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Tickmill vs IC Markets

One instrument and one window, measured on accounts we hold ourselves. Green marks the better number on that row, not the better broker.

EUR/USD · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · profile 10 lots a month

Axis	Tickmill	IC Markets
Annual cost	$722 spread + commission · Raw · MT5	$910 spread + commission · Raw Spread · MT5
Avg spread, 07:00–20:00 UTC	0.00 pips 45 821 samples · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC	0.06 pips 28 851 samples · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC
Spread 21:00–24:00 UTC	1.12 pips rollover hours · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC	0.84 pips rollover hours · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC
Commission per lot	$6.00 fee schedule · 2026-10-13	$7.00 fee schedule · 2026-10-13

Both brokers on this page are measured and named in full, and neither is linked: we have no commercial relationship with either, and sending you to one of them would be the quickest way to make these numbers worth less than the time it took to take them.

The trade-off, in money

The table above is colour-coded by axis, which makes it easy to read and easy to misread: a column of green cells on one side do not mean that side is cheaper or better, because the axes are not worth the same amount of money.

On annual cost of ownership, Tickmill is $187 a year cheaper at 10 lots a month — $722 at Tickmill against $910 at IC Markets. Inside those totals, Tickmill pays $2 in spread and $720 in commission, while IC Markets pays $70 and $840 — the same two components in different proportions, which is why the ranking between them is a question about volume rather than about brokers.

The two accounts behave differently once the session ends. Between 21:00 and 24:00 UTC Tickmill averaged 1.12 pips and IC Markets 0.84 — against 0.002 and 0.058 in the liquid session. Tickmill is the wider of the two in that band by 0.28 pips, roughly $3 on a standard lot, charged on every lot opened or closed inside it.

No broker publishes this band, because it is the worst number it has. A spread quoted “from 0.0 pips” is a statement about the London afternoon. What a position held through midnight pays is the band above, and the only way to know it is to record every second of it on an account you hold yourself. Whether that cost reaches you depends entirely on when your orders go in.

Neither account is “better”. A high-volume day trader who is flat overnight should weight the commission; somebody who holds positions past the New York close should weight the rollover band, where the cheaper account on the bill is not necessarily the cheaper one to hold. Both columns are printed in the same type size because the weighting is yours to apply.

Axis by axis

The same axes as the table, unrolled into sentences, with the winner named on each. There is no overall score: inventing one would let us bury a loss inside an average.

The entities behind these two accounts

An account is measured; a company is regulated. Those are different objects, and the difference is the most consequential thing on a page like this: two clients of the same brand, onboarded through different entities, can have identical platforms, identical spreads and materially different protection if the firm fails.

Each confirmed entity gets the regulator's own sentences on its broker page — compensation, leverage, close-out, negative balance — rather than our summary of them. Where we cannot establish the entity we say so rather than guessing, and the figures remain a record of the account itself.

The measurement behind this pairing

The comparison is only worth reading because both sides went through the same pipeline at the same time. Figures taken weeks apart, or on different pairs, can disagree by more than the brokers do.

Here it is EUR/USD on both sides, 2026-10-12T19:08:17Z to 2026-10-13T17:13:27Z continuous, on the Raw · MT5 account at Tickmill against the Raw Spread · MT5 account at IC Markets — both opened through the ordinary retail sign-up, both running on the broker's own MetaTrader 5 build on hardware that does not sleep.

Only one side of this pairing has a publishable execution sample, so the execution axes are not compared. The side that is missing says why on the axis itself, and the cost axes — which come from the quote stream rather than from order probes — are compared in full.

It is one instrument: EUR/USD is the most liquid pair in the market, and a broker that looks tight here can be much wider on a cross or a metal, where its own margin is less exposed. And it is one window: a month of measurement is a month, not a permanent property of either firm. Hence the window printed beside every number rather than declared once in small print.

