Forex Margin Calculator

Margin is a deposit, not a cost

The most common way to read a margin figure is as what the trade costs. It is not. Required margin is a slice of your own money that the platform holds while the position is open, and it is handed back when the position is closed — minus the result of the trade. It is a deposit against a position, in the same sense a deposit on a hire car is a deposit: the money is still yours, you just cannot spend it while the position is open.

What a trade costs is a different number built from different inputs. It is the stop distance multiplied by the money one pip is worth at the size you took, and neither of those contains leverage. This is why the figures on this page and the figures on a forex stop loss calculator do not move together: one describes the deposit, the other describes the loss, and a trade can be cheap to hold and expensive to lose, or the other way round.

The practical consequence is that a "small" margin number is not a small trade. Half a lot of EURUSD at 1.0850 is 50,000 units and 54,250 dollars of exposure. At 500:1 that exposure costs 108.50 dollars of margin, which looks like nothing — and it moves 5 dollars for every pip, which is not nothing on a two thousand dollar account. The deposit and the exposure are separated by the leverage, which is exactly what makes the deposit a bad thing to size from.

What leverage actually changes

Leverage sets the exchange rate between margin and exposure. At 100:1, one dollar of margin carries 100 dollars of position; at 30:1 it carries 30. That is the whole of it. It does not touch the money a pip is worth, it does not touch the distance to your stop, and it does not touch the percentage of the account you decided to risk.

Here is the part that surprises people, and it is visible in the table above: at a fixed size, higher leverage gives you more room, not less. Half a lot on a ten thousand dollar account survives 1,695 pips at 30:1 and 1,982 pips at 500:1. The reason is straightforward: the stop-out fires on the ratio of equity to used margin, and higher leverage uses less margin, so that ratio starts higher and has further to fall.

That is not an argument for high leverage, and the same table shows why. On a one thousand dollar account, that half lot cannot be opened at all at 30:1 — it needs 1,808 dollars of margin and there is 1,000 in the account, so the order is refused. At 500:1 it opens with 179 pips of room. The leverage did not make the position safer; it made an otherwise impossible position possible, and the room that came with it is 179 pips on a pair that can do that in a morning. What leverage buys is access to size. The size is what eats the runway.

The clean way to see it is to hold the account still and change only the size. Two thousand dollars, 500:1, same pair: at 0.10 lots you have 1,982 pips of room; at 2.00 lots you have 78. Twenty times the position, one twenty-fifth of the distance. Nothing about the leverage changed. The deposit did not change what the trade risks — it changed what the trade was allowed to be.

The stop-out is a ratio, not a dollar amount

Margin level is equity divided by used margin, written as a percentage. That is the number the platform watches, and it has two ways of falling: the numerator can drop, or the denominator can rise. Losing money drops equity. Opening a position raises used margin. Both move you towards the same threshold, and only one of them involves being wrong about the market.

This is why free margin is not money you have. Free margin is equity minus used margin, and spending all of it on one more position takes the margin level to its floor — at 100%, to the floor exactly. Fill the account with margin and you can be closed out on a position that has not moved against you at all, simply because there is no equity left above the deposit. The third tool above shows how much size that is, and it is worth running once with the target set to 100% just to see the number, then running it again at 200% or 300%.

Used margin can also rise without you opening anything. Whether it does depends on how the platform recalculates, which is why that is a field on the second tool rather than an assumption. If required margin is recomputed at the current price, a position's deposit is rebuilt on every tick, and the deposit moves with the price.

Two distances, and only one of them is yours

Every trade has two distances and they are measured from the same point. One is the distance to your stop: the level where the reason for the trade is gone, which you chose from the chart. The other is the distance to the stop-out: the point where the margin level reaches the threshold the platform set, which you did not choose and cannot negotiate at the moment it arrives.

If the second is shorter than the first, the platform decides when the trade ends. That is the whole reason this page exists, and it is the number nobody prints. A calculator that tells you the margin required for a position has answered a deposit question; it has not told you how much of the move you are allowed to sit through.

Take the second row of the table: two thousand dollars, half a lot, 30:1, forty pips of room. Put a fifty pip stop on that trade and the two distances are in the wrong order. The position is closed at just under forty pips, for about 198 dollars, and the trade is over ten pips before the level that was supposed to end it. Note what that means: the loss is smaller than the 250 dollars you planned, so the stop-out is not the thing that blows accounts up on its own. What it takes is the trade. You paid for a position that was closed by an arithmetic threshold rather than by the market doing what you said would prove you wrong — and it closed at the worst point of the move, which is the only point a stop-out ever happens at.

The fix is not a better leverage setting. It is either a smaller position, which lengthens the stop-out distance without touching the risk, or more equity against the same position, which does the same thing. Both are visible in the second tool: change the volume and watch the distance, then change the balance and watch it again.

Longs and shorts are not symmetric

On a long, price moving against you means price falling, and a falling price makes the position worth less in the quote currency — so if the platform recomputes the deposit at the current price, the used margin on that long shrinks as you lose. On a short the same arithmetic runs the other way: price rising against you makes the position worth more, so the deposit grows while the equity shrinks. Both ends of the ratio move the wrong way at once.

The size of the effect depends on the leverage, because the leverage decides how much of the position's value is sitting in the deposit. On the ten thousand dollar half lot at 30:1, the short has 1,586 pips of room against the long's 1,695 — about six percent less. At 500:1 the gap is under half a percent, because the deposit is too small to matter. It is a second-order effect, and it is the direction that matters: of the two, the short is always the one with less room.

