Forex Margin Calculator

Three margin numbers, and which one closes trades

Required margin is what the broker takes to open the position. Free margin is what is left for the next idea. Neither of those stops anything. The maintenance requirement is the third figure — the level your equity is not allowed to fall below while the position is open — and it is the one that turns into liquidation.

The last two lines are what this page adds to the usual margin box. A platform that shows "margin required: 3,666.67" is answering whether the ticket will be accepted. A platform that shows "816.67 pips before anything closes" is answering whether you can survive being wrong — and those answers are not proportional, because pip value grows with the size while equity does not.

Brokers set the maintenance rate themselves and some express it as a percentage of notional rather than of initial margin; the field above takes it as a share of the initial margin, which is the common retail form, and 50% is the usual default. Check the figure in your own account terms before trusting the distance.

Worked example: one lot of EUR/USD on a 10,000 account

Equity 10,000.00 USD, no other trades open, EUR/USD at 1.1000, one standard lot, broker offering 1:30, maintenance set at 50% of initial margin. Each row below is one operation you can repeat by hand.

The jump from row five to row six is the one people miss. A margin level of 272.73% looks comfortable, and it is — measured against the initial margin. Measured against the maintenance line, the account can absorb 8,166.67, which is four fifths of the balance but only 0.0817 of price on this pair. Both statements are true at once, and the second one is the one that decides whether a losing week ends with the position still open.

Check it forward: EUR/USD falling 816.67 pips from 1.1000 lands at 1.0183. Equity there is 10,000.00 - 8,166.67 = 1,833.33, which is exactly the maintenance line — where the call fires. Any tick beyond that and the broker decides what happens next, not you.

Nothing in that arithmetic changes if the entry is long or short: the notional, the margin and the pip value are the same either way, and only the direction of the adverse move differs.

What adding size does to the distance

Here is the part that surprises people. Doubling your size doubles the pip value but leaves the equity unchanged, so the number of pips you can survive falls faster than the size grows. Run the same EUR/USD example at five different lot counts and the pattern is unmistakable.

The last row deserves a second look, because it is the largest position this account can open at all. Free margin there is 26.67 — a rounding error against a 10,000.00 balance — and any adverse tick starts eating into the buffer immediately. It also means that on this account and this pair, the practical ceiling on size is set by margin, not by preference: 300,000.00 of notional at 1:30 is 2.7272 lots, which rounds down to the 1,000-unit step at 2.72.

Notice too that none of these five rows changes your stop or your risk budget. A 30-pip stop on the 2.72-lot row risks 816.00, while the same stop on the half-lot row risks 150.00. Margin decided which of them you were allowed to place; only the stop and the budget decide which of them you should have. That calculation lives in the forex position size calculator, and the two of them used together are what keeps the answer honest.

One lot does not cost the same on every pair

Contract size is uniform across forex at 100,000 units, so you might expect every standard lot to tie up the same margin. It does not: the notional depends on which currency you are actually holding, and the pip value depends on how that pip is quoted. Five pairs below, one lot each, same account.

The three USD-quoted pairs have identical pip values and near-identical distance in pips, and the whole difference between them comes from the base currency's price: 60,000.00 against 125,000.00 of notional for the same lot count. A rule written as "I trade one lot" is therefore a different size of bet on each of those three pairs before you consider anything else.

The two yen rows are the interesting pair. USD/JPY holds exactly 100,000.00 of notional whatever the price does, because the units being bought are dollars — its margin is fixed at 3,333.33 until you close it. EUR/JPY carries the conversion the whole way through, and its pip value is quoted in yen before being carried into dollars, which is why both rows show 6.67 per pip against 10.00 on the dollar-quoted pairs. Compare distance in pips across those two groups and you are comparing different-sized units; compare it in price, as the last column does, and the comparison makes sense.

Practical consequence: if you are choosing between pairs with the same stop distance in pips, the cheaper one in margin is the one with the lower base-currency price, and the one with more room is the one whose pip value in your currency is smaller. Neither of those is visible in a platform dialogue that reports a lot count as "1".

The 67 forex contracts, as published

The complete forex block from the contract specification file that ships with this site, reproduced exactly as published — no rounding, no reordering, no symbols omitted. These are the defaults the calculator above reads when you pick a pair, and they are what every number on this page was derived from.

Read for margin purposes, those 67 rows sort into three behaviours, and knowing which group a pair sits in tells you how its margin will behave while the trade is open.

Twenty-one rows hold exactly 100,000.00 of notional, always. Every pair with USD as the base currency — USD/JPY through USD/KRW in the block above — represents 100,000 dollars of exposure regardless of where the price goes. Their required margin does not drift as the market moves, because there is nothing to convert. Their pip value does move, though: on USD/JPY it is contract size times pip size divided by the price, so the same lot is worth slightly fewer dollars per pip at 155.00 than at 150.00.

Four rows need no conversion and reprice as they move. AUD/USD, EUR/USD, GBP/USD and NZD/USD are quoted in dollars, so notional is units times price — and every tick changes both the notional and the margin tied to it, in the way the worked example shows. The other sixty-three rows either never change or need a rate you supply.

