Trading Account Inactivity Fees: What Happens to a Balance

An account is funded, traded for a few months, then left alone. A year later the balance is smaller than the number that was there when the platform was last closed, and no trade explains the difference.

Two separate things are happening, and almost every explanation treats them as one. A fee is a charge under the account terms. Dormancy is a status under the client money rules. Below is what separates them, what counts as activity, and why the charge and the clock run on different tracks.

A Charge and a Status Are Two Different Things

The fee comes from the contract. The account terms set out a periodic charge that applies once a defined period passes without whatever that firm counts as activity, priced by the firm and disclosed in its schedule of costs.

Dormancy is something else. It is a regulatory description of a balance whose owner has stopped engaging with it, and it matters because the money is not the firm’s. Where a firm holds client money under a segregation regime, the balance belongs to the client, covered under how client money is held.

Conflating the two produces the assumption most people arrive with: that if the fee runs long enough, the firm eventually keeps the account. The rules that say otherwise are quoted further down. Keeping the two apart also changes what is worth arguing about, because a fee applied against the terms is a complaint about a charge while a balance that has been released is a question about client money.

What Brokers Actually Count as Activity

Every comparison of inactivity fees states a period in months. Almost none states what resets it, which is the part that decides whether a fee ever arrives. Four events are candidates and they are not equivalent: placing a trade, making a deposit, holding an open position without placing any new trade, and logging in. A firm can treat any combination of them as activity, and the combination is a policy choice rather than a market convention.

OANDA Corporation, that firm’s United States entity, publishes an unusually specific answer. Its charge applies once twelve months pass with no trade placed on the account, and the firm states that the fee is withheld while a position remains open.

Two consequences follow, and they illustrate how much the details vary rather than stating a rule that applies elsewhere. Trading is what the period is measured against, so a deposit on its own is not described as stopping the clock. An untouched open position, which many would not think of as activity, prevents the charge outright.

The same page sets out how the charge is taken from a client holding more than one sub-account. It is levied first on the sub-account with the smallest balance and continues until a maximum of twenty United States dollars per client has been debited that month. The question is therefore asked per client and per account rather than per relationship, and where accounts differ in more than name is set out under account types and their terms.

Why the Fee Cannot Take the Account Below Zero

A charge that keeps applying to an account nobody is watching raises an obvious question: what stops it running past the balance into a debt? The design answer is a cap. OANDA Corporation states that the charge is never allowed to push a sub-account below zero, and that it continues only until the account is closed, trading resumes, or the balance reaches zero. The fee stops when the money runs out rather than continuing into a deficit.

A second limit matters to anyone holding several currencies with one firm. The charge is taken first from whichever sub-account holds the least, then from the next, up to a monthly ceiling of twenty United States dollars per client, converted into each sub-account’s own currency. The ceiling applies to the client, not to each sub-account, and whether any other firm caps the charge the same way is a question for its own documents.

When a Fee Can Be Rebated, and When It Cannot

A charge already taken is not always final, and this is the one part of the subject where asking costs nothing. OANDA Corporation states that a client who starts trading again once the charge has been taken may ask for up to three months of it back, scaled to how many months were charged. It is a request rather than an automatic reversal, it is capped, and it is unlikely to be applied unprompted.

Where a firm declines and the terms appear not to support the charge, the route is the ordinary complaints route rather than a negotiation, set out under escalating a complaint about a charge.

What the Client Money Rules Say About an Unclaimed Balance

This is the question every list of inactivity fees raises and then drops: what can a firm do with money nobody claims. For firms holding client money under the FCA regime the answer is written down and is narrower than most expect. The FCA Handbook is explicit that simply keeping hold of client money for some set length of time never turns it into money of the firm. Time on its own converts nothing.

Releasing an allocated but unclaimed balance is permitted, but only against conditions that have to hold together.

A firm may hand the money to a charity of its own choosing. It may do so only where the law and the terms on which it holds the balance both allow it, only where six years or more have passed since anything last moved on the account for a reason the client caused, and only where it can show it made a real effort to find the client and give the money back.

What counts as reasonable steps is not left to interpretation. The Handbook sets out a course of conduct: posting or emailing a notice to the most recent address on file and allowing twenty-eight days for instructions, trying again by some other means if nothing comes back, and writing once more before any money moves.

Two further routes exist. Where the aggregate balance is twenty-five pounds or less for a retail client, or one hundred pounds or less for another client, a shorter de minimis procedure applies that still requires the same six-year period. Separately, a balance stops being client money once it is routed into the statutory dormant assets scheme that the Dormant Assets Act 2022 created.

