Forex.com does not choose your maximum leverage. Whichever regulator licenses the entity that opens your account does. That distinction sounds pedantic until you look at what it implies. The ceiling is different depending on whether you are a US customer of GAIN Capital Group LLC or a UK customer of StoneX Financial Ltd, and neither of those two companies is the one most people assume they are dealing with.
This page was checked on 15 September 2026. It quotes no spread, commission or overnight financing rate, because those change and because a stale figure is worse than none. What follows is the part that moves slowly: where the leverage caps come from, this brand's enforcement record in the United States, and the registers where you can confirm every line of it.
The regulatory facts below come from primary documents rather than broker comparison sites. For the United States that means the NFA rulebook, NFA BASIC, CFTC press releases 8174-20 and 8263-20, and the NFA Business Conduct Committee decision dated 7 December 2022. For the United Kingdom and the European Union it means the FCA Financial Services Register, ESMA Decision (EU) 2018/796, FCA Policy Statement PS19/18 and FCA Policy Statement PS20/10. Where a figure could not be traced to one of those, it is not here.
The US entity is GAIN Capital Group LLC, NFA ID 339826, a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant and retail foreign exchange dealer headquartered in Warren, New Jersey. Its parent is StoneX Group Inc., which is listed, so group-level audited accounts exist in a way they do not for a privately held broker.
The 50:1 and 20:1 figures quoted for US retail forex are not a marketing tier. They are the arithmetic reciprocal of the minimum security deposit a dealer must collect, roughly 2 percent on the major currency pairs and roughly 5 percent on everything else. A dealer cannot waive them for a retail customer, and no amount of account size or experience changes them.
Two further constraints come from NFA Compliance Rule 2-43(b), and they affect position management more than the leverage ceiling does. A forex dealer member may not carry offsetting positions in a customer account, and must offset them on a first-in, first-out basis. In practice you cannot hold a long and a short in the same pair as separate tickets, and you cannot choose which entry to close when you reduce exposure. The NFA's own guidance confirms Rule 2-43 does not apply to transactions with eligible contract participants, which is a different category from "experienced retail client".
NFA Compliance Rule 2-43(a) prohibits a forex dealer member from cancelling an executed customer order or adjusting a customer account in any way that changes the price of an executed order. The exceptions are narrow and mostly run in the customer's favour. The rule exists precisely because the temptation to undo a bad fill is strong, and the firm sits on the same side of every retail trade.
On 31 March 2021 at about 2:55 pm, and until roughly 1:00 am on 1 April 2021, the FOREX.com platform displayed stale quotes on 14 currency pairs. Customers were able to execute stop and limit orders at prices that did not reflect the prices the firm was publishing. By the time the malfunction was stopped, GAIN had lost approximately $3 million on the resulting fills.
What followed is the part worth reading. GAIN made negative adjustments of about $2.84 million across 17 customer accounts and positive adjustments of about $35,000 across 33 accounts. The chief executive approved them personally. NFA's Business Conduct Committee found that this breached Rule 2-43(a)(1), that the treatment of affected customers breached Rule 2-36(c), that information supplied to NFA was inaccurate and incomplete contrary to Rules 2-5 and 2-36(c), and that supervision failed under Rules 2-36(e) and 2-9(a).
The decision is dated 7 December 2022 and was announced on 8 December 2022. GAIN was ordered to pay $700,000. Neither GAIN nor Alexander Robert Bobinski, Jr. admitted or denied the allegations, which is how these settlements are structured. Bobinski was separately barred for three years under CFTC Regulation 1.63 from serving on any self-regulatory organisation disciplinary committee, arbitration panel, oversight panel or governing board.
The 2022 case is the largest, but it is not isolated. Four actions are on the public record against entities operating this brand, and a page about leverage that omits them is not giving you the information you need to pick a counterparty.
None of this makes the firm unusual. Retail forex in the United States is a concentrated market with a handful of CFTC-registered dealers and a long enforcement history across all of them. The point is narrower and more useful: being regulated did not prevent any of the four, and the value of regulation here is that every one of them is written down and searchable.
ESMA Decision (EU) 2018/796 took effect on 1 August 2018 under Article 40 of MiFIR. Its measures were temporary, renewed repeatedly, then made permanent at national level. In the United Kingdom that happened through FCA Policy Statement PS19/18, in force for CFDs from 1 August 2019.
The leverage caps step down by asset class: 30:1 on major currency pairs, 20:1 on non-major pairs plus gold and the major equity indices, 10:1 on other commodities and non-major indices, 5:1 on single equities, and 2:1 on cryptocurrency under the ESMA framework.