Forty-two rows are crosses, and six of those quote in yen. For a cross, the notional arrives in a third currency and has to be carried into your account's currency at a rate that only you can supply — the calculator will not guess one, because a guessed rate produces a guessed margin figure and a guessed distance to the call. The six yen crosses are EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY, AUD/JPY, CAD/JPY, CHF/JPY and NZD/JPY. USD/JPY is not among them even though it quotes in yen, because there USD is the base currency: it belongs to the twenty-one above, where nothing has to be converted. Seven rows carry a pip size of 0.01 — those six plus USD/JPY — and the remaining sixty use 0.0001. Comparing "pips to a call" between those two groups without converting into money first is comparing units that differ by a factor of a hundred.

What the margin figure cannot tell you

Margin answers one question: will this order open, and how much of the balance disappears into it. It says nothing about whether the trade deserves the size it was given, and nothing about what happens after the spread widening at a Friday close.

Two things routinely break the arithmetic above. The first is that requirements change around weekend holds and major announcements; brokers raise margin rates ahead of them, which moves the required figure without any change in what you are holding. The second is that a second position does not add risk in the calm way this single-trade page implies: margin is aggregated across every open order, so three small positions can leave less room in aggregate than one large one, and only your own book can tell you that.

The useful habit is to read the pips column before the click rather than the margin column. If the distance from here to your maintenance line is shorter than your intended stop plus the usual slippage, the size is wrong whatever the platform says about whether it fits — and the size that fits is worked out from the risk budget and the stop distance, not from the remaining free margin. The mechanics behind that split are set out in leverage, margin and position size; this page does the arithmetic only.

Before you accept the number

• Confirm the maintenance rate your broker actually uses, and whether it is quoted against initial margin or against notional — the same 50% means different things in the two conventions.
• Put the margin already used by open trades into the field. A page that only looks at one order shows more free margin than the account has.
• Convert crosses with a rate you looked up today. On EUR/JPY the rate carries both the notional and the pip value, so a stale one distorts the whole result.
• Read the pips-to-call figure against your stop distance, not against your hopes for the week. If the stop is further away than the call, the size has to come down.
• Re-run the figure after a large move. This page holds notional at the entry price, which is right at the click and approximate twenty figures later.
• Settle the size first, then check margin. Sized from risk and stop distance, then verified against margin, is the order that keeps both numbers honest.

Open the position size calculator

What people call this

A margin call calculator is asking for the part of this page that most calculators leave out: the distance from your current equity to the level at which positions start closing. It is the same arithmetic as the last four rows here — maintenance line, the loss that reaches it, then that loss divided by the pip value of the position — and it is why the answer is given in pips and in price rather than only in currency. Where this page stops at the pip count, the margin call calculator starts: it works in equity instead, giving the level that trips the call, the deposit that clears it, and the notional you would have to cut instead.

A forex margin calculator in the narrower sense stops at required margin and free margin, which is what most brokers publish on their own sites. Both versions need the same three things from you — the pair, the size, and the leverage the account offers — and neither of them decides how much you should be trading.

Questions traders ask

Notional divided by the leverage your account offers. One standard lot is 100,000 units, so at 1.1000 that is 110,000.00 of notional, and at 1:30 the broker holds 3,666.67. The same lot at 1:500 costs 220.00 — the exposure is identical in both cases, only the deposit differs.

High enough that a normal losing streak does not approach the maintenance line. On this page's worked example a level of 272.73% sounds safe and buys 816.67 pips of room; at the largest size the account can open the level barely clears 100% and 184.31 pips are left. Compare it against the move you intend to survive, not against round numbers.

Take the maintenance line from your equity, then divide by the pip value of the whole position. Here: 1,833.33 maintenance leaves 8,166.67 of tolerable loss, and one lot of EUR/USD is worth 10.00 a pip, giving 816.67 pips. Double the size and the pip value doubles while the tolerable loss only falls — which is why the answer collapses to 316.67 pips at two lots.

Because free margin is measured against initial margin and closing happens at the maintenance line, which is lower. In the worked example the order leaves 6,333.33 free, yet the relevant figure is that equity can only fall by 8,166.67 before hitting the maintenance requirement of 1,833.33 — and with several positions open those requirements add up while your equity does not.

Not the risk in the trade — it changes the deposit and therefore how large a position the account will accept. The same one lot keeps its 110,000.00 of exposure and its 10.00 per pip whether the cap is 1:30 or 1:500; the cap only decides whether there is enough margin left for the next order, and how little room the maintenance line leaves.

Related guides

• Forex position size calculator — risk budget and stop distance turned into units, which is what sets the size this page checks.
• Leverage calculator — effective leverage and the margin from notional and equity.
• Position size by instrument — contract size and step for all 131 symbols, and why the same budget gives a different lot count on each.
• Stop loss calculator — the stop distance your risk budget pays for, with spread and commission taken out first.
• Reference data — the four files every figure on this site is cut from.