Spread and Commission Calculator

How to use this calculator

The calculator asks you for four things: the currency pair, your position size in standard lots, the spread in pips, and the round-turn commission per lot. The account currency selector is fixed to USD, which matches how every UAE cost figure on this site is published. It opens on a worked example so the shape of a real trade is visible before any figures are changed. The default trade is EUR/USD at 1.00 standard lot, a spread of 0.20 pips and a commission of US$7.00 per lot round turn.

From those four inputs the calculator returns five figures: the value of one pip at 1.00 lot, the spread cost in dollars, the commission cost in dollars, the commission converted into pips, and the all-in cost in pips. The calculator accepts any position size. A mini lot is 0.10 and a micro lot is 0.01, and the maths scales the same way. If you want to explore pip values for different pairs without the spread and commission layers, our pip value calculator isolates that step.

Spread and commission are the same cost in different clothes

A raw or ECN account quotes a razor-thin spread and adds a separate dollar commission. A standard account quotes one wider spread and charges no commission. On the surface the two look like completely different pricing models, but they are really the same cost expressed in two different units. The calculator converts the commission into pips so the two account types can be compared directly.

In the default example, the spread of 0.20 pips on EUR/USD at 1.00 lot costs US$2.00, and the round-turn commission of US$7.00 adds another US$7.00, so your total round-turn cost is US$9.00. To see what that means in pips, the calculator divides the commission by the US$10.00 pip value, giving 0.70 pips. Add the spread back in and your all-in cost is 0.90 pips. A standard account would need to quote a spread below 0.90 pips on EUR/USD to be the cheaper choice.

In my opinion, the raw account suits a trader who wants to see the tightest possible spread and is comfortable with a separate commission line. If you value cost transparency, I would steer you toward a raw account. A standard account can feel simpler, but that simplicity comes at the cost of a wider spread. Our best forex brokers in the UAE list ranks brokers by their measured costs, so you can see at a glance which ones keep the all-in spread low. And once you have your all-in pips figure, you can plug it into our broker cost calculator to see the total cost over a month of trading.

There is no volume break-even, and that surprises people

A common piece of advice says a raw account only pays off once a certain monthly lot volume is reached. That advice is wrong for an account that charges a fixed dollar commission per lot alongside a spread. Both costs are linear in the number of lots, and neither has a fixed component. The account that is cheaper at one lot is cheaper at every lot size.

In the worked example the all-in cost is 0.90 pips. A standard account must quote below that figure to win. That break-even does not move if you trade 0.10 lots, 5 lots or 50 lots; the maths is the same. In my experience, this misunderstanding is repeated often, and the calculator makes it obvious once you see the numbers side by side. The break-even is a spread number, not a volume number.

What one pip is worth, and when a rate enters the sum

EUR/USD is quoted in US dollars, so in a USD account one pip on a standard lot is exactly US$10.00 with no conversion at all. Cross pairs such as EUR/GBP work differently. The pip value is first expressed in the quote currency, and the calculator converts it at an exchange rate that is dated on the page. Our exchange rates refresh daily, so every result that involves a cross pair carries the date of the rate that produced it. If you trade a cross pair, you will see that date alongside the result.

The account currency is USD, and the UAE dirham is pegged to the US dollar. A USD account needs no conversion and carries no rate-date caveat. An AED account is deliberately not offered, because every cost figure this site captures is published in USD.

When your broker quotes a spread in points, the distinction matters. On five-decimal pricing a point is the fifth decimal place and a pip is the fourth, so one pip equals ten points. A spread quoted as "6 points" is 0.6 pips. I always double-check the unit a broker uses, because entering 6 into the spread box where a pip figure belongs overstates the cost by a factor of ten.

Where these numbers come from

The spread and the commission are the two manual inputs. I chose to keep them as user inputs because only 4 of the 25 UAE-licensed brokers we track publish a per-lot commission. The other 21 publish nothing, so a calculator that pulls a broker's commission from our roster would work for 4 brokers and return nothing for the rest. The spread box is also a manual input, because spreads vary between account types and brokers, and keeping the control with the reader keeps the comparison accurate. That way, any spread a trader has been quoted can be paired with the commission their broker charges, and the calculator does the conversion. I think that is the only honest approach.

Our spread capture, which Noam Korbl leads, runs from a London VPS using IceFX SpreadMonitor across 8 currency pairs over a May to June 2026 window. That capture feeds the spread data shown on our lowest spread forex brokers page, but the calculator's spread box is not filled from that capture; the spread is typed in manually. The methodology behind that capture is detailed in how we test brokers.