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 inactivity period begins at the first deposit into a forex account and is reset once there is an open position, after which it is calculated again from the point trading activity stops. It also states that the fee is not charged while a position is open.

Two consequences follow, and they illustrate how much the details vary rather than stating a rule that applies elsewhere. A deposit on its own is not described as resetting anything, and an untouched open position, which many would not think of as activity, prevents the charge outright.

The same page draws a line between products: at that entity the fee applies to forex accounts and not to crypto accounts, and crypto trades are stated not to count as activity for the forex accounts. The question therefore has to be asked 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 a client’s money for some set length of time never turns it into the firm’s own. 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 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 looking for a list of which brokers charge what will not find one here. Those figures sit on each firm’s schedule of costs, differ between the regulated entities of one brand, and change without announcement. 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.

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