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.

Margin call and stop out — two levels, and the pips between them

The two get typed together as a pair, usually with numbers attached: margin call stop out level 50 20, stop out level 20, margin call level calculator, stop out level calculator. Most of what comes back from those searches is platforms quoting their own settings, which is the wrong place to learn what the settings do. This page cannot tell you what yours are and does not guess: both levels are fields on the second tool, not numbers printed here.

What it can do is measure the gap, because the gap is a distance and it is almost never written down. A margin call level and a stop-out level are two thresholds on the same ratio — equity divided by used margin. Cross the first and the account is in a state the platform flags; what that state actually does to you is the platform's business, and it is not the same everywhere. Cross the second and positions are closed. Only one of the two ends a trade, and the pips between them are the part of the move where the trade is still yours.

What is the difference between a margin call and a stop out?

One is a line you cross and hear about. The other is a line you cross and get closed at. They are the same measurement taken twice, at two settings, and the call level is the higher of the two — if the stop-out fired first, the call would have nothing to announce. What happens at the call level is where this page stops: some platforms refuse new positions while the account is under it, some only send a message, and some do both at different levels. None of that is assumed here.

Here is the ladder on one position, and it is worth reading as three separate stop-outs rather than as one event. Two thousand dollars of equity, half a lot of EURUSD at 1.0850, 100:1, margin fixed at the entry price: the margin level is 368.66% and the position moves five dollars a pip. The 100% level is 291.50 pips away, at 1.05585, and getting there costs 1,457.50 USD — 72.88% of the equity. The 50% level is 345.75 pips away, at 1.05042, costing 1,728.75 USD, or 86.44%. The 20% level is 378.30 pips away, at 1.04717, costing 1,891.50 USD, or 94.58%. Take the last column in: by the time the deepest of the three fires, almost all of the account is gone, and the three rungs sit within 86.80 pips of each other.

Run the same three with the margin recalculated as price moves — the default on the tool, and the setting the rest of this page uses — and they land at 294.44, 347.49 and 379.06 pips. The window between 100% and 50% becomes 53.04 pips instead of 54.25. That difference is what the platform's choice is worth, and it is small next to everything else in this section.

How wide is the window, and what decides it?

Not the size, and that is the part nobody expects. The table below holds the account, the pair and the leverage still and changes only the position. The distance to the first rung collapses from 1,891.50 pips to 91.50 as the size goes up tenfold. The window between the two rungs does not move at all.

Two thousand dollars of equity, EURUSD at 1.0850, 100:1, 100,000 units per lot, pip size 0.0001, account currency the same as the quote currency, long, margin fixed at the entry price. Distances in pips. Change any of those on the second tool and the whole ladder moves — the window column is the one that refuses to.

So size decides how far you are standing from the edge, and it does not decide how wide the ledge is. Read the last column before that feels like good news: the window is the same 54.25 pips at every size, and sitting through it costs 54.25 dollars at the smallest size and 542.50 dollars at the largest. The same ledge, ten times the price of standing on it.

What does move the window is the leverage, and it moves it the wrong way. Same position, three leverages:

Half a lot, two thousand dollars of equity, everything else as above. At 500:1 the account is a long way from every rung — 378.30 pips of room to the first one — and the ledge it lands on is 10.85 pips wide. At 30:1 the ledge is 180.83 pips wide and the account starts 38.33 pips from the top of it. Higher leverage buys distance and spends width, and width is the part you use.

Does adding money widen it?

No, and this is the most useful thing on this page to know before it matters. Adding equity pushes every rung further away by exactly the same number of pips, because the exchange rate between dollars and pips here is one divided by the money a pip is worth: at five dollars a pip, a thousand dollars buys two hundred pips, wherever you are on the ladder. Both rungs move, so the gap between them does not.

Half a lot at 1:100, everything else as above. A thousand dollars buys two hundred pips on both columns at once, which is why the third column does not move.

