Interactive Brokers Review 2026: Your UK Account Is Carried in America
Quick facts
| Legal entity | Five verified companies, by market. Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited (UK, FCA), Interactive Brokers Ireland Limited (EU, Central Bank of Ireland), Interactive Brokers LLC (US, SEC and CFTC, and the carrying broker for UK client accounts), Interactive Brokers Singapore Pte. Ltd. (MAS), Interactive Brokers Australia Pty. Ltd. (AFSL 453554, declared not verified). Parent: Interactive Brokers Group, Inc., listed on NASDAQ. |
|---|---|
| Regulator | ASIC, Central Bank of Ireland, CFTC / NFA, Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), MAS, SEC |
| Licence number | FCA 208159; Central Bank of Ireland C423427 (MiFID firm and MiCAR crypto-asset service provider); SEC 8-47257 and FINRA CRD 36418; MAS CMS100917; ASIC AFSL 453554 |
| Founded | 1978 (Interactive Brokers LLC registered as a broker-dealer 1994; UK entity FCA authorised 2002) |
| Headquarters | One Pickwick Plaza, Greenwich, Connecticut. UK entity at 20 Fenchurch Street, Floor 12, London EC3M 3BY |
| Spread from | Spot forex charged as commission, not spread: 0.20 basis points of trade value with a $2.00 minimum per order, so every order under $100,000 of trade value pays a flat $4.00 round turn. Index CFD commission 0.005% to 0.01% |
| Maximum leverage | 30:1 on major FX pairs for UK retail clients. Retail minimum initial margin on index CFDs is 20%. Margin loans from benchmark plus 1.5%, published as 4.990% on the first GBP 80,000 |
| Platforms | Trader Workstation, IBKR Desktop, IBKR Mobile, Client Portal, TradingView, APIs (REST, FIX, TWS) |
| Instruments | Stocks, ETFs, bonds, funds, options, futures, forex, metals and CFDs across 170 market centres in over 200 countries and territories |
| Withdrawal time | Not published as a stated timeframe on the pages checked |
| Segregated funds | UK client accounts are cleared and carried by Interactive Brokers LLC in the United States. IBKR states that products are only covered by the UK FSCS in limited circumstances. SIPC applies instead at $500,000 with a $250,000 cash sublimit, plus excess cover at Lloyd's of $30 million per account subject to a $150 million aggregate across all clients. Neither covers spot forex or futures. EU clients are with the Irish entity under the Investor Compensation Scheme, 90% of loss to a maximum of EUR 20,000. Singapore clients have no scheme. |
| Website | interactivebrokers.co.ukVisit → |
Interactive Brokers is the best-capitalised broker on this site by a distance, and its UK arm is a Financial Conduct Authority firm authorised since 2002. Read its own disclaimers page, though, and you find this sentence: “Your account is cleared and carried by Interactive Brokers LLC.” Your money is in Greenwich, Connecticut. It scores 8.1 and we rate it Trusted, but the reason that sentence matters takes some explaining.
What the numbers actually are
IBKR does not ask you to take its financial strength on trust, because the parent is listed on NASDAQ and has to publish. As at 1 July 2026 the group reports $22.3 billion in equity capital, “over $13.9 billion in excess of regulatory requirements”, $4.8 billion of pretax income for 2025 and no long-term debt. Interactive Brokers LLC is rated A- Outlook Stable by Standard & Poor’s. The fact sheet for the same quarter gives 5.185 million client accounts and $903.3 billion of client equity.
For comparison, no other broker we have reviewed publishes an equity figure at all, and only two carry a credit rating. On raw balance sheet this is not a close contest.
IBKR also publishes something almost nobody else does: what it does with the money. Roughly 11% of client funds sit in segregated accounts and roughly 89% are invested in short-term US Treasury securities and reverse repurchase agreements with a 30 to 40 day weighted average maturity. Agree with that or not, you can see it.
Where your money actually sits, and what covers it
This is the part that decides the review.
Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited is real. FCA reference 208159, Authorised since 6 February 2002, permitted to hold and control client money, registered at 20 Fenchurch Street. The register shows no requirements, no restrictions, and exactly one previous name, a cosmetic change from “Interactive Brokers (UK) Ltd” in January 2023. There is no white-label history whatsoever, which puts it alongside Saxo and against IG, whose licence carries forty previous trading names.
