Licensed Forex Brokers 2026

A licence and a “registration” are not the same thing

Both words appear in broker footers, often in the same sentence, and the difference between them is most of the protection you are trying to buy.

The practical test is blunt: does the number the broker publishes resolve, on a financial regulator's own website, to the entity you would be contracting with? If yes, you have a licence. If it resolves to a company registry, or to nothing, you have a registration and a marketing sentence.

The registers — where to check, per regulator

These are the regulators' own public registers, not third-party directories. The right-hand column counts how many brokers in our data record a licence from that regulator — it describes our coverage, not the regulator's size, and a zero is a fact about us rather than about them.

Register links checked 27 August 2026. Regulators reorganise their sites without notice; if one of these does not open a search page, go to the regulator's home page and navigate from there rather than trusting a link supplied by a broker. Deeper profiles of the European regulators are on our regulation hub.

Verify a licence in 60 seconds

Five steps. The first four take under a minute; the fifth happens later, at sign-up, and is the one that catches the entity switch.

1. 1

   Find the legal entity, not the brand

   The name at the top of the website is a brand. The name that matters sits in the footer, in the risk warning, and in the client agreement you tick to accept — usually something like “X Europe Ltd” or “X (UK) Limited”. That entity is the one you would be contracting with, and it is the only name worth searching.

2. 2

   Note the licence number the broker publishes

   A firm that is authorised knows its own number and prints it. If a site names a regulator but gives no number, you cannot complete this check — treat that as the answer rather than as a gap to fill in with goodwill.

3. 3

   Search the regulator's own register

   Open the register from the table above, in a new tab, typed or clicked from this page — not from a link inside the broker's site or an email. Search the entity name or the number. Cloned-firm fraud works by borrowing a real firm's real number, so arriving at the register independently is part of the check.

4. 4

   Read the entry, not just the fact it exists

   Three things: current status (authorised, and not “no longer authorised”); the permissions the firm actually holds, including whether it may hold client money; and the registered address and website. A mismatch on any of the three is a stop.

5. 5

   Confirm the entity that opens your account is the one you checked

   This is where most checks fall over. Complete the sign-up as far as the client agreement and read which entity is named. If it is a different company in a different jurisdiction from the one on the register, the protections you just verified are not the protections you would get.

Brokers you can open an account with here — with the numbers to check

These are the brokers we hold a live commercial arrangement with and that clear our compliance gate for a UK visitor. The regulator, licence number and contracting entity are printed so you can run the check above before you click anything. Everything shown comes from our broker record and our compliance matrix; nothing here is supplied by the broker.

The entity trap: same brand, different company

Brokers whose entity for this site is licensed offshore

Read straight out of our broker data for the site you are on. These are not accusations — they are the licences on record for the entity that would serve a visitor here, and the reason to read the client agreement carefully before funding.

Offshore registers exist, but they are generally thinner than the FCA or CySEC equivalents and harder to search. Two we have opened ourselves: the Seychelles FSA regulated entities — capital markets and the Securities Commission of The Bahamas registrant and licensee status. Where we have not opened a jurisdiction's register, we do not link one.

Every licence we hold on record

All 30brokers we cover, with the regulator names and licence numbers exactly as recorded in our broker data, for the entity that serves the site you are reading. Where a broker carries no link from us, the reason is eligibility or the absence of a commercial arrangement — not a judgement about the licence, which is stated either way so you can check it.

Licence numbers are transcribed from the brokers' own disclosures and re-checked against the registers on review. If you find one that does not resolve, tell us and we will correct it — our methodology sets out how records are sourced and updated.

What a licence buys you — and what it does not

One consequence worth stating plainly, because it is routinely inverted in marketing: deposit bonuses and similar inducements are prohibited for retail clients under the ESMA measures of 2018 and the FCA's permanent rules of 2019. An entity offering one to a European or UK retail client is telling you something about which regime it is operating under. That is a licence question, not a promotions question.

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