The reason is visible in the arithmetic rather than in the table. With the margin fixed, the gap between two levels in pips is the difference between the levels, times the price and the currency rate, divided by the leverage and the pip size. The balance is not in that expression, and neither is the size. Half a level, at 1.0850, on 100:1 with a 0.0001 pip, is 54.25 pips — on a two thousand dollar account and on a two million dollar one, at a tenth of a lot and at ten. It is set by three things, and you chose two of them when you picked the broker and the pair.

What that leaves is this: the distance to the edge is yours to change, and the width of the ledge largely is not. Size and equity lengthen the runway. The levels are handed to you, and the leverage you accepted decides how much of the warning you get to use. The other distance in the same trade — the one from your entry to the stop you chose — is measured by the forex stop loss calculator, and the shorter of the two is the one that ends the trade. This page does not tell you which pair of levels to accept, or what to do in the window — only how many pips the window is, before you need to know.

What this section does not assume

• Neither level. The margin call level and the stop-out level are settings on your account and platform. Every number above is a distance to a level you typed, not to a level this page knows.
• What the margin call does to you. Whether it blocks new orders, only sends a message, or both at different levels is a platform rule. The window is measured here as a distance, not as a set of permissions.
• Which position gets closed. The largest loser, the oldest, the one with the biggest margin, or everything at once — platforms differ, and the tools here work one position at a time.
• Whether the close is partial. Some platforms close enough to lift the level back above it and leave the rest running, which means the same level can be reached twice. Nothing above models a second pass.
• The price you get closed at. The level is a trigger, not a fill. Positions are closed at market once it is touched, and a gap can put the fill far below the level that fired it. The losses in this section are the arithmetic at the level, which is the best case.

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.

Leverage and lot size — one sentence, two different questions

The two get typed together so often that they read as one thing: leverage and lot size, leverage vs lot size, is leverage and lot size the same thing. They are not, and the useful part is not that they differ — it is that they differ in a direction most explanations skip. Leverage does not decide the size you should take. It decides the largest size you can take, and that number is a different number with a different purpose.

Is leverage and lot size the same thing?

No. Lot size is the quantity you are trading — 0.40 lots of EURUSD is 40,000 units, about 43,400.00 USD of exposure at 1.0850. Leverage is the exchange rate between that exposure and the deposit the platform holds against it: at 1:100 the same position needs 434.00 USD of margin, at 1:30 it needs 1,446.67 USD. One is a quantity, the other is a ratio. Only one of them appears in the arithmetic that decides what the trade risks.

What is the difference between leverage and lot size?

Lot size is an output of your risk; leverage is a property of your account. The size comes from the risk budget divided by what one lot risks at your stop distance, and leverage is nowhere in that equation. The leverage enters afterwards, as the thing that turns whatever size you chose into a deposit. So the two numbers move independently: the same 0.40 lots needs 434.00 USD at 1:100 and 1,446.67 USD at 1:30, and the same 1:100 gives a deposit of 434.00 USD at 0.40 lots and 9,992.85 USD at 9.21. Neither figure tells you what the other should be.

Does leverage affect lot size?

Not the one you should take — and yes, the largest one you can open, which is a different number and a much larger one. Both are computed on this page. Take a 10,000.00 USD account on EURUSD at 1.0850, 100,000 units per lot, no other positions open:

The ceiling column is the third tool above run at a 100% margin level — the largest volume that keeps the ratio at the stop-out line. Read the last column before you read the second. The largest size your leverage allows is, by definition, the size with no room left. It is the volume that puts the margin level exactly on the threshold: 9.21 lots at 1:100 has 0.1 pips of adverse movement in it, and 46.08 lots at 1:500 has none. One tick and the position is closed, at the worst point of the move, which is the only point a stop-out ever happens at.

