have CFTC
orders against them.

OANDA Corporation, 21 August 2020, $500,000

The CFTC fined OANDA $500,000. The findings:

• it failed to meet minimum net capital requirements from 26 April to 21 August
  2019, a period of close to four months
• it breached the equity withdrawal restriction by paying dividends on 15 October
  2018, 26 April 2019 and 28 May 2019
• it failed to meet certain reporting requirements
• it failed to diligently supervise matters related to its business as a registrant

The order recognises the firm’s cooperation in the investigation.

Now put that beside the table. The firm that has previously fallen below its minimum capital while
paying money out to shareholders is the same firm that today holds the thinnest cushion above its
requirement of the four dealers, with $132m of customer money behind it. Those are two separate
official documents six years apart, and read together they say more than either does alone.

This is not a prediction that anything will go wrong. OANDA is registered, approved and operating
normally, and the 2019 shortfall was corrected. It is a reason to look at the capital column rather
than the homepage.

GAIN Capital Group LLC, 29 September 2020, $300,000

The CFTC fined GAIN Capital, which trades as FOREX.com, $300,000 for failing to diligently
supervise customer accounts introduced by an introducing broker called Foremost, in breach of
Regulation 166.3. The order records that “prior to 2016, Respondent had no follow-on policies or
procedures in place” for reviewing introduced accounts.

The fairest way to put this: the fraud was committed by Foremost and its associated
person, not by GAIN Capital. The finding against GAIN is that it did not supervise properly
while someone else defrauded its customers. That is a real failure and it is a different kind of
failure from the one a headline would imply. GAIN Capital is a wholly owned subsidiary of StoneX
Group Inc, a listed US institution, and we cover the group’s British arm in our
FOREX.com review.

50 to 1, no hedging, and no CFDs

American rules are the strictest in the world on what you may do, which is the mirror image of
how weak the protection is if the firm fails.

Leverage. NFA sets it as a security deposit rather than a ratio, under NFA
Financial Requirements Section 12: “two percent of the notional value of transactions of major
currency groups” and “five percent of the notional value of other currency transactions”. Two
percent is 50 to 1. Five percent is 20 to 1. The guide adds that firms “may, of course, charge their
customers higher security deposits”, so those are ceilings and your broker may be stricter.

For comparison, the FCA, ASIC, the DFSA in Dubai and the FSRA in Abu Dhabi all cap majors at 30
to 1, so the United States is actually more permissive than the United Kingdom on leverage and far
more restrictive than the offshore brands advertising 400 to 1 or 1000 to 1. What that kind of
leverage does to an account is arithmetic rather than opinion, and we have set it out in
our leverage guide.

No hedging. A dealer may not carry offsetting positions in your account and must
“offset the positions on a first-in, first-out basis”. This is the FIFO rule. If you have been sold
a strategy that holds a long and a short on the same pair at once, it does not work in an American
account, and no broker here can make it work for you.

No CFDs. The registration these firms hold covers off-exchange retail forex. The
share, index and commodity CFDs that dominate European and Australian broker menus are not part of
the American retail offering, which is why a firm like tastyfx publishes forex pricing only and says
plainly that it is not an SEC-registered broker-dealer. If you want equities, you open a brokerage
account; the forex account does not stretch to cover them.

What each one charges, where it is published

Published pricing in this market is thinner than it should be, so here is what each firm actually
puts in public rather than what a comparison table would like to claim.

tastyfx LLC, NFA ID 0509630, publishes three accounts: Standard at a minimum
0.8 pips with no commission and no minimum deposit, Zero+ at a minimum 0.0 pips with $5 per lot, and
Prime at a minimum 0.6 pips with no commission and a $50,000 minimum deposit. That is the clearest
published pricing of the six.

GAIN Capital Group LLC publishes a RAW Pricing account at spreads “as low as 0.0
pips” with commission of $7 per $100,000 traded, charged on each side. Note the wording: a minimum
spread is not an average, and “as low as” is doing work in that sentence.

Trading.com Markets Inc, NFA ID 0516820, registered at 85 Broad Street in New
York, is the newest of the four dealers and the smallest by a wide margin, holding under $3m of
customer money against OANDA’s $132m.

OANDA Corporation publishes core spreads from 0.0 on EUR/USD with commission
at 0.70 US dollars per 10,000 units on each leg, which is 7.00 US dollars per 100,000 traded per
side. That is the same headline commission as FOREX.com’s RAW account. OANDA is the only one of
the six carrying a CFTC order about its own capital, and the detail is in
our OANDA review.

For Interactive Brokers LLC the forex offering sits inside a much larger
brokerage, and the group is covered in our
Interactive Brokers review.
Its American entity holds more than ten billion dollars of adjusted net capital, which is
a different order of thing entirely from the dealers above it.

What we could not check, and how you can in two minutes

We read the enforcement records for OANDA and GAIN Capital at source. We were not able to pull
complete regulatory histories for tastyfx, Trading.com Markets, Charles Schwab Futures and Forex or
Interactive Brokers, because NFA’s BASIC search would not return their records reliably for us.

So we are not telling you those four are clean. We are telling you we did not read them, which is
a different statement, and you should not read silence here as a clean bill of health on any page
including this one.

You can check any of them yourself, and it is genuinely quick:

1. Go to NFA BASIC at nfa.futures.org and type the firm’s name into the Firm search.
2. Read the Regulatory Actions column in the results. It says Yes or No.
3. If it says Yes, open the record and read the case. Do not stop at the registration summary,
   because that is where the actions are not.

Type the regulator’s address into your browser yourself rather than following a link a broker
hands you. That advice is not about this page; it is about every page.

Licensed, and not yet reviewed

Four firms may legally take you and do not appear in the ranking above, for one reason: we have
not finished the work. GAIN Capital Group LLC trading as FOREX.com,
Trading.com Markets Inc, Charles Schwab Futures and Forex LLC and
Interactive Brokers LLC are all real registrants holding real client money, and
their CFTC figures are in the table at the top of this page.

FOREX.com and Interactive Brokers both carry reviews here already, but those reviews cover
StoneX Financial Ltd and Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited, which
are different companies under different rules. Ranking them on an American page using a British
review would be exactly the mistake this page exists to warn about.

So which one

We are not going to hand you a number one, because the honest answer depends on something only you
know.

If the size of the institution behind your money is what worries you most, the two firms that are
not dealers at all, Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab Futures and Forex, are a different
category of counterparty, with capital in the hundreds of millions or billions and large regulated
businesses around them.

If you want published pricing you can check before you deposit, tastyfx is the only one of the six
that puts a full account comparison in public without an account.

If you are weighing OANDA, read the 2020 order first. Not because it disqualifies the firm, but
because it is directly about capital and it is the one firm whose capital position today is worth a
second look.

And whichever you choose, the thing to internalise is the one in the middle of this page: there is
no compensation scheme behind any of them. In the United Kingdom you can afford to be relaxed about
which authorised firm you pick, because the scheme catches you. Here you cannot, and the regulator
has forbidden anyone from pretending otherwise. How we score and what we check is set out on
our methodology page.

Why each one is on the list

How this list was ordered

Ranked on the published six-pillar score, which weights regulation at 30 per cent and fund safety at 25 per cent. Nothing on this page is ordered by commission, and a broker cannot hold a ranked position unless we hold published cost data for it. The full weighting is in our methodology.

Every entry re-checked at source on 2026-10-10.

Some links on this page are partner links and we may be paid a commission if you open an account through one. They appear only on brokers we rate Trusted or Neutral, they are never on a broker we rate High Risk or Scam, and they cannot change a rating or a position on this list.