Pip Calculator

How the pip value is worked out

A pip is a fixed slice of price, and its value in money depends on only three things: how big that slice is, how many units you hold, and what currency your account is denominated in. Nothing else enters the arithmetic.

1. Pip size comes from the instrument, not from a preference. Most forex pairs quote to four decimals, so a pip is 0.0001 of price. JPY pairs quote to two, so a pip is 0.01. Gold is quoted straight in dollars and the smallest quoted increment is 0.01, which is what this page treats as its pip.
2. Lot size is a unit count. A standard lot is the contract size of the instrument — 100,000 units on forex, 100 ounces on gold in this dataset. Mini, micro and nano are one tenth, one hundredth and one thousandth of it.
3. The currency conversion happens last, and only once. Everything is first computed in the quote currency of the instrument, then multiplied by a single rate to land in your account currency.

Two figures on the results panel are fixed reference points rather than inputs: the cost of a 1-pip spread, which is what you pay to get in, and the cost of a 20-pip move, the ordinary adverse move people use to sanity-check a size. Both scale linearly, so a 40-pip move is exactly twice the second figure.

If what you already have is an entry and an exit price rather than a pip count, the forex profit calculator that turns two prices into the money figure, before and after costs takes those directly, for a buy or a sell.

Worked example: GBP/USD on a euro account

Assume you are long 3 standard lots of GBP/USD — 300,000 units — with an account denominated in euros. GBP/USD is quoted in USD, so the pip value arrives in dollars first and has to be converted once.

1. Pip size: GBP/USD quotes to four decimals, so one pip is 0.0001 of price.
2. Units: 3 standard lots x 100,000 units = 300,000 units.
3. Pip value in the quote currency: 0.0001 x 300,000 = 30.00 USD per pip.
4. Convert: you type your own EUR/USD rate of 1.0850 into the rate field. 30.00 x 1.0850 = 32.55 EUR per pip.
5. 1-pip spread: 32.55 x 1 = 32.55 EUR paid the moment you open.
6. 20-pip move: 32.55 x 20 = 651.00 EUR against you if the pair travels twenty pips the wrong way.

Step 4 is the whole reason the rate field exists and the whole reason it is empty when you arrive. A dollar-based pip value does not become a euro-based pip value without a rate, and a rate that this page invented would be worse than no answer at all — it would be wrong in a way you could not see. Type the rate your broker or your bank is actually giving you and the conversion is exact; leave it blank and the panel shows the figures in dollars instead, and says that it is doing so.

The same arithmetic read the other way round is what turns this into a forex position size calculator: instead of asking what a pip costs, you start from the money you are willing to lose and the distance to your stop, and the unit count falls out.

What one pip is worth at each lot size

The four lot sizes are the same fraction of the contract everywhere, which is why the pip values below form a clean factor-of-ten ladder. Every figure in this table was produced by the calculator at the top of this page on 20 September 2026, at one lot of each size.

Two rows deserve a second look. The USD/JPY row is not ten times the EUR/USD row, because on JPY pairs a pip is 0.01 of price rather than 0.0001, and the result then has to be converted out of yen — both of which the calculator does from the price and rate you supply. The GBP/USD row is larger than the EUR/USD row for the same reason a euro account sees it: the dollar pip value is being multiplied by a rate above 1.

These are arithmetic figures, not a claim that your broker offers every size. A nano lot on gold would be a tenth of an ounce, and brokers that deal in whole ounces will not accept it. The lot size explainer covers which sizes are actually offered and what a broker's minimum lot step does to the ladder.

Gold, indices and instruments that are not quoted in pips

A pip calculator for gold is a slightly different question from a forex one, because XAU/USD is quoted directly in dollars per ounce and there is no quote-currency conversion to do on a USD account. What changes is the contract: in this reference data one contract of gold is 100 ounces, so one standard lot is 100 ounces and a 0.01 price move — the smallest increment brokers normally quote — is worth 1.00 USD per lot. Ten dollars of movement costs 1,000.00 USD per full contract, which is why gold position sizes look small next to forex ones.

Index CFDs are the opposite shape again. Their pip size is 1.00 and their contract size is 1 unit, so one pip — one index point — is worth 1.00 USD per standard lot, and a 20-point move costs 20.00 USD. Crypto futures quoted in USDT use a contract size of 1 unit with a pip size of 0.01, so a 0.01 move is worth 0.01 USD per lot.

In every case the page does the same three steps with the instrument's own numbers: pip size, times units, times your rate. If your broker's contract size differs from the published value, edit it in the panel above the results and every figure recomputes from your number.

Gold sizing in money terms — how many ounces you are allowed to hold for a given risk — is worked through on the XAU/USD page, which starts from dollars of risk rather than from pip value.

Where the exchange rate comes from

From you. That is the whole answer, and it is worth being blunt about because it is the one place where a pip calculator can quietly lie.

• Your account currency is the quote currency — EUR/USD on a USD account, for instance. No conversion is needed and the rate used is exactly 1. The page says so in the note above the results.
• Your account currency is the base currency — USD/JPY on a USD account. The rate is derived as 1 divided by the price you typed, and the note names that price so you can check it.
• Any other combination — GBP/USD on a EUR account, EUR/GBP on a JPY account. The page has no way to know the rate, so you type it. Leave it blank and the figures stay in the quote currency, with a warning that no conversion has been applied.

There is no rate feed on this page, no background request and no cached table of prices, because a rate that is fetched once and displayed all day is stale by the time you read it, and a rate that is guessed is worse than one that is missing. Every number you see is traceable to either your own input or the published contract specification.

What this page covers

The instrument list holds 131 instruments: 67 forex pairs covering majors, minors and crosses, 4 metals, 3 energy CFDs, 12 index CFDs and 43 crypto futures quoted in USDT, plus a stock entry and a fully manual entry for anything not on the list. For each one the pip size, contract size and unit step come from the open reference dataset published alongside this site, and both fields are editable if your broker quotes them differently.

Those specifications are typical retail defaults, not values published by an exchange or by any broker. Contract sizes and minimum increments vary between brokers and sometimes between account types at the same broker, so check the deal ticket before trusting a number produced here — particularly the contract size, which is what turns a pip into money on gold, indices and energies.

One forex detail does the most damage when it is missed: on pairs quoted in JPY a pip is 0.01 of price, not 0.0001. That is handled automatically from the instrument you pick, which is why selecting the pair is the first thing the calculator asks for.

What people call this

A pip value calculator, a forex pip calculator and a pip calculator for forex are all the same three multiplications described above, and this page runs them for whichever of those names you arrived under. The instrument list covers the pairs people search for by name along with the crosses that are harder to price by hand.

The number people usually want is not the pip value on its own but what it costs them — the spread they pay at entry and the move they would suffer if the trade goes against them. That is why the panel prints the 1-pip spread cost and the 20-pip move cost next to the pip value rather than leaving you to multiply, and why the pips field lets you price whatever distance you actually have in mind.

Pip value is one input into sizing, not the answer to it. To go from pip value to a tradable size you need the money you are willing to lose and the distance to your stop, which is what the position size calculator takes as its inputs, and the forex sizing walkthrough works through by hand.

FAQ

Related pages

• Forex position size calculator — start from risk and stop distance instead of from pip value.
• Lot sizes explained — standard, mini, micro and nano, and which ones brokers actually offer.
• Position sizing for gold (XAU/USD) — dollars of risk instead of pips.
• How to calculate position size in forex — the same arithmetic worked by hand.
• Open reference dataset — the contract specifications behind the instrument list.