The middle column is the size the risk equation gives, and it is the same at every leverage because leverage is not in it. Run that size through the second tool and the distance is not a rounding error away from the ceiling's: 0.40 lots has 2,212.1 pips of room at 1:30, 2,415.7 at 1:100 and 2,483.3 at 1:500. Same three leverages, same position, and the gap between 0.1 pips and 2,415.7 pips is entirely a question of which of the two questions you asked.

What is the relationship between leverage and lot size?

This: leverage sets a ceiling, risk sets a size, and the ceiling is not a target. Raise the leverage and the ceiling rises with it — at a 300% margin level the same account allows 0.92 lots at 1:30, 3.07 at 1:100 and 15.36 at 1:500, against the same 0.40 the risk equation gives. What did not move is the size you should take; what moved is how far above it you are permitted to go.

That gap is the whole risk of a high leverage setting, and it is worth naming precisely. Leverage does not make a correct size bigger. It makes an incorrect size enterable, and it makes the incorrect size enormous — 23 times the right one at 1:100, 115 times at 1:500 — while the leverage itself appears nowhere in the arithmetic that would have told you the size was wrong. If you want the size that belongs to your stop and your budget, work it out on the lot size calculator first and bring it here afterwards. Coming at it the other way round means asking the deposit a question it cannot answer.

What this section does not assume

• No risk percentage and no stop distance. The 0.40 in the table is 1% of a 10,000.00 USD account behind a 25 pip stop. Change either and that column moves; the ceiling column does not.
• No volume step and no maximum volume. The ceilings are brought down onto a 0.01 step and onto no broker limit. Yours may be coarser, and most symbols carry a maximum volume that lands well below the ceiling.
• No other open positions. Every figure assumes nothing else is running. Margin already used by other positions eats the ceiling before this one reaches it, and the second and third tools take that as an input.
• No hedging or netting rule. What a platform charges margin on when positions offset or oppose each other is a broker setting, and it moves the ceiling in both directions.
• No recommendation about which leverage to use. The table shows what each setting permits and what it costs in room. Which of them to run is your decision, and the honest function of the arithmetic is to make it visible rather than to make it.

Margin vs leverage — one equation, and three numbers that share the name

margin vs leverage, margin and leverage in trading, is margin and leverage the same, difference between margin and leverage with example — these get typed as though margin and leverage were two rival things and a trader had to pick one. They are not rivals, and they are not the same thing either. Required margin is exposure divided by leverage, which makes them two ends of one equation: leverage is the rate, margin is the amount the rate produces. Move the rate and the amount moves with it. Nothing else does.

Is margin and leverage the same thing?

No, and the table shows which half of the trade belongs to which word. All three rows are the same position: 0.50 lots of EURUSD at 1.0850, a 100,000 contract size, 50,000 units, on a 10,000.00 USD account with nothing else open.

The exposure is $54,250.00 in every row and the units are 50,000 in every row. The money one pip is worth is fixed by the size alone — the pip calculator works it out without asking for leverage, because leverage is not in it. The only column that actually changed is how much of your own money the platform fenced off. That is what leverage is for and that is all it is for: it sets the size of the fence, never the size of the field.

Which is the reason to be suspicious of the last column. It reads like a safety score, and it moved by more than sixteen times while the trade sat still. A margin level is equity over used margin, so shrinking the deposit by raising the leverage inflates the ratio — the number improved because the denominator got smaller, not because anything about the position got safer.

What is the difference between margin and leverage?

Leverage is a property of the account, and it does not move while you hold. Margin is a property of the position, and it can: it is rebuilt from the price wherever the platform recomputes it, which is why a short's deposit grows as the price rises against it while the setting on the account sits unchanged. Both directions are set out in Longs and shorts are not symmetric above. One of the two numbers can change on its own during a trade; the other cannot, and the one that moves is the one the stop-out watches.

How is margin calculated in forex?

Four steps, of which the third is the one the formula people pass around leaves out.