The United Kingdom departs from that last figure. Cryptoasset derivatives have not been available to UK retail clients since 6 January 2021, when the prohibition in FCA Policy Statement PS20/10 took effect. There is no 2:1 crypto tier for a UK retail account. If you are reading a leverage table that shows one, it is describing the EU framework or an older one, not the FCA rulebook.
Four further protections travel with retail status under this regime, and they matter more than the caps. Positions must begin closing when account equity falls to 50 percent of the margin required to hold them. Negative balance protection is mandatory, so a retail client cannot owe more than was deposited. Monetary and non-monetary inducements such as deposit bonuses are banned. And every firm must publish a standardised risk warning stating the percentage of its own retail accounts that lost money. None of these four is imposed in the same form on a US retail forex account, so whether you get any of them is a question for your customer agreement rather than for a regulator.
The UK business runs through StoneX Financial Ltd, FCA reference number 446717, authorised since 24 March 2006. City Index is a trading name of the same company, so Forex.com and City Index share one legal counterparty in the United Kingdom rather than two.
Gain Capital UK Limited, FCA reference number 113942, is the long-standing operator and still shows as Authorised on the register, but it is no longer the counterparty for UK clients. The company has stated that it will surrender its FCA authorisation in the fullness of time, after the Dubai operating licence obtained in August 2025 can be transferred to StoneX Financial Ltd. The timing is uncertain and the process depends on that transfer. Check the register for the current position rather than relying on any summary, including this one.
One consequence is easy to miss. FSCS cover runs per authorised firm, not per brand. Because Forex.com and City Index are the same firm, a person holding money with both is covered once up to £85,000, not twice. Retail client money is segregated under the FCA's CASS rules and held on trust, and disputes that the firm does not resolve can go to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Reclassifying as a professional client raises the leverage available to you and gives up those protections.
| Feature | US retail forex | UK and EU retail CFD | Where to confirm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Major currency pairs | 50:1 | 30:1 | NFA rulebook; ESMA Decision (EU) 2018/796 and FCA PS19/18 |
| Other currency pairs | 20:1 | 20:1 | Same sources |
| Cryptoasset derivatives | Varies by firm and may be unavailable | Not available to UK retail clients since 6 January 2021; 2:1 where ESMA rules apply | FCA PS20/10; your product list |
| Opposing positions in one account | Not permitted under NFA Rule 2-43(b) | Permitted | NFA Rule 2-43(b); your terms of business |
| Close-out order | Set by the firm | First-in, first-out offsetting; mandatory close-out at 50 percent of initial margin | Your customer agreement |
| Negative balance protection | Not mandated; check the agreement | Mandatory for retail clients | Your customer agreement; FCA Handbook |
| Incentives and bonuses | Not prohibited in these terms | Banned | FCA PS19/18 |
| Compensation scheme | None equivalent | FSCS up to £85,000 per eligible person per firm | FSCS; the FCA register entry |
| Counterparty entity | GAIN Capital Group LLC, NFA ID 339826 | StoneX Financial Ltd, FRN 446717 | NFA BASIC; FCA Financial Services Register |
The formula is simple. Required margin equals position size multiplied by the exchange rate, divided by the leverage ratio. A position of 100,000 units of EUR/USD at 1.1000 under 50:1 needs 110,000 divided by 50, which is $2,200. Under the UK and EU cap of 30:1 the same position needs about $3,667.
That is the whole of it, and it is also where the formula stops being useful. It assumes one position and no others. Under NFA Rule 2-43(b) you cannot net opposing tickets in the same account, so exposure behaves the way the offsetting rule says it does, not the way your spreadsheet says it does. Under the ESMA and FCA framework, the close-out obligation is calculated on the account, and a firm will typically close the worst performing positions first. The order in which positions are liquidated is set out in the terms, and it is your profit and loss in a fast market.
Neither figure tells you the probability of losing. The regime that caps leverage at 30:1 also requires firms to publish the share of their own retail accounts that lost money, which is the more honest number and the one worth reading before you look at margin at all.
The leverage ceiling tells you the largest position your account can carry. It does not tell you what size you should carry, and no regulator has ever claimed otherwise. The four enforcement actions above are the better guide to what you are actually choosing when you pick a counterparty, because they show what happens when a firm's own interest and yours diverge.
Every document referenced here is public and none of it takes long to read. Do that before you fund an account. The registers are free, they name the entity you are actually contracting with, and they list the cases that a marketing page will not.