Best Brokers With Low Leverage 2026

Author

Michael MacKenzie

Michael is a UK-based investment writer with over 10 years of experience in the journalism industry. Michael has critically evaluated many of the largest investment brokers in the UK.

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Editor

James Barra

James is a UK-based writer and investor with consultancy experience at some of Britain's largest financial organisations. James authors, edits and fact-checks content for a row of investing websites.

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Fact Checker

Tobias Robinson

Tobias is a UK director and partner at Investing.co.uk. He provides commentary on the financial markets in the UK and supports the testing team with first-hand observations from over two decades of active trading.

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Brokers with low leverage rates offer investors the opportunity to magnify the scale of their profits without exposing themselves to excessive risk. This supports sensible risk management and is well suited to beginner traders.

Dig into our list of the best UK brokers for low leverage, with insights into the size of margin trading opportunities and account safeguards.

How Investing.co.uk Chose the Top Low Leverage Trading Platforms

We only considered FCA-regulated brokers to ensure UK investor protection. We compared leverage policies on high-risk products like CFDs, recording maximum limits on major asset classes.

Platforms that offer conservative leverage options, risk tools, and transparent costs score best in our comprehensive testing process, with data verified through hands-on testing.

What To Look For In A Low Leverage Broker

Over decades of combined trading with leverage in the UK, our experts consider these to be the key features to look for in a low-leverage trading firm:

Trust

Trading with leverage means putting both your own and borrowed funds at risk, so you need to be able to rely on your broker.

Leverage trading will magnify your losses as well as gains. This leaves traders at high risk from unscrupulous brokers who use abusive or manipulative practices to their advantage.

That’s why we recommend registering with a broker that’s licensed by the FCA.

The FCA protects consumers trading on margin by:

• Requiring brokers to meet stringent standards and to submit to regular audits.
• Ensuring that brokers are registered with the Financial Services Compensation Scheme so up to £85,000 of each clients’ funds is protected in the case of business insolvency.
• Mandating consumer protections including segregated client funds and negative balance protection, which prevents traders’ losses from exceeding their account balance.
• Limiting the amount of leverage available to retail clients to a maximum of 1:30 on major forex pairs.

Flexible Leverage

Choose a broker that allows you to adjust the amount of leverage on offer so you will always be comfortable with your risk level.

Even if your FCA-regulated broker limits leverage on, say, stock trades to the required top level of 1:5, that’s still a considerable amount and can lead to heavy losses.

Having the choice of reducing this to 1:2 gives traders a lot more flexibility and, importantly, peace of mind.

eToro’s flexible leverage of 1x, 2x or 5x on an NVDA trade

I’m a big proponent of low-leverage trading. My philosophy is to aim for consistency rather than one-off big wins, and low leverage allows me to limit my risk and ensure that losses don’t wipe out my trading funds.

Michael MacKenzie

Author

Fees

Choose a broker with low fees so you can keep your gains from low-leverage trades.

Brokers implement a variety of charges, known as a cost model, across their services, which can quickly add up and chip away at profits.

These fees can come in many forms, but generally we’ve found that the spread – the difference between buy and sell prices – and sometimes flat-rate commissions are the most significant.

Besides these, some brokers also apply non-trading fees such as a charge on deposits and withdrawals, currency conversion fees, fees for accession data feeds and other research tools, and inactivity fees for accounts that remain idle for several months.

Deposits & Withdrawals

Consider brokers that offer convenient payment methods at competitive costs.

The most common payment forms include bank wire transfers, credit and debit payment cards and e-wallets such as PayPal. These will often come with varying fees and transaction times, but we’ve found that most good brokers provide free deposit options.

Instruments

You should sign up with a broker that provides access to the instruments you want to trade, whether these are forex pairs, CFDs, options, equities, futures, cryptocurrencies or something else.

We’ve found that major forex pairs like EUR/USD are a great place to start trading with leverage. These instruments tend to have high liquidity during predictable market hours, making it easier to get in and out of positions quickly at the desired price.

How Leverage Works

Leverage trading uses an initial stake deposit, known as a margin, to provide the investor with increased exposure to an underlying asset. The broker then takes on the remainder of the trade’s risk, which can be thought of as putting up the rest of the money for the trade.

This means that in practice you are putting down a small amount of the full value of the position and the rest is loaned to you by your broker. Your total profit or loss will be calculated based on the size of the entire position, not just on your margin.

Brokers with low leverage level offers will typically present them as a leverage ratio, such as 1:10. This denotes the ratio of your stake to the total position size. In this example, your position would be magnified by a scale of 10.

Below you can find the meaning of each of the key terms surrounding leverage:

• Margin – the percentage of the total position size put down by the trader
• Leverage Rate – the ratio of the investor’s stake to the total position size
• Buying Power – the total capital an investor can trade with, including leverage
• Coverage/Risk Ratio – the ratio of the net account balance to leveraged position size
• Margin Call – the minimum coverage level required to maintain the leveraged position. If this is exceeded, the broker will inform you that you are high risk due to an exposure greater than permitted by the firm
• Stop Out – the point at which the broker automatically closes orders because the required leverage amount has not been recovered, despite the margin call warnings. If leverage is still not recovered, the firm can close the investor’s portfolio

What Counts As ‘Low’ Leverage In Trading?

What counts as ‘low’ leverage is subjective and depends on your risk tolerance, trading experience and even the asset being traded. However, with some brokers offering to boost traders’ trading capital by hundreds or even thousands of times their initial outlay, we might think of anything below 1:30 (or 30x) as ‘low’.

For retail investors in the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) caps the amount of leverage available:

• 1:5 on individual stocks
• 1:10 on commodities except gold and non-major equity indices
• 1:20 on non-major currency pairs, major indices and gold
• 1:30 on major currency pairs

The range in leverage limits reflects differing levels of risk, with the most volatile (stocks) being afforded the lowest leverage.

Bottom Line

Choosing brokers with low leverage is important if you are looking to take advantage of margin trading without exposure to significant risk. Lower leverage can turn over larger profits than trading with just the cash you have, opening greater positions than otherwise affordable. However, it remains high-risk as you could still lose money – both gains and losses are multiplied.

See our list of the best UK brokers with low leverage to find the right provider for your needs.