1. Units. Lots times the contract size: 0.50 times 100,000 is 50,000 units of the base currency.
2. Value in the quote currency. Units times the price: 50,000 units at 1.0850 is $54,250.00.
3. Convert into your account currency. Multiply by the rate between the quote currency and yours. On a dollar account trading EURUSD that rate is 1, which is the only case where this step is invisible.
4. Divide by the leverage. $54,250.00 over 100 is $542.50.

Drop the third step and you have the shortcut — units divided by leverage — and it gives the right answer on exactly one family of pairs. Both rows below are 0.50 lots with a 100,000 contract size at 1:100:

The second row is a cross pair quoted in a currency that is not the account currency: 50,000 units at 190.00 is $9,500,000.00 of yen, and 0.0066 turns that into $62,700.00 of exposure before the leverage is applied. The shortcut has nowhere to put the conversion, so it quietly skips it — and it errs in the direction that flatters the number. It understates the deposit, which means an order can look affordable by 127.00 and be refused anyway. The same four steps with a different contract size are how metals are margined: gold's is 100 troy ounces to the lot, and what that does to the deposit as the metal moves is set out on the XAUUSD page.

What is the difference between margin level and free margin?

Platforms print both, in the same panel, and they are not two views of one thing. Free margin is equity minus used margin: a number in your account currency. Margin level is equity divided by used margin: a ratio, with no currency in it at all. The stop-out fires on the second one. The first one is the one that looks reassuring.

The free margin column is the same all the way down, and that is not a coincidence. Free margin is the distance to a 100% margin level measured in money: the ratio reaches one when equity has fallen to the used margin, and the gap between those two is the free margin exactly. So the dollars carry no information about how close you are. What differs is how much of the account that fall represents — 66.67% of equity in the first row, 10.00% in the last. The same $1,000.00 of room is two thirds of one account and a tenth of another, and only the ratio tells you which.

The reverse is just as lopsided. Three accounts sitting on the same ratio:

One ratio, and the room behind it runs from $500.00 to $10,000.00. Neither figure answers the question alone: the level says how close you are, the free margin says how large the thing is that is close. This page prints both for that reason, and the third tool above works from a target level rather than from a dollar amount, because the level is the one that ends trades.

Used margin, the third of the names, is the part of the equity already fenced off — by this position once it is open, and by every other one still running. It is the only one of the three you can raise without the market doing anything at all. Opening a position lifts it, and on its own that can carry the ratio down to the threshold. Losing money is not required.

What this section does not assume

• No stop-out level. The 100% line in the third table is there to make the arithmetic visible. The level your account closes at is set by the platform and the account type, and it is a field on the second tool rather than a number this page states.
• Used margin is held still while equity falls. That is what makes the dollar distance equal to the free margin. Where a platform recomputes the deposit at the current price, the used margin travels with the price too, and the fall required is no longer exactly the free margin.
• No currency rate from a feed. The 0.0066 in the GBPJPY row was typed into a field to show what the third step does. There is no market data behind this site — put your own rate in.
• No floating profit or loss. Every figure in these tables assumes equity equals balance. Open profit raises the equity and with it the margin level, and it takes both back the instant the position is closed.
• No recommendation about which leverage to run. The first table shows what each setting does to the deposit and to the ratio. Which of them to use is your decision, and the arithmetic here only makes the trade-off visible rather than making it.

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. It is also the dollar distance to a 100% margin level, which is why the same free margin can mean two very different things — the table in margin level and free margin below shows four accounts with $1,000.00 of it.

What is margin and leverage in trading?

Two readings of the same arrangement. Leverage is the rate at which your deposit is converted into exposure — 1:100 means one dollar of margin carries 100 dollars of position. Margin is the amount of your own money the platform holds against that position while it is open. Required margin is the exposure divided by the leverage, so the two are not competing ideas: one is the rate, the other is what the rate produces.

Is margin and leverage the same?