But the FCA entity is not where your positions live. IBKR’s UK disclaimers page states it plainly:
“Your account is cleared and carried by Interactive Brokers LLC and for certain limited products by Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited. Interactive Brokers LLC is regulated by the US SEC and CFTC and is a member of the SIPC compensation scheme. Products are only covered by the UK FSCS in limited circumstances.“
“Limited circumstances” is never defined. What replaces the FSCS is the US Securities Investor Protection Corporation, and its terms are different in ways that matter here:
| FSCS (UK) | SIPC (US) | |
|---|---|---|
| Limit | £85,000 | $500,000 |
| Cash sublimit | None separate | $250,000 |
| Covers forex? | Yes, where the activity is regulated | No |
| Covers futures? | Yes, where the activity is regulated | No |
SIPC’s own wording is that it does not protect “commodity futures contracts (unless held in a special portfolio margining account), or foreign exchange trades”. IBKR repeats it on its own client protection page: “Futures and options on futures are not covered.”
So on this site, which exists to review forex brokers, the honest summary is that a spot forex position at Interactive Brokers has no compensation scheme behind it in any jurisdiction we checked. Not the FSCS, not SIPC, not the excess policy below. That is not a criticism unique to IBKR, because SIPC excludes forex for everybody, but most UK readers arrive assuming £85,000 of FSCS cover and it is not there.
The excess SIPC policy, and the number in its footnote
IBKR buys additional cover from underwriters at Lloyd’s of London. The headline is generous: an extra $30 million per account, with a $900,000 cash sublimit. The qualifier is in the same sentence and gets quoted far less often: “subject to an aggregate limit of $150 million”.
$150 million is the total across every client. Against $903.3 billion of client equity and 5.185 million accounts, it is a rounding error in any scenario where it would actually be needed. It is meaningful insurance against a single account going wrong in a failure. It is not a backstop for a firm-wide event, and it is not sold as one once you read the footnote.
The Irish entity is a different proposition
EU clients go to Interactive Brokers Ireland Limited, and we verified it on the Central Bank of Ireland’s register: reference C423427, authorised as a MiFID investment firm, and separately on the Register of Crypto-Asset Service Providers under Article 63 of MiCAR. That second authorisation is rare. Of the brokers on this site, IBKR is the only one we have found holding one.
Irish clients are covered by the Investor Compensation Scheme, which pays 90% of the amount lost to a maximum of €20,000. That is a quarter of the FSCS limit, and it is the standard European floor rather than anything specific to IBKR. Our guide to compensation schemes sets out why the €20,000 ceiling catches people out.
What holds the score down
Ninety-two regulatory events
FINRA’s BrokerCheck report for Interactive Brokers LLC, firm 36418, records 92 regulatory events, all final, none pending, plus 29 arbitrations. We are not aware of another broker rated Trusted on this site with a conduct file of that size.
Two of them are worth naming.
10 August 2020. The SEC, FINRA and the CFTC settled with IBKR on the same day for $38 million combined, being $11.5 million to the SEC, $15 million to FINRA and $11.5 million to the CFTC. The SEC’s press release states the firm failed to file more than 150 Suspicious Activity Reports on US microcap trades, and that it “failed to recognize red flags concerning these transactions, failed to properly investigate suspicious activity as required by its written supervisory procedures, and failed to file SARs in a timely fashion even when suspicious transactions were flagged by compliance personnel”. That last clause is the damaging one. Compliance staff raised the flags and nothing happened.
2025. Seven separate options exchanges fined IBKR in a three-day window at the end of September for one shared cause: an order-counting algorithm that mismarked professional customer orders as ordinary customer orders, in some cases for more than a decade.
| Exchange | Date | Fine |
|---|---|---|
| NASDAQ ISE | 30 Sep 2025 | $2,370,100 |
| NASDAQ PHLX | 30 Sep 2025 | $1,628,204 |
| MIAX Emerald | 29 Sep 2025 | $744,816 |
| Miami International Securities Exchange | 29 Sep 2025 | $201,443 |
| BOX Exchange | 30 Sep 2025 | $137,845 |
| MIAX Pearl | 29 Sep 2025 | $72,831 |
| NASDAQ BX | 30 Sep 2025 | $44,386 |
| Seven-exchange total | $5,199,625 |
Two more followed. NASDAQ fined IBKR $900,000 on 3 December 2025 over supervisory system deficiencies concerning “potentially manipulative trading effected through omnibus accounts”, and FINRA fined it $150,000 on 31 October 2025 for failing to provide a consolidated display containing all required market data elements at the point of order entry. Nine orders, roughly $6.2 million, in one calendar year.
