Is XTB safe? FCA licence, FSCS cover, listed accounts and the KNF fines

The short answer

XTB is a legitimate, heavily regulated broker. UK clients are served by XTB Limited, authorised by the FCA under firm reference 522157, with client money held in segregated accounts and covered by the FSCS up to £85,000 per person if the firm fails. The parent company, XTB S.A., is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and reported a preliminary net profit of EUR 241.6 million for the first half of 2026.

The caveats are about conduct rather than solvency. The Polish regulator has fined XTB twice, most recently PLN 20 million in 2026 over how it assessed and informed CFD clients, and XTB’s own risk warning says 74% of retail CFD accounts lose money. The rest of this guide is the detail, entity by entity.

Who regulates XTB?

XTB is a group, not a single company, and which entity holds your account decides your regulator, your compensation scheme and whether you get negative balance protection. According to the group structure published on XTB’s investor relations site (checked October 2026), the entities that matter for European readers are these:

The UK company is registered in England under company number 07227848 and trades from One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, according to the footer of XTB’s UK site. Check the licence yourself: search the FCA register for 522157 and confirm the status reads “authorised”. If you are in the EU, your client agreement names the entity; look it up on the register of that regulator, not on XTB’s website.

The one entity to be wary of is the Belize one. It is a legitimate subsidiary, but offshore regulation offers far less protection, and XTB’s own help centre says negative balance protection does not apply there. A UK or EU resident should never end up on it.

What does the FSCS cover for XTB clients?

If XTB Limited failed and could not return everything it holds for you, that is an investment claim, and the FSCS pays up to £85,000 per eligible person, per firm, according to the FSCS’s own rules. Because client money is segregated, any shortfall would normally be small; the limit is a backstop.

One point of confusion worth clearing up. XTB’s UK pages show a “£120,000 FSCS money protection” badge, while the FAQ on the same site says £85,000. The £120,000 figure is the FSCS deposit limit, raised from December 2025, which applies when a bank fails. XTB is not a bank. If XTB itself fails, the £85,000 investment limit is the one that applies. If one of the banks holding XTB’s segregated client accounts failed, deposit protection might apply instead, but XTB does not publish which banks it uses, so you cannot plan around that.

What about EU clients?

The European schemes are much smaller, and this is the biggest practical difference between an XTB UK account and an EU one.

The Polish figures come from KDPW, which runs the scheme under Poland’s Act on Trading in Financial Instruments. A larger EU balance is still protected first by segregation; the compensation scheme only covers what segregation fails to return.

How does XTB hold client money?

XTB’s client money page for the UK says all retail client money is held in segregated client bank accounts, separate from XTB’s own money, under the FCA’s client asset rules (CASS). The practical effect is that XTB’s creditors have no claim on those funds if the company fails. Shares and ETFs you buy through XTB are held as custody assets under the same rulebook, recorded as yours rather than the firm’s.

An insolvency would therefore be slow and annoying rather than catastrophic. An administrator would reconcile client money and assets, then return them or transfer them to another broker, with the FSCS behind any gap.

Can you lose more than your deposit?

Not as a UK retail client. XTB’s help centre states that it offers negative balance protection to UK retail clients of XTB Limited: losses stop at your account balance. EU rules require the same for retail CFD clients across the bloc.

Two groups lose this. Clients who opt up to professional status give up negative balance protection, along with the leverage limits and, in many cases, compensation-scheme eligibility. And, as above, the Belize entity does not offer it.

How many XTB clients lose money on CFDs?

XTB’s UK site states that 74% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider (as shown in October 2026). Other XTB pages and entities show slightly different figures, because each entity calculates its own and updates it periodically.

That number says nothing about whether XTB is solvent. It is what leveraged products do to most retail users. It is also worth knowing how XTB earns its money: its preliminary first-half 2026 report says commodity CFDs produced 75.3% of its gross result on instruments, and as a market maker XTB is frequently the other side of its clients’ CFD trades. That is legal, regulated and disclosed, and it is the main reason the KNF’s conduct findings matter. If you only buy shares and ETFs, the CFD statistic does not describe your risk. For the difference between the two leveraged products UK traders use, see spread betting vs CFDs.

What do XTB’s public accounts show?

Unlike most brokers, XTB’s parent is a listed company, so its finances are public and audited. That is a genuine safety advantage: losses, regulatory provisions and capital positions are disclosed to the market, not discovered later.

• Full year 2025: operating income of about PLN 2.15 billion (up 14.6%) and net profit of PLN 644.2 million (down 24.8%, as marketing spending rose), according to XTB’s annual results. Total clients passed 2.16 million.
• First half 2026 (preliminary): operating revenue of EUR 490.7 million and net profit of EUR 241.6 million, up 148.7% year on year, with client assets of EUR 11.7 billion and more than 2.9 million clients, according to XTB’s investor relations release. XTB labels these figures preliminary; the audited half-year report can differ.
• The UK subsidiary: XTB Limited’s own 2025 accounts, reported by Finance Magnates, show revenue of £8.64 million and profit after tax of £0.32 million. Small, but your protection rests on segregation and the FSCS, not on the UK company’s profit.

Profits swing with markets, because CFD market-making income depends on how clients’ trades go. A business earning hundreds of millions a year has every reason not to gamble with client money, but the volatility is real.

Has XTB been fined?

Yes, twice by the KNF, its home regulator. Neither case involved client money being lost through insolvency; both were about how XTB treated clients.

2018: PLN 9.9 million. The KNF found that between January 2014 and May 2015 XTB used an asymmetric deviation parameter on instant-execution orders, so price slippage worked against clients more often than for them, breaching best-execution rules. XTB disputed the finding, but the Warsaw administrative court dismissed its appeal and in 2023 Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court rejected its final appeal, making the fine final.

2026: PLN 20 million. First imposed on 30 March 2026 and confirmed after reconsideration on 28 August 2026, as reported by Finance Magnates. The KNF found that from January 2022 to August 2023 XTB did not properly check whether clients had the knowledge and experience for the products they traded, that it fell short in defining target markets (including concerns about its client-facing “HOT” list), and that information on CFD risks was unreliable or misleading. XTB booked the fine as a one-off cost in its first-quarter 2026 accounts.

The pattern is the one to watch: the regulator’s complaints cluster around CFD sales and execution, which is also where XTB makes most of its money.

What is not protected?

• Market losses. No compensation scheme pays out because a share or CFD fell in value.
• CFD losses beyond the account balance are prevented for retail clients, but losses up to the balance are entirely yours.
• Anything above the scheme limit: above £85,000 in the UK, or above roughly €20,000 for EU clients, you rely on segregation alone.
• Professional-client accounts, which give up negative balance protection and may lose scheme eligibility.
• Accounts with XTB International (Belize), which sit outside UK and EU protection.

Verdict

XTB is safe in the sense most people mean: it is authorised by the FCA, holds client money apart from its own, has the FSCS behind UK accounts, and publishes audited accounts as a listed company. Our trust score of 9.0 reflects that. The reservations are the two KNF fines, both about CFD conduct, and the plain fact that most retail CFD accounts lose money. For share and ETF investing on the UK entity, the protection is solid. The full assessment, including fees and the xStation platform, is in our XTB review.

If you are choosing between brokers on safety, the closest UK alternatives are set out in XTB vs Trading 212 (and is Trading 212 safe?), XTB vs eToro and Plus500 vs XTB, or see the full list of FCA-regulated trading platforms.

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CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. A majority of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.