The leverage you are actually running is a different number

The leverage on your account is a ceiling; the leverage in your position is exposure divided by equity, and it is usually far below the ceiling. Half a lot of EURUSD at 1.0850 is 54,250 dollars of exposure. On a ten thousand dollar account that is 5.4:1. On a hundred thousand dollar account it is 0.54:1. The account says 100:1 in both cases and neither position uses it.

That figure — printed by the first tool as "leverage you are actually running" — is the honest measure of how loaded the account is, because it is built from what is open rather than from what would be allowed. Summed across positions it is also the number that turns into a stop-out distance: at 5.4:1 there is room, at 30:1 there is very little, and the difference between them is entirely a question of size, not of settings.

What this page does not assume

No leverage. No stop-out level, and no margin call level — both are set by the platform and the account type, so both are fields here rather than numbers this page states. No contract size, no pip size, no currency rate and no prices: every one is a field, and there is no market feed behind this site.

No hedging or netting rules. Platforms differ in what they charge margin on when positions offset or oppose each other — some net them, some charge the larger side, some charge the sum. That is a broker setting this page cannot see, so the tools work one position at a time, with optional fields for the margin and the per-pip cost of anything else you are carrying. If your platform nets, the distance it gives you is an understatement of the room you have; if it charges the sum, fill the two extra fields in and it is close.

No advice about what leverage to use, or what stop-out level is safe, or how much of an account should be in margin. Those are decisions about your account and your strategy, and the honest function of a calculator is to make the arithmetic of them visible rather than to make them for you.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate margin in forex?

Work out the position value in your account currency — units times the price, converted at the rate if the quote currency is not your account currency — and divide it by the leverage. Half a lot of EURUSD at 1.0850 with a 100,000 contract size is 50,000 units, worth 54,250 dollars, so at 100:1 the margin is 542.50. The first tool above computes it from your own contract size, price, rate and leverage rather than assuming any of them.

What is margin level?

Equity divided by used margin, as a percentage. It is the ratio the platform watches, and the stop-out triggers when it falls to the level your account has set. Because it is a ratio, it can fall from either side: losses shrink the equity on top, and opening positions grows the margin underneath.

What is free margin?

Equity minus used margin. It is the room between where you are and the stop-out, not cash available to spend — using all of it takes the margin level to its floor. The first tool prints it, and the third tool shows what spending it buys in lots.

At what margin level does a broker close my positions?

Whatever level your platform and account type have set, and it differs between them, which is why it is an input on this page rather than a number printed here. Read it from your account terms or ask the broker directly. The stop-out level is often not the same as the margin call level — one is a warning, the other closes positions — and only the second one ends trades.

Does leverage change how much I can lose?

No. The loss is the stop distance multiplied by the money a pip is worth at your size, and leverage appears in neither. What leverage changes is the deposit, and through the deposit, how far price can travel before the platform closes the position for you. Two accounts with the same size and the same stop lose the same money; the one with the smaller deposit loses it earlier.

How many pips until a margin call?

It depends on four things you have to supply: equity, position size, leverage and the level your platform closes at. The second tool above takes all four and returns the distance in pips, the price it lands at, the money it costs and how it compares with the stop you planned. There is no single answer that works without those numbers, and any page that gives you one is guessing at three of them.

Does my stop loss affect the margin I need?

No, and this is worth being clear about because the two are easy to confuse. Margin is built from the position value and the leverage; the stop distance appears nowhere in it. A twenty pip stop and a two hundred pip stop on the same size need exactly the same deposit. What the stop changes is the money at risk, which is why the same margin number can sit next to two completely different amounts of risk.

Why was my order refused for insufficient margin?

Because the deposit the position needs was larger than the free margin you had. The first tool above flags this before you send the order: it compares the required margin against the free margin and says so. The usual cause is a position that is large relative to the equity behind it, and the usual fixes are a smaller size or more equity — not a higher leverage, which only moves the line you are already standing on.

Is margin the same as risk?

No. Margin is what the platform holds while the trade is open and returns afterwards. Risk is what the trade costs if it goes against you to the stop. They are built from different inputs, they move for different reasons, and a position can be large in one and small in the other. The lot size calculator works out the size from the risk side; this page works out what the platform takes while that size is open.

Is an fx margin calculator different from a forex margin calculator?

No. fx margin calculator, forex margin calculator and margin calculator forex are three ways of asking for the same three numbers: the margin a position needs, the margin level it leaves you at, and how far price can run before the platform closes it. All three are above. The wording people search with varies; the arithmetic behind it does not.

Is this a leverage calculator?

It is the other direction of one. A leverage calculator takes a position and tells you what leverage you are running; this page takes the leverage as something you already have on the account and tells you what it does to the margin, to the margin level and to the distance before a stop-out. If what you want is the effective leverage on a position you already hold, divide the position value by the equity behind it — that is the number that matters, and it is rarely the same as the headline figure on the account.

Do I need my broker's own margin calculator instead?

For the exact deposit on your account, use theirs. A broker's calculator already knows that firm's contract sizes, its margin rates and whether the account nets or hedges, and those three decide the answer — which is exactly why this page asks you for them instead of assuming them.

What this page adds is the part a deposit calculator does not give you: where your margin level sits once the position is open, how many pips of adverse movement the account can absorb before a forced close, and how much room is left for the next one. Those are the same inputs, answered from the other side of the order ticket.

The per-pip figure every tool on this page leans on comes from the pip calculator, and the stop distance it compares against is measured by the forex stop loss calculator. If the size is going into MetaTrader, the MT4 lot size calculator brings it onto the volume step the platform accepts. Instruments without a standard contract size have their own pages: XAUUSD, US30 and BTCUSD.