Forex Trading Statistics Australia

The key Australian forex numbers for 2026

If you only want the headline figures, here they are:

• Australia has roughly 170,000 active retail CFD and forex traders as of early 2026, based on ASIC-broker disclosures across the AFSL holders we track
• 68% of retail CFD investors lost money in FY2024, more than $458 million including $73 million in fees, per ASIC REP 828 (published 20 January 2026)
• The AUD is the seventh-most-traded currency globally, on one side of 6.1% of daily global forex turnover, per the BIS Triennial Survey 2025, final revised data (June 2026 release)
• Global daily forex turnover is USD 9.51 trillion, so the AUD’s share works out at roughly USD 580 billion a day, of which a relatively small fraction is settled in Australia
• Australia ranks eleventh as a trading centre, at about USD 201 billion a day, or 1.6% of global turnover
• The five largest ASIC-regulated CFD brokers by AU active client base are CMC Markets, IG Markets, Pepperstone, IC Markets and Plus500
• Retail trader demographics skew male (roughly 80 to 85%) and aged 25 to 44, with growing participation from the 45 to 60 cohort over the past three years

These are not advisory figures. They’re a reference set we maintain so traders can compare their own activity and outcomes against the wider AU market.

How big is the Australian retail forex market?

Australia is one of the most active retail CFD jurisdictions globally, despite being a comparatively small population market. Two factors drive this. The first is the depth of the local broker industry. There are 32 ASIC-regulated AFSL holders on our tracked list offering retail CFDs locally, many with parent operations in the UK, Cyprus or Israel that route AU clients through the Australian entity. The second is participation rates. Australian retail traders trade more frequently than most global peers and have done so since the early 2000s.

Active trader counts

ASIC-broker public disclosures and PDS filings put the Australian retail CFD active client base at approximately 170,000 to 180,000 as of early 2026. “Active” here means an account that placed at least one trade in the preceding 12 months. The total number of registered (but not necessarily active) AU CFD accounts is meaningfully higher, closer to 400,000 to 500,000 across all licensed brokers combined.

For context, the active retail CFD population in 2018 (pre-PIO) was estimated at around 110,000 by ASIC. The market grew through the COVID-era retail trading boom of 2020 to 2021, plateaued after the Product Intervention Order took effect in March 2021, and has stabilised since.

Account funding levels

Average funded retail CFD account size in Australia sits around AUD 4,500 to AUD 6,500. Median balances are lower, typically AUD 1,200 to AUD 2,000, because account distributions are heavily right-skewed. A small number of high-balance accounts pull the average up.

Trade frequency

Active AU retail CFD traders place roughly 80 to 120 trades per quarter on average. High-frequency scalpers can reach 500+ trades per quarter. Position traders sit in the 20 to 40 range. These figures vary widely by broker because of platform mix (MT4/MT5/cTrader users tend to trade more frequently than proprietary-platform users like CMC Next Generation).

ASIC retail loss-rate data

Australia has no per-broker loss-rate disclosure. When ASIC made its product intervention order in 2020 it considered issuer-specific risk warnings, as proposed in Consultation Paper 322, and confirmed it would not require them. Unlike brokers regulated in the United Kingdom or the European Union, an Australian entity publishes no standardised percentage of its own. The reliable Australian numbers come from ASIC’s own sector reviews.

The chart shows the two ASIC sector figures side by side: 72% of retail CFD clients losing money in REP 626 before the intervention order, against 68% in the 2024 financial year in REP 828.

What ASIC measured

In REP 828 Risky business, published 20 January 2026, ASIC reported that in the 2024 financial year 68% of retail CFD investors lost money, totalling more than $458 million, including $73 million in fees. The earlier REP 626 Consumer harm from OTC binary options and CFDs, published in 2019, put the CFD figure at 72% of retail clients.

Individual brokers do publish loss percentages in other jurisdictions, and a global brand’s UK or EU figure is easy to mistake for an Australian one. They are not interchangeable: the client populations, leverage caps and product rules differ.

Why loss rates are persistently high

ASIC’s 2019 to 2020 market review identified four drivers behind the high retail loss rate:

1. Excessive leverage before the PIO took effect (some brokers offered 500:1 to retail accounts pre-2021)
2. Over-trading relative to account size, which compounds spread and commission costs
3. Negative skew in retail strategies, traders cut winners early and let losers run
4. Insufficient education on margin, position sizing and risk-of-ruin maths

The 30:1 cap on majors and the 50% margin close-out rule directly target factors 1 and 2. The other two are behavioural and harder to regulate, and the intervention order does not address them directly.

AUD daily forex turnover and global market share

The Bank for International Settlements runs the Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity. The current canonical source is the BIS Triennial Survey 2025, whose final revised data was released in June 2026 and supersedes the 2022 survey this page previously ran on. Figures below are from that release and its annex tables.

AUD share of global turnover

The Australian dollar is the seventh-most-traded currency globally. AUD’s share of total global forex turnover sat at:

• 2010: 7.6%
• 2013: 8.6%
• 2016: 6.9%
• 2019: 6.8%
• 2022: 6.4%
• 2025: 6.1%

Two things drive the decline since 2013. First, growing share for emerging market currencies (CNY in particular). Second, slightly lower carry-trade interest in AUD as the RBA’s policy rate trended down through the 2010s. The rank slipped from fifth to seventh between the 2022 and 2025 surveys even though the share moved only three-tenths of a point, because the currencies above it grew faster rather than because AUD volume fell. The AUD remains a major reserve currency proxy for institutional flows and is structurally embedded in commodity-currency carry strategies.

Daily turnover figures (BIS 2025)

Global forex daily turnover on the 2025 survey is USD 9.51 trillion per day, up from USD 7.5 trillion in 2022. At a 6.1% share, that puts the AUD on one side of roughly USD 580 billion of daily turnover on those figures. AUD/USD is the sixth-most-traded currency pair globally at 4.9% of daily turnover.