No. Leverage is a setting on the account and it does not move while a trade is open. Margin is an amount attached to a position and it can move, because it is rebuilt from the price wherever the platform recomputes it. Half a lot of EURUSD at 1.0850 is $54,250.00 of exposure at every leverage there is; what changes is only the deposit — $1,808.33 at 1:30, $542.50 at 1:100, $108.50 at 1:500. Same trade, three fences.

What is the difference between margin and leverage?

Margin answers "how much of my money is tied up", in your account currency. Leverage answers "at what rate is it tied up", as a ratio. They fail in different directions too: a margin figure tells you nothing about the size of the position behind it, and a leverage figure tells you nothing about how much of the account is already committed. The pair of them still misses the number that ends trades, which is the margin level.

What is the difference between free margin and used margin?

Used margin is the part of your equity the platform is holding against open positions; free margin is what is left — equity minus used margin. They move for completely different reasons. Losing money lowers free margin without touching used margin, and opening a position raises used margin and lowers free margin by the same amount without the market moving at all. Only the second of those two is under your control at the moment you place an order.

What is the margin level calculation formula?

Equity divided by used margin, times 100. Equity is the balance plus any floating profit or loss on open positions; used margin is the total deposit held against everything running. On a 10,000.00 USD account with 9,000.00 USD used, the level is 111.11%. That is the figure the platform compares against its stop-out level, and because it is a ratio it can fall from either end — the equity dropping, or the used margin rising.

How do I calculate used 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 — divide it by the leverage, and add the result to whatever margin other open positions are already using. Half a lot of GBPJPY at 190.00 on a dollar account is 50,000 units, $9,500,000.00 of yen, $62,700.00 of exposure at 0.0066, and $627.00 of margin at 1:100. The shortcut of dividing the units by the leverage skips the conversion and returns $500.00 instead.

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.

What is the difference between a margin call and a stop out?

One is a level you cross and get warned at; the other is a level you cross and get closed at. Both are thresholds on the same ratio — the margin level, equity divided by used margin — and the call sits above the stop-out, because a warning that fired after the closing would have nothing to announce. On the position used in the section above, a 100% level was 291.50 pips away and a 50% level was 345.75 pips away, so the window between them was 54.25 pips. What the call actually does to your account while you are in it is a platform rule, and this page states none of them.

What does a stop out level of 20 mean?

It means the stop-out fires when equity has fallen to 20% of the margin being held — a margin level of 20%. Whose 20% is the part that matters: the figure shows up in search because platforms publish their own, so it is an input on the second tool here rather than a number this page prints. Read it off your account terms, enter it, and read the distance. On the half lot of EURUSD used above, a 20% level sat 378.30 pips away and reaching it cost 1,891.50 USD of the 2,000.00 USD in the account — 94.58% of the equity, gone before the position was closed for you.

What happens between a margin call and a stop out?

The trade is still open, still losing, and still yours: you can close it, reduce it, or put money in. What you cannot count on is opening anything new — whether orders are refused above the call level is a platform rule, and it is not the same everywhere. The window is measured in pips as the difference between the two distances: 54.25 pips on that half lot at 100:1, 180.83 at 1:30 and 10.85 at 1:500. That last one is under eleven pips of warning, which is what high leverage does to it.

Can I avoid a stop out by adding money?

It moves the stop-out further away and it does not make the warning any longer. At five dollars a pip, a thousand dollars buys two hundred pips of distance to every level at once — the 100% level goes from 291.50 to 491.50 pips, the 50% level from 345.75 to 545.75, and the gap between them stays 54.25. A deposit is how you buy runway. The width of the ledge is set by the leverage and the pair, not by the balance.

Does the platform close all my positions at a stop out?

Not necessarily, and which one it closes changes what happens next. Some close the position losing the most, some the oldest, some everything at once, and some close only enough to lift the margin level back above the line and leave the rest running — which means the same level can be reached a second time. The tools here work one position at a time and assume none of those rules. Read yours off the account terms, then run the second tool on the position you think would be closed first.

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.