The fair reading, and we want to be careful here. A US broker-dealer executing 4.8 million trades a day across 170 market centres is subject to a dozen exchange disciplinary regimes that a UK-only firm never touches. Counting IBKR’s 92 events against IG’s or CMC’s FCA record is not like for like, and most of the 2025 items are technical order-marking failures rather than client harm. But the 2020 AML settlement is not technical, the omnibus-account supervision order is not technical, and a firm this size clearing a decade of mismarked orders on seven exchanges at once is a control-environment story whatever label you put on it. The complaints pillar scores 6.0, and that is the single reason this review does not sit above 8.5.
Six clone firms on the FCA register
The FCA register entry for Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited carries a clone warning section listing six operations using IBKR’s details:
- IBL Markets, added 25 August 2016
- Interactive Brokers, added 30 July 2021
- Interactive Brokers / Polar Capital, added 7 July 2023
- Immediate Matrix, added 9 February 2024
- Broker, added 20 May 2024
- xtradecons.com, added 20 May 2024
This is not IBKR’s fault and it does not reduce the score. It is here because it changes what a prospective client should do. The practical risk to a UK reader is not that Interactive Brokers fails. It is that they deposit with something calling itself Interactive Brokers. Four of those six were added in the last three years, and “Immediate Matrix” is a name that has circulated widely as an automated-trading pitch. Checking the licence yourself takes two minutes and the FCA register displays the clone warning on the same page as the genuine entry.
The forex commission minimum bites small traders hard
IBKR prices spot forex as commission on trade value rather than as a spread, which is the institutional convention and generally the cheaper one. The published schedule:
| Monthly volume | Rate | Minimum per order |
|---|---|---|
| Up to $1bn | 0.20 bp | $2.00 |
| $1bn to $2bn | 0.15 bp | $1.50 |
| $2bn to $5bn | 0.10 bp | $1.25 |
| Above $5bn | 0.08 bp | $1.00 |
Work the first row. 0.20 basis points on $100,000 of trade value is exactly $2.00, which is exactly the minimum. So $100,000 is the break-even order size. Below it, the minimum takes over and the effective rate climbs as the order shrinks. On $10,000 of trade value the rate would charge $0.20 and the minimum charges $2.00, which is ten times the advertised tariff. Every forex order under $100,000 costs the same $2.00 each way, $4.00 the round turn.
That $4.00 round turn on a $10,000 position compares badly with a spread-based broker. CMC Markets quotes EUR/USD from 0.50 pips, which on $10,000 of notional is roughly fifty cents all in. The comparison reverses at size, and at $1 million of trade value IBKR is the cheapest venue on this site by a wide margin. But it means the headline “0.20 bp” is not the number most retail readers will pay, and the page does not say so.
Where IBKR is unambiguously cheap is financing. Margin loans start at benchmark plus 1.5%, published as 4.990% on the first £80,000 and falling to 4.240% above £800,000, with the benchmark and the markup both shown per tier. Equity index CFD and precious metal financing is benchmark plus or minus 1.5%. Both are well inside what the spread-betting firms charge, and both are published in a form you can check.
The risk warning says something worth reading
Every FCA-regulated CFD provider has to publish the percentage of its retail accounts that lose money. Read on each firm’s own UK site on 20 September 2026:
| Broker | Retail accounts losing money |
|---|---|
| Interactive Brokers | 57.9% |
| Saxo | 60% |
| Capital.com | 65% |
| CMC Markets | 68% |
| IG | 69% |
IBKR has the lowest figure of the five, by two points over the next best and eleven over the worst. Do not over-read it. The number reflects who a broker attracts as much as what it does for them, and IBKR’s CFD business is a sideline attached to a multi-asset brokerage whose clients mostly hold stocks and bonds, while CMC and IG are CFD houses whose retail base is built for leverage. Still, it is the only cross-broker outcome measure the regulator forces onto the page, and IBKR wins it.