Because BIS counts two currencies in every transaction, individual currency shares sum to 200% rather than 100%, while pair shares sum to 100%. That is why the AUD’s 6.1% and AUD/USD’s 4.9% are not directly comparable numbers.

Where AUD trades happen

Most AUD trading by volume happens outside Australia. London, New York, Singapore and Tokyo together account for the bulk of AUD turnover. Australia is a meaningful but smaller centre: the 2025 survey ranks it eleventh globally at about USD 201 billion a day, or 1.6% of global turnover.

The Australian Foreign Exchange Committee’s October 2025 follow-up survey put local turnover lower still, at about USD 178.6 billion a day, and the RBA notes that related-party trades account for roughly half of Australian turnover (AFXC FX turnover reports). Both points matter for reading the headline: a large share of what is booked in Australia is internal to the banks rather than client flow.

AU retail trader demographics

Demographic data from broker onboarding records (anonymised, aggregated and shared at industry level) gives us a current picture of who’s trading retail forex in Australia.

Age distribution

The 25 to 44 cohort makes up 60% of the active base. Participation in the 45+ band has grown steadily since 2020, reflecting both the COVID-era expansion of self-directed investing and the ongoing migration from term deposits and managed funds toward direct trading.

Gender split

Australian retail CFD trading remains heavily male-skewed. Current estimates put the active AU retail base at roughly 82 to 85% male and 15 to 18% female. This is consistent with global patterns (the male share is broadly similar in the UK, EU and Singapore) and is a long-running structural feature rather than a recent trend.

State distribution

Active AU retail CFD traders by state of residence, indexed against population:

• New South Wales: 36% of active base (32% of population), over-indexed
• Victoria: 28% of active base (26% of population), slightly over
• Queensland: 18% of active base (20% of population)
• Western Australia: 9% of active base (11% of population)
• South Australia: 5% of active base (7% of population)
• Other (TAS, ACT, NT): 4%

Sydney and Melbourne are the two heaviest concentrations, which fits the broader pattern of Australian financial services activity. Brisbane has grown as a retail trading hub since 2020.

Broker market share in Australia

Estimating exact broker market share is hard because most ASIC-regulated brokers don’t publish AU-specific client counts. The figures below are our estimates based on triangulating ASIC filings, public earnings reports for listed brokers, and our own client-onboarding survey.

The five largest brokers account for roughly half the AU active retail CFD base. The mid-tier (Vantage, TMGM, FP Markets, Fusion, AvaTrade, ThinkMarkets, Eightcap) collectively serves another 25 to 30%. The remainder is fragmented across the smaller AFSL holders. Our guide to the top-rated forex brokers in Australia compares these names on measured cost and execution.

Platform usage in Australia

Among the 32 ASIC-regulated brokers we track, platform availability and usage breaks down as:

The chart shows how many of the 32 ASIC-regulated brokers we track offer each platform, with MetaTrader 4 still ahead at 23 and cTrader the narrowest at 5.

Counts are our own, taken across the 32 ASIC-regulated brokers we track and recomputed 19 July 2026 (MT5 adjusted 23 July 2026 when ThinkMarkets’ AU entity was confirmed to offer no MT5, and again 26 July 2026 when Focus Markets was added as an MT5-only broker; proprietary adjusted 6 August 2026 when Trading 212 was added as a proprietary-only broker, and MT4 and proprietary both adjusted 12 August 2026 when Fortrade was added). Brokers offering more than one platform appear in more than one row.

MT4 remains the most widely used platform for AU retail forex traders despite MT5 being the newer release. The MT4 EA ecosystem keeps it sticky among algorithmic traders. Proprietary platforms (CMC Next Generation, IG web, Plus500 WebTrader, eToro) command share among traders who prioritise integrated research, sentiment data and multi-asset coverage.

For more on platform choice, see our MT4 vs MT5 comparison and the dedicated cTrader page.

How AU trading volumes compare globally

AU retail CFD trading is large relative to the country’s population. Per-capita active retail CFD traders sit at roughly 6.5 per 1,000 adults, which is among the highest in the developed world.

Japan’s number is genuinely an outlier. Margin FX trading is treated as a mainstream retail product there with a different regulatory framework. Singapore’s high per-capita figure reflects its role as a regional trading hub. Australia’s ratio is broadly similar to the UK’s, which is what we’d expect given comparable broker maturity and product availability.

What the data tells us about retail outcomes

A few patterns repeat across the AU retail CFD data:

• Account survival is short. The median active AU CFD account is open for 8 to 14 months before becoming inactive. Around 30% of accounts are inactive within 6 months of first deposit.
• Loss skew is persistent. Even accounting for natural churn, the 68% of retail CFD investors ASIC recorded as losing money in FY2024 suggests that profitable retail trading remains the exception rather than the rule.
• Larger accounts perform better. Within broker-disclosed cohorts, accounts above AUD 10,000 in funded balance show somewhat better win rates than smaller accounts. This is partly selection (more experienced traders fund larger balances) and partly mechanical (smaller accounts hit margin close-out faster on adverse moves).
• Time in market helps. Accounts open for 24+ months disclosed lower loss rates than the broader cohort. This suggests learning curves matter, but also that survivor bias is real (unprofitable traders churn out earlier).

We’re not drawing strategy conclusions from this data here. That work belongs in our other education pages. See drawdown and risk of ruin and position sizing for the actionable side of the same numbers.

Costs are the one line in this data a trader controls directly, and they compound with the trade frequencies above. Our broker cost calculator totals spread and commission across the brokers we measure at your own monthly volume. For the wider picture, start at our forex education hub.