Nobody lied to you. The advertised spread and the spread you trade on are simply different numbers, and only one of them appears in the marketing.
What does a ‘from’ spread actually mean?
It means the tightest number observed, under the best conditions, on the most liquid instrument, at the busiest time of day.
It is a floor, not an average, and every word of that is disclosed if you read the small print. The advertising is technically accurate and practically misleading, which is a combination the industry has refined over decades.
The reason it persists is that there is no honest alternative single number. Spreads genuinely do vary, continuously, and a broker quoting one fixed figure would either be lying or charging you a premium for the certainty. So the complaint is not really that the number is a floor. It is that nobody publishes the distribution.
How wide does the gap actually get?
Wide enough to change the arithmetic of a strategy. Testing on a live funded raw-spread account at an FCA-regulated broker in July 2026 recorded EUR/USD at around 0.1 pips during the London session, the deepest and most competitive part of the day for that pair. During the US non-farm payrolls release the same instrument on the same account went to around 0.9 pips.
That is a ninefold move on the most liquid currency pair in the world. Not on an exotic, not on a thin instrument, not at a broker with a poor reputation. EUR/USD is the deepest book retail traders have access to, which makes it the best case rather than a representative one. The instruments people reach for when they want more movement, the minor crosses, the single stocks, the smaller indices, have a fraction of that depth to absorb the same release, and they widen further and stay wide longer.
| When you trade EUR/USD |
Spread behaviour |
Measured? |
Cost per standard lot |
| London session, normal conditions |
about 0.1 pips |
yes, recorded |
roughly 80p |
| Overlap with New York |
tight, deepest book of the day |
no |
low |
| During a scheduled release |
about 0.9 pips |
yes, recorded |
roughly GBP 7 |
| After the New York close |
widens, few participants |
no |
higher |
| Sunday reopen |
widest of the week, gaps common |
no |
highest |
Live funded raw-spread account, one FCA-regulated broker, July 2026. Only two of these five rows came off a statement. The other three are the received wisdom of anyone who has traded those hours, which is not the same thing at all, and they are flagged as such here because an article about distrusting unmeasured numbers ought to be willing to label its own.
Why does the timing matter more than the broker?
Because the variation within a single broker across the day is frequently larger than the variation between brokers at the same moment. Someone agonising over a 0.2 pip difference between two providers, then trading into a data release, has optimised the small term and ignored the large one. This is the practical inversion worth internalising. Choose the broker on its costs by all means, but the decision that moves your execution cost most is when you press the button. That decision is free, entirely yours, and almost never discussed in comparison content because there is nothing to sell alongside it.
Does a commission account solve it?
Partly, and in a useful way. On a raw-spread account the commission is fixed and the spread floats, so your cost has one stable component and one variable one. On a commission-free account the entire cost is inside the spread, which means the whole thing floats and you have less visibility into what you paid.
The same July 2026 testing put the raw-spread route at roughly GBP 5.30 all-in per standard lot in liquid hours against about GBP 8.00 on the commission-free account at the same broker.
Cheaper and more legible, for the price of an extra line on the statement. The commission-free version is the one that sounds better and costs more, which is a pattern that recurs across retail finance.
How can you check what you are really paying?
Stop reading the marketing and read your own statements. Take twenty completed round trips, add the spread cost and the commission on each, and divide by twenty. That is your actual average cost per trade at your broker, on your instruments, at the times you actually trade. It is the only number that describes you.
Almost nobody does this, which is why almost nobody knows what their trading costs. The figure is usually higher than the advertised floor and lower than the worst-case fear, and knowing it changes how you size positions. It takes about twenty minutes with a spreadsheet and your trade history.
Where does independent testing help?
It helps by producing numbers that came from somewhere you can point at. Ask a comparison of forex brokers serving UK traders where a quoted figure came from and the answer is a live account opened and funded with its own money to test a UK trading platform, rather than a ranking compiled from the provider’s published fee schedule. Somebody had already paid the spread before it was written down.
And where does it stop?
It does not help as much as anyone would like, and the reason is structural. A funded account measures one location, one connection, one set of instruments and one period. Spreads are a distribution and a tester samples it. A reading of 0.1 pips in London in July 2026 is a real observation, but it is an observation, and presenting it as the spread a reader will get is exactly the overreach the testing was meant to avoid.
So what is the honest summary?
Advertised spreads are floors. Real spreads are distributions with fat tails around scheduled events and thin sessions. Commission-bearing accounts usually cost less all-in than commission-free ones and show you more of the breakdown. And the timing of your trades is a bigger lever on cost than the identity of your broker.
None of that requires trusting anybody. It requires twenty minutes with your own trade history, which is the one dataset that is genuinely about you.
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