What this comparison rests on

Two averages are only comparable if they cover the same time. The figures above are taken over 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC — the period both of these accounts were recording — and averaged over the 16 hours of the day they both measured, of which 6 fall inside the liquid session and 3 at the rollover. Hours only one of them recorded are left out entirely: an hour measured on one side is not a comparison, and including it would make the collection schedule part of the result.

Account	Samples with both sides	Window recorded	Bid equals ask
Tickmill Raw · MT5	45,821	100%	98%
IC Markets Raw Spread · MT5	28,851	70%	45%

EUR/USD · samples are one-second bid/ask observations inside the shared window · “window recorded” is the share of the window's market hours that hold samples on that account

The lower figure in the third column is the limit on this page. IC Markets holds the smaller share of the window here, and whatever it did not record cannot be in its average. The gap is not an estimate filled in later: a missing hour stays missing, the hour is dropped for both accounts, and the figures move when the window grows rather than when we decide they should.

The fourth column is the one people misread. A high share of samples where bid equals ask means the spread is sitting on the floor of the price grid, which is exactly what a commission account is for: the broker is paid per lot instead of through the price. It makes the spread column small and the commission column decisive, and it is the reason this site compares the total rather than the spread.

The same comparison at six volumes

The bill on either account is the cost of a lot times the number of lots, with no standing charge to spread over them. Our headline profile — 10 lots a month — is one point on it, and a reader who trades a tenth or ten times that is reading the wrong point. Here is the same arithmetic at six volumes, with our profile marked.

Spread × $10 per pip per lot, plus commission per lot · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · every component scales with volume, which is what makes the lines cross at all

Both bills are now pure functions of volume: every dollar in them is charged per lot, so the ranking does not flip anywhere. Tickmill costs $6.02 a lot against IC Markets's $7.58 — 1.3 times the cost per lot, and that ratio holds at one lot a month and at a hundred. What volume changes is the size of the gap in dollars, not its direction. A reader who holds through the rollover is on a different line altogether, which is why that band is measured separately.

Two cautions about reading this table. It assumes the measured spread holds at your volume, which is reasonable for retail size and stops being reasonable well before institutional size. And it is an average over all hours: a strategy that lives in the thin hours either side of midnight UTC pays a materially larger bill than this.

The rollover penalty, priced

The annual figures above use each account average across all hours. Nobody trades all hours, and the thin ones are much more expensive than the rest. Tickmill goes from 0.00 to 1.12 pips in that window; IC Markets from 0.06 to 0.84. Below is the same annual sum with a share of the volume moved into those hours.

Spread blended between the window mean and the rollover mean in the stated proportion · commission unchanged · 10 lots a month

At a fifth of the volume in the thin hours, the penalty is $269 a year on Tickmill and $189 on IC Markets — Tickmill carries the heavier one. It is also the component most sensitive to automation: a strategy that does not know what time it is pays it in full.

Two caveats. The blend assumes the rest of your volume behaves like our all-hours average, and it assumes the rollover mean holds on the days it matters - around a major release it can be far worse than any monthly mean.

Where this pair sits in the population

Comparing two accounts with each other says nothing about whether either is any good. Both can be mid-table. So here are the same two accounts placed against every account we measure, axis by axis. Tickmill leads the whole table on annual cost; Tickmill leads the whole table on avg spread, 07:00–20:00 utc.

Placings inside one source class · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · the full ranking is on the brokers page

The whole table is ten accounts, and the sort order on the front page is annual cost - so a reader who only wants the cheapest bill does not need this page at all.

What this pairing does not tell you

It is not a recommendation, and it is not a verdict on either firm. It is a record of what two accounts did on one instrument during one stated window, published by a desk that earns a commission if a reader opens an account at IC Markets and nothing at all if they open one at Tickmill. That is why the method is written out rather than summarised: a reader has to be able to find the places we could have cheated.

Plenty that matters is missing: how fast money comes out, what support does at three in the morning, how the platform behaves in a real panic, and how either firm handles a disputed fill. Some of that is outside anything a retail account can show at all; the rest is work this rig has not done yet. “Which broker is better” is a much larger claim than anything on this page, and it is not one a measurement can settle.

Questions this comparison raises