One small oddity: IBKR’s version reads “57.9% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with IBKR”, where the standard form is “with this provider”. Trivial, but we noticed.
The entity map
Five entities verified at the regulator’s own source on 20 September 2026.
| Where you sign up | Company | Licence | If it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited | FCA FRN 208159, Authorised 06/02/2002 | Account carried by Interactive Brokers LLC. SIPC, not FSCS, in most cases |
| European Union | Interactive Brokers Ireland Limited | Central Bank of Ireland C423427, MiFID firm, and a MiCAR crypto-asset service provider | Irish ICS: 90% of loss, max €20,000 |
| United States, and the carrying broker for UK clients | Interactive Brokers LLC | SEC and CFTC, FINRA member, CRD 36418 | SIPC $500,000 (cash sublimit $250,000), plus excess cover to $30m per account subject to a $150m aggregate. No forex, no futures |
| Singapore | Interactive Brokers Singapore Pte. Ltd. | MAS Capital Markets Services Licensee, CMS100917 | Nothing. No scheme covers a CMS licensee |
| Australia | Interactive Brokers Australia Pty. Ltd. | AFSL 453554, AFCA member 38492 | Declared by IBKR. We could not reach AFCA’s member search to confirm it |
Not checked at source: Canada (CIRO and the Canadian Investor Protection Fund), Hong Kong (SFC), India (SEBI INZ000217730), Japan (Kanto Local Finance Bureau 187), and the Australian entry above. IBKR also operates entities in Hungary and Switzerland that its UK disclaimers page does not list.
Who this suits
Someone holding a large, multi-currency, multi-asset portfolio who borrows against it and cares what the margin rate is. On that profile nothing else on this site is close: the capital base is an order of magnitude larger, the financing is the cheapest published anywhere, and the market access is genuinely global rather than a list of CFDs on foreign shares.
It suits a small forex trader considerably less well. The $2 minimum per order makes every position under $100,000 of trade value cost a flat $4.00 to open and close, the platform assumes you know what a smart routing destination is, and the compensation position on spot forex is that there is none. If forex is the whole of what you do and your positions are modest, CMC Markets is cheaper and the FSCS actually applies. Regulation and fund safety carry 55% of the weight in our scoring method, which is why IBKR still lands at 8.1, but the method is a description of a firm and not a recommendation for a person.
Frequently asked questions
Is Interactive Brokers safe?
By balance sheet it is the strongest broker we have reviewed: $22.3 billion of equity capital with $13.9 billion above regulatory requirements, no long-term debt, an A- rating from Standard & Poor’s, and a NASDAQ-listed parent that has to publish. The qualification is about compensation rather than solvency. UK clients’ accounts are cleared and carried by Interactive Brokers LLC in the United States, IBKR states that products “are only covered by the UK FSCS in limited circumstances”, and SIPC, which applies instead, excludes foreign exchange and futures entirely.
Does the FSCS cover Interactive Brokers UK clients?
Only in limited circumstances, which is IBKR’s own phrase from its UK disclaimers page and is not defined there. The account is cleared and carried by Interactive Brokers LLC, so the applicable scheme in most cases is SIPC at $500,000 with a $250,000 cash sublimit, plus an excess policy at Lloyd’s giving a further $30 million per account subject to a $150 million aggregate across all clients. Neither SIPC nor the excess policy covers spot forex or futures.
How much does Interactive Brokers charge for forex?
0.20 basis points of trade value at the entry tier, with a $2.00 minimum per order. The minimum is what matters for most retail traders: 0.20 bp equals $2.00 at exactly $100,000 of trade value, so every order below that size pays the $2.00 floor, $4.00 for the round turn. On $10,000 of trade value that is ten times the headline rate. Above $100,000 it becomes the cheapest forex pricing on this site.
Has Interactive Brokers been fined?
Repeatedly. FINRA’s BrokerCheck report for Interactive Brokers LLC records 92 final regulatory events and 29 arbitrations. The largest is the combined $38 million settled with the SEC, FINRA and the CFTC on 10 August 2020 for failing to file more than 150 Suspicious Activity Reports on US microcap trades. In 2025 alone, seven options exchanges, NASDAQ and FINRA issued nine orders totalling roughly $6.2 million, most of them arising from one order-marking algorithm.
Why does the FCA register show clone firms for Interactive Brokers?