Why an Inactivity Fee Does Not Reset the Dormancy Clock

Here is the consequence that follows, and it is the single most useful thing to know about the subject. The six-year period is measured from whenever the account last moved. The rule then says something specific about what a movement is: interest, charges and similar items are expressly disregarded when identifying it. The de minimis route carries the identical wording.

An inactivity fee is a charge, and it is debited by the firm rather than initiated by the client. It therefore does not count as movement and cannot push the six-year period forward. An account can be charged month after month while the clock underneath it keeps running from the last thing the client actually did.

That is the opposite of the usual intuition. The drafting has a plain reason: if a firm’s own charges restarted the period, it could hold a balance indefinitely by continuing to debit it.

What Seven Entities Publish, and What Three of Them Do Not

Inactivity terms are set by the licensed company that signs the account, not by the brand on the marketing site. One brand routinely operates several such companies, and they publish different terms, so a figure quoted against a brand name is the wrong number for anyone whose account sits with a different entity of it.

XM is the clearest case. The 5 USD monthly figure below appears in the costs-and-charges document of the European and United Kingdom entities. No equivalent figure is published for the Belize or Dubai entity that serves most readers in the Gulf, which is a different answer to the same question rather than the same answer with a different address.

Figures verified against each broker’s own published terms on 26 July 2026. Each entity is named because the terms differ between entities of one brand.

Three of the seven publish nothing, and that is a finding rather than a gap in the table. A firm that publishes a zero has committed to charging nothing, and Raw Trading Ltd does exactly that.

A firm that publishes nothing has committed to nothing, and the charge it may apply is discoverable only in the client agreement of the specific entity. Comparison sites collapse those two into a single fee-free claim, which is the error that costs a reader money.

The Exinity Limited row reads as undisclosed for a different reason: two readings of the published terms of that entity returned different answers, and an unresolved conflict is not a figure. What the entity charges belongs in its own client agreement, alongside the other terms that vary by entity, such as the minimum deposit by entity.

The Trigger Is Three Conditions, Not One Period

A comparison that states three to twelve months as the typical range treats the trigger as one number. The published terms above move on three independent conditions, and all three have to line up before a charge arrives.

The first is the period itself, and it is not measured the same way. Tickmill Ltd sets dormancy at twelve months and ten days. Admirals Europe Ltd sets it at twenty-four months without trading activity. The gap between those two is a full year on the same nominal subject.

The second is how often the charge repeats once it starts. Tickmill Ltd charges quarterly. Admirals Europe Ltd and the European and United Kingdom entities of XM charge monthly. A quarterly 10 and a monthly 10 are the same headline number and four times apart over a year.

The third is the balance condition, and it appears on none of the comparison pages checked. Tickmill Ltd charges only where the balance is 50 or less, so an account left with more than that is outside the charge entirely while a nearly empty one is inside it. XM caps the charge at the free balance rather than applying a flat amount regardless.

Put together, the three conditions decide the outcome in a way the period alone cannot. A balance of 40 left at Tickmill Ltd sits inside that balance condition, so the quarterly charge applies once dormancy is reached. The same 40 at Admirals Europe Ltd meets no balance test at all, and what applies instead is the monthly amount once twenty-four months have passed. Same money, same intention to step away, two different answers.

The question to take to a client agreement is therefore in three parts: how long, how often, and whether the balance matters. A firm that answers only the first has not told anyone what the account will be worth on their return.

What to Do Before You Stop Trading

Three options exist for an account that will not be used for a while, and they do different things.

The middle column is the one people avoid and is often the cleanest, because a settled account has no charge to argue about later. The cost is that returning means a fresh application.

Withdrawing while leaving the account open is the compromise, and it has a detail worth planning for: the withdrawal is itself the movement the dormancy period will later be measured from. Getting the money out by a route that settles cleanly is covered under withdrawal methods and their costs.

Anyone stepping away to practise rather than to stop can keep the platform without the exposure, which is what a demo account is for.

Who This Page Is Not For

Anyone treating the table above as current will eventually be wrong. Those terms sit on each entity’s schedule of costs and change without announcement, so the table is a dated reading rather than a live feed, and the entity serving a given reader may not be the one listed. Anyone chasing a fee already taken on an account they had genuinely abandoned may also find the effort exceeds the sum.

Anyone whose firm does not hold client money under the FCA regime should treat the rules above as an illustration rather than as their own protection. The regime that applies is the one the entity on the account statement is authorised under.

Frequently Asked Questions