IC Markets commission explained: what a lot really costs on Raw vs Standard

What each account actually is

Both accounts run on the same infrastructure and the same execution — IC Markets quotes one raw feed and packages it two ways:

• Raw Spread passes you the interbank spread — from 0.0 pips, with a published EURUSD average of 0.1 pips — and bills a separate commission: $3.50 per lot per side on MetaTrader, so $7.00 per round-turn standard lot. It runs on MT4, MT5, cTrader, and TradingView.
• Standard charges no commission at all. The fee is an all-inclusive spread with a published floor of 0.8 pips — the same raw feed with the cost baked in. It runs on MetaTrader only.

IC Markets never prints its Standard markup as a single number the way Pepperstone does — but it publishes both floors, and the arithmetic is not subtle: 0.0 on Raw, 0.8 on Standard. That 0.8-pip gap is the built-in price of not seeing a commission line.

The math on EURUSD

A pip on a standard EURUSD lot (100,000 units) is worth $10.00, so Standard's 0.8-pip premium costs about $8.00 per round-turn lot — paid invisibly, inside the spread. Raw Spread charges $7.00 for the same lot, printed on your statement:

The raw spread itself cancels out of the comparison — you pay it on both accounts, whatever it happens to be at that moment. What is left is $8.00 against $7.00. That is the whole decision, and it is closer than most people assume. How the commission sits alongside spread and swap on the full per-lot bill is itemized in what a round-turn lot really costs.

The part the comparison sites round off

Affiliate reviews like to present Raw as the obvious choice at any commission. Run the actual numbers and the public-rate verdict is thinner: $1.00 per lot on EURUSD, less on some pairs, and negative on others (yen pairs — below). A markup and a commission are just two prices for the same thing, and IC Markets priced them deliberately close.

That is precisely why the discounted commission matters more at IC Markets than a dollar-fifty sounds. At $5.50, Raw is no longer a coin-flip with a slight edge — it clears Standard by $2.50 per lot on EURUSD and stays ahead on every USD-quoted pair and cross. The rebate does not sweeten the deal; it settles the argument.

What that adds up to over a year

Per lot it looks small. Multiplied by real volume it is not:

That is the saving against Standard on EURUSD-class pairs. Measured against the public Raw rate alone, the rebate is $1.50 per lot — $360 a year at 20 lots a month, $1,800 at 100. Run your own volume through the rebate calculator — it does this exact math with your numbers. And in the other direction: at 2 lots a month the whole Raw-vs-Standard question is worth about $5 a month at our rate. Real, but coffee money — the account choice matters in proportion to your volume.

Commission by platform

The $7.00 figure is the MetaTrader rate on a USD account. IC Markets bills each platform differently:

Note what the cTrader line actually says: $3.00 per 100,000 US dollars traded, not per lot. On USDJPY a lot is exactly 100k USD, so the round turn is exactly $6.00. On EURUSD the notional is a lot times the exchange rate — IC Markets' own worked example bills $7.83 for one EURUSD lot at 1.3000. With the euro above parity, cTrader is not the cheap platform it looks like on paper.

Three footnotes worth knowing: trades smaller than one lot are charged proportionally (0.01 lots costs $0.07 round turn on MetaTrader); non-USD MetaTrader accounts pay a fixed schedule in their own currency (a EUR account is billed €3.25 per side, a GBP account £2.75) rather than a spot conversion; and the commission applies to forex and metals only — index and commodity CFDs are spread-priced identically on both accounts.

Where the math flips: yen pairs and crosses

The $8.00 markup figure holds when USD is the quote currency — EURUSD, GBPUSD, AUDUSD. Elsewhere, a pip is worth 10 units of the quote currency, and the markup's dollar cost moves with it:

• USDJPY — a pip is ¥1,000, about $6.67 at USDJPY 150, so 0.8 pips costs about $5.33. That is less than the $7.00 commission: at public rates a yen-pair-only trader is better off on Standard, and even at the Forexnese $5.50 the two accounts are a wash.
• EURGBP — a pip is £10, about $12.70 at GBPUSD 1.27, so the markup costs about $10.16 — and Raw's edge widens to $3.16 at public rates, $4.66 at ours.

Most comparisons skip this because it complicates the pitch. It should not be skipped: if your book is mostly yen pairs, the account type barely matters for you at IC Markets, and we would rather tell you that than pretend the rebate changes it.

When Standard is the right choice

Raw wins the arithmetic on most pairs — but not for everyone:

• You mostly trade yen pairs. As above: Standard is ahead at public pricing and roughly level even at our rate. Simplicity can decide.
• You mostly trade index or commodity CFDs. The commission only exists on forex and metals; everything else costs the same on both accounts.
• You trade a few micro-lots a month. At 0.01 lots the difference is a cent or two per trade, and one all-in spread number is genuinely easier to reason about.

For everyone else — anyone trading meaningful FX volume on USD-quoted pairs or crosses — the markup is the more expensive way to pay, every lot, forever.

The Forexnese rate on Raw Spread

Forexnese pools its traders under one introducing-broker group at IC Markets, and the group rate is a commission of $7.00 → $5.50 per round-turn lot — 21% off, applied at the source on every trade, on both the MetaTrader and cTrader Raw Spread accounts, with spreads and execution untouched. How that at-source mechanism works — and why it beats cashback paid later — is covered in how forex rebates work. Trading Pepperstone instead? The same account-type math is worked out in Razor vs Standard — and the two brokers go head to head in IC Markets vs Pepperstone.

The rate attaches automatically when you open the account through Forexnese; the details and FAQ are on the IC Markets rebate page. And to be straight about it: $5.50 vs $7.00 does not rescue a losing strategy — it just makes every winner keep more and every loser cost less.