Because six separate operations have used IBKR’s details to look authorised: IBL Markets (2016), Interactive Brokers (2021), Interactive Brokers / Polar Capital (2023), Immediate Matrix (2024), Broker (2024) and xtradecons.com (2024). A clone warning is a statement about impersonators, not about the firm. It is worth knowing because it means the realistic danger to a UK reader is depositing with the wrong Interactive Brokers, which is exactly what checking the register prevents.
Sources
Financial Conduct Authority register, Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited, FRN 208159: Authorised since 06/02/2002, can hold and can control client money, Companies House number 03958476, one current name and one previous name (“Interactive Brokers (UK) Ltd”, 03 Feb 2014 to 04 Jan 2023), no requirements or restrictions, and six clone firm entries dated 25 Aug 2016, 30 Jul 2021, 07 Jul 2023, 09 Feb 2024 and two on 20 May 2024. Checked 20 September 2026.
interactivebrokers.co.uk disclaimers page for the entity block quoted in full, including “Your account is cleared and carried by Interactive Brokers LLC” and “Products are only covered by the UK FSCS in limited circumstances”, and for the Ireland, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore entries. Checked 20 September 2026.
Central Bank of Ireland registers, Interactive Brokers Ireland Limited, reference C423427: authorised as an Investment Firm under Regulation 8(3) and deemed authorised under Regulation 5(2) of S.I. 375/2017, and listed on the Register of Crypto-Asset Service Providers under Article 63 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. Checked 20 September 2026.
Monetary Authority of Singapore Financial Institutions Directory, Interactive Brokers Singapore Pte. Ltd., Capital Markets Services Licensee. Checked 20 September 2026.
FINRA BrokerCheck report for Interactive Brokers LLC, CRD 36418, SEC number 8-47257, registered 1994: 92 regulatory events all final with none pending, 29 arbitrations, and the individual 2025 orders from NASDAQ ISE, NASDAQ PHLX, NASDAQ BX, NASDAQ, MIAX Emerald, MIAX Pearl, Miami International Securities Exchange, BOX Exchange and FINRA. Checked 20 September 2026.
Securities and Exchange Commission press release 2020-178, 10 August 2020, “SEC Charges Interactive Brokers With Repeatedly Failing to File Suspicious Activity Reports”, for the $11.5m, $15m and $11.5m penalties, the $38 million total, the more than 150 unfiled SARs and the quoted description of the failures.
Securities Investor Protection Corporation, “What SIPC Protects”, for the $500,000 limit, the $250,000 cash sublimit and the exclusion of commodity futures contracts and foreign exchange trades. Interactive Brokers client protection page for the excess SIPC policy with underwriters at Lloyd’s of London, the $30 million per account extension, the $900,000 cash sublimit, the $150 million aggregate limit and “Futures and options on futures are not covered”. Checked 20 September 2026.
Investor Compensation Company DAC (investorcompensation.ie) for the Irish scheme limit of 90% of the amount lost to a maximum of €20,000. Checked 20 September 2026.
interactivebrokers.com financial strength page for the $22.3 billion equity capital, the $13.9 billion excess, the $4.8 billion 2025 pretax income, no long-term debt, the S&P A- Outlook Stable rating and the segregation and Treasury maturity figures as of 1 July 2026; IBKR fact sheet for 5.185 million accounts, $903.3 billion client equity, 4,824,000 daily average revenue trades and 170 market centres, Q2 2026.
interactivebrokers.co.uk spot currency commission schedule, CFD product page and margin rates page for the 0.20 bp tariff and $2.00 minimum, the 0.005% to 0.01% index CFD commission, benchmark plus or minus 1.5% financing, the 20% retail initial margin and the GBP and USD margin loan tiers. Checked 20 September 2026.
Risk warning percentages read on each firm’s own UK website on 20 September 2026: Interactive Brokers 57.9%, Saxo 60%, Capital.com 65%, CMC Markets 68%, IG 69%.
Not verified at source: the Australian AFSL and AFCA membership, which AFCA’s member search would not return on three attempts, and the Canadian, Hong Kong, Indian and Japanese registrations, which are recorded here as IBKR declares them.
Answered in detail
Rated higher on the same scale
Rated Trusted or Neutral against the same six pillars. These link to our own reviews, not to the brokers, and no broker can pay to appear here.