Open the account-types page of almost any broker and you will find the same liquidity offered twice. One account quotes EUR/USD at around 1.2 pips and charges nothing else. The next quotes the same pair at 0.2 pips and adds a commission of roughly $7 per round-turn lot. The broker is not offering two products; it is offering one product with the cost moved between two lines of the invoice.
Which line is cheaper is a question of arithmetic, not of marketing, and the answer changes with the size and frequency of your trades. It is one of the few broker comparisons that can be settled exactly.
What this article settles
- Both models charge you for the same liquidity; only the presentation differs.
- A commission is fixed per lot, so it shrinks as a share of cost when spreads widen.
- Raw-spread accounts win on liquid pairs in calm markets and lose on thin ones.
- Minimum deposits, not cost, are usually what actually decides the choice.
The two models, stated precisely
An all-in spread account, often called Standard or Classic, takes the raw price it receives from its liquidity providers and adds a markup before showing it to you. If the underlying market is 1.10230 / 1.10231 — a raw spread of 0.1 pips — the account might show 1.10225 / 1.10236, a spread of 1.1 pips. The extra pip is the broker's revenue. Nothing else is deducted, and your statement shows no fee line at all.
A commission account, sold as Raw, ECN, Zero or Pro, passes the underlying price through with little or no markup and bills separately. The commission is quoted per side or per round turn, and per standard lot of 100,000 units of base currency. Seven dollars per round-turn lot is the most common figure in the retail market; some brokers quote it as $3.50 per side, which is the same thing.
Read the commission quote carefully
Per side and per round turn differ by a factor of two. A broker advertising "$3 commission" is almost always quoting one side, meaning $6 to open and close a position. Compare like with like before you conclude one broker is half the price of another.
Converting a commission into pips
To compare the two you need them in the same unit. On a standard lot of a pair quoted to five decimal places with USD as the quote currency, one pip is worth $10. A $7 round-turn commission is therefore 0.7 pips. Add that to a 0.2 pip raw spread and the commission account costs 0.9 pips all in — against 1.2 pips for the all-in account. On this pair, at this moment, the commission account is cheaper by 0.3 pips, or $3 per lot traded.
The conversion is not universal. Where the quote currency is not the dollar, the pip value moves with the exchange rate, and on JPY pairs quoted to three decimals a pip is again $10 per lot but expressed differently. The commission, meanwhile, is usually charged in the account currency regardless of the instrument. That asymmetry is the whole story: the spread side of the cost scales with the instrument, the commission side does not.
Where each model wins
On the most liquid instruments — EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, the major indices during their home session — raw spreads sit close to zero for much of the day. The commission then dominates the total, but the total is still small, and it beats the all-in account because the all-in markup is set to survive the worst hours of the day, not the best.
On thin instruments the calculation inverts. An exotic pair with a raw spread of 25 pips still carries the same $7 commission, which is now 3% of the cost rather than 78% of it. The two account types converge, and the all-in account may edge ahead because its markup on exotics is proportionally smaller than its markup on majors.
The same inversion happens in time rather than in instrument. During the seconds around a central bank decision, raw spreads on EUR/USD can widen from 0.1 pips to several pips. The commission does not widen. If most of your trading happens in those windows, the fixed component is a smaller share of a larger bill, and the difference between account types matters less than the fact that you are trading into a widening spread at all.
The break-even that actually matters
Rather than comparing headline numbers, compare the total cost of the trades you actually place. Take your last hundred trades from the platform's history, note the instrument and the time of day for each, and price them both ways. Most traders find the gap is smaller than the marketing implies — a fraction of a pip per trade — and that it is dwarfed by slippage and by the spread they accepted on entries they did not need to take.
How to price your own trading both ways
- Export the last three months of closed positions from your platform.
- Group them by instrument and by hour of the day.
- For each group, record the spread you were actually filled at, not the advertised average.
- Add the commission you paid, converted to pips at the pip value of that instrument.
- Repeat using the other account type's published spread for the same instrument and hour.
- Compare the two totals against the size of your average win.
This exercise usually produces a second, more useful finding. Traders who run it discover that their cost is concentrated in a handful of instruments and a handful of hours, and that changing when they trade moves the bill further than changing which account type they hold.
What the account type also changes
Cost is rarely the only difference between the two tiers. Commission accounts routinely carry a higher minimum deposit, because the broker earns a fixed amount per lot and needs volume to justify the tier. They may offer a different execution model, deeper price aggregation, or access to platforms the standard account does not get. Some brokers restrict certain strategies — scalping windows, news trading, expert advisors — by account type rather than by account holder.
Those differences are often worth more than the pips. A commission account that costs 0.3 pips less but requires a $2,000 minimum deposit is a poor trade for someone funding an account with $500, because the deposit requirement forces either an oversized account or a leverage level they did not intend to use.
A zero-spread account is not a zero-cost account
Marketing that promises spreads "from 0.0 pips" is describing the best moment on the most liquid instrument, not the average. Ask for the average spread over a full session on the instrument you trade, and read the commission schedule next to it. The two numbers only mean something together.
Costs that sit outside both models
Neither account type covers everything you will be charged. Positions held past the daily rollover pay or receive financing, which has nothing to do with the spread or the commission and can easily exceed both on a multi-day trade. Deposits and withdrawals may carry their own charges. An account funded in one currency and trading instruments denominated in another pays a conversion cost on every realised profit and loss.
For a position trader holding for weeks, financing dwarfs the entry cost entirely, and the choice between account types is close to irrelevant. For a scalper closing within minutes, the entry cost is nearly the whole bill. Identify which of those you are before spending time on the comparison.
Common questions
Is a raw-spread account always cheaper?
No. It is usually cheaper on major pairs in liquid hours, because the fixed commission is a small number against a tiny raw spread. On exotic pairs, on illiquid instruments and during volatile windows, the two models converge and the all-in account can be cheaper.
Why do brokers offer both instead of just the cheaper one?
Because they are not equally cheap for everyone, and because the models suit different volumes. An all-in spread is simpler to understand and works better for infrequent traders; a commission account rewards volume and appeals to traders who want to see the underlying price.
Does a commission account mean my orders go to the market?
Not necessarily. The commission tells you how the broker prices, not how it executes. Some commission accounts route orders to external liquidity, others internalise them exactly as the standard account does. Execution policy is a separate question, answered in the client agreement rather than the pricing table.
How do I compare two brokers with different commission structures?
Convert everything to pips per round-turn lot on one instrument you actually trade, at the hour you actually trade it, then add the average spread over that hour. A single all-in number per instrument makes the comparison honest.
