Eight years on from the intervention that produced them, the UK’s retail leverage limits have achieved the condition every rule aspires to: nobody argues about them any more. A short history, for readers who arrived late. In 2018 the European Securities and Markets Authority imposed temporary product-intervention measures on CFDs sold to retail clients; in 2019 the FCA made equivalent rules permanent for the UK; and the framework was carried into UK law after Brexit. As of this writing, it remains in force, materially unchanged — the steady state this article exists to summarise.
The caps themselves, per the rulebook: leverage on major currency pairs is limited to 30:1 for retail clients. Non-major pairs, gold, and major equity indices sit at 20:1; commodities other than gold and non-major indices at 10:1; individual shares at 5:1. The original framework’s 2:1 tier for crypto-asset derivatives has since been overtaken in the UK by something blunter — the FCA’s ban on the sale of crypto derivatives to retail consumers, in force since January 2021.
The limits travel with a supporting cast that deserves equal billing. Retail accounts carry negative balance protection, so a client cannot lose more than the account holds. Positions are closed out when funds fall to half the required margin. Brokers may not offer bonuses or other inducements to trade, and must display standardised risk warnings stating the percentage of their retail accounts that lose money — figures the reader is encouraged to actually read, since firms publish them in their own risk warnings with a candour no marketing department would volunteer.
One door out of the framework remains open, and it is the part of the steady state this desk watches with the least warmth. A client may request elective professional status, which, where the qualifying tests are met, removes the leverage caps — along with protections the retail classification exists to provide. The tests are the firm’s to assess, per the rules, but the arithmetic is the applicant’s to live with. An upgrade that consists of removing safeguards is an upgrade in the same sense that removing the handrail shortens the staircase; the desk suggests reading the classification documents as carefully as the Register entry of the firm offering them.
Steady states are dull, which is rather the point of them. The 2026 position is that the limits hold, the warnings publish, and the only volatility in the regime is the traffic through the professional-client door.
As ever: leverage caps the borrowing, not the risk — most retail accounts lose money, per the warnings the rules themselves require.