The question the market is actually pricing in XTB is whether the company is still a contract-for-difference market maker or the mass-market savings app its own marketing now describes. XTB answers that question itself, in writing, twice a year, because it is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and has no choice. The answer sits in the half-year report the management board signed on 27 August 2026. In the six months to 30 June, XTB S.A. booked PLN 2,086.6m of operating income. PLN 2,024.6m of it was the net result from operations on financial instruments, the line that captures market making, spread and swap points. PLN 46.0m was interest on client cash. Fee and commission income, meaning every explicit charge XTB levies on a client, came to PLN 16.0m. That is 0.77% of the top line. XTB is not commission-free because it found a cheaper way to bill you. It is commission-free because commission is not where the money is.
Divide the trading result by the volume that produced it and you get the number no competitor review carries, because no competitor publishes the inputs. XTB's clients traded 4,154,831 CFD lots in the first half of 2026, and XTB's own metrics table prices each at PLN 459. At the European Central Bank reference rate for 4 September 2026, PLN 4.3148 to the euro, that is €106.38 a lot. The useful comparison is not against a rival's advertised spread. It is against XTB's own history: PLN 251 a lot in the first half of 2025, PLN 215 across the whole of 2025, PLN 275 in 2024. Lot volume fell 1.8% year on year. Revenue rose 79.7%. Clients did not trade more in 2026. Each lot they did trade simply cost them 83% more than it had a year earlier.
Key facts
- Revenue per CFD lot was PLN 459 (€106.38) in H1 2026, against PLN 251 in H1 2025 and PLN 215 for full-year 2025 — XTB S.A. current report 18/2026, 29 July 2026
- Fee and commission income was PLN 16.0m, 0.77% of PLN 2,086.6m operating income; the market-making result was 97.0% — H1 2026 half-year financial statements, signed 27 August 2026
- Commodity CFDs produced 75.3% of the gross result on instruments, up from 33.1% a year earlier — current report 18/2026, 29 July 2026
- The KNF's PLN 20m fine on XTB became final on 28 August 2026, one day after XTB signed accounts calling it non-final — KNF register of 2026 penalties, updated 4 September 2026
- The spread column in XTB's 52-page UK specification table reads "variable" 128 times and carries no number at all — xtb.com/en/table-uk.pdf, retrieved 7 September 2026
- Inactivity fee is €10 a month, and only bites after 365 days without a trade and 90 days without a deposit — Table of XTB's Commissions and Fees dated 29.06.2026, retrieved 7 September 2026
- Poland supplied 57.4% of group revenue in H1 2026, central and eastern Europe 73.1% — H1 2026 financial statements, note 6.3
The fact box
| Group parent | XTB S.A., Prosta 67, Warsaw; listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange as XTB |
| Home regulator | Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF), authorisation dated 8 November 2005 |
| Client-facing entities | XTB Limited (UK), XTB Limited (Cyprus), XTB International Limited (Belize), XTB MENA Limited (DIFC) |
| Clients | 2,825,700 total, 1,489,872 active in H1 2026; assets €11.7bn |
| Retail leverage | 1:30 on the UK entity, 1:500 on the Belize entity |
| Published loss rate | 74% of retail accounts (UK site), 77% (Cyprus site) |
| Rating | 3.4 out of 5 |
What a lot costs, and what XTB will tell you it costs
Set the €106 against the schedule a prospective client actually reads. XTB's UK trading-conditions page, retrieved 7 September 2026, lists CFD commission at 0%, stock and ETF commission at zero up to €100,000 of monthly turnover and 0.2% thereafter, no custody fee below €250,000, free deposits and withdrawals, and a 0.5% currency conversion fee. Nothing on that page is untrue. Nothing on it is material either. A client would have to convert €21,000 of profit at 0.5% to hand XTB what one average CFD lot handed it.
The currency conversion fee is the only cost in this peer group that all but one broker publishes as a hard number. XTB charges 0.5%, at the cheap end.
The wider cost picture, every figure from that broker's own live page and not from a comparison site. Figures retrieved 7 September 2026 from xtb.com, helpcentre.trading212.com, capital.com, plus500.com, ig.com/uk/charges and etoro.com.
| Broker and entity | Currency conversion | Inactivity fee | Published EUR/USD spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| XTB Limited (UK) and XTB International Ltd (Belize) | 0.50% | €10/month after 365 days without a trade and 90 days without a deposit | None. Spec table says "variable" |
| Trading 212 (CFD account) | 0.50% | None | None. "Spreads are dynamic" |
| Capital Com Online Investments Ltd | 0.70% retail, 0.50% Pro | Not published on the charges page | None |
| Plus500CY Ltd | Up to 0.70% of realised net profit and loss | Up to US$10/month after three months without a login | Behind the platform login |
| IG Markets Ltd (CFD account) | 0.80% | Free | 0.6 minimum |
| eToro | Not published | Free | None |
One broker in this table publishes an FX spread figure on a public page. IG puts EUR/USD at a 0.6 minimum where anyone can read it before opening an account. The rest call the spread dynamic, gate it behind a login, or, in XTB's case, write "variable" and move on. Any review showing a tidy EUR/USD spread column for all of these firms is quoting an aggregator, not the brokers, a trap our ActivTrades review ran into from the other side.
Every spread cell in the book reads "variable"
XTB's Table of Commissions and Fees, dated 29 June 2026, is nine pages of genuine detail: the inactivity trigger to the day, the 0.5% conversion mark-up with three worked examples, a 0.30% mark-up baked into stock CFD quotes with half taken from the bid and half added to the ask. It is more specific than most competitors manage. Then, in section 7, it says this: "Other costs connected with Transactions in XTB e.g. Spreads, swap points, overnight financing or other commissions and fees, which the Client shall pay to XTB are described in others Condition Tables and Swap points/overnight financing table available on XTB's Website."
Follow that pointer. The Specification Table of CFD derivatives on currencies, indices and commodities runs to 52 pages on the UK site. It gives nominal lot values, pip sizes, minimum order sizes and trading hours for 128 instruments. The rightmost column is headed "Spread". Every cell in it, EUR/USD included, contains the single word "variable".
The swap table is the exception, and it is where XTB's cost disclosure is genuinely good. The Table of Swap Points Rates effective 31 August 2026 prices a long EUR/USD position on a Standard account at −0.008198% of nominal per day and a short at −0.000133%. On one lot of €100,000 that is €8.20 a day to hold the long side and 13 cents to hold the short, or 2.99% and 0.05% annualised. Both sides pay. Hold that long lot a month and the swap alone comes to roughly €246. Overnight financing is the published cost that matters most here, and the one nobody reads.
What the KNF actually found
Start with what changed on 28 August. The KNF's own register of 2026 penalties, updated 4 September, carries XTB S.A. at row 8 with a fine of PLN 20,000,000 and this note: on 28 August the Commission issued a final decision upholding its decision of 30 March. XTB's half-year accounts, signed on 27 August, describe the same penalty as non-final and under reconsideration. That was accurate when the board signed. It stopped being accurate the next day, and XTB has published no current report saying so.
The four counts repay reading in the original rather than in summary. Between January 2022 and September 2023, the KNF found that XTB assessed inadequately whether clients had the knowledge to understand the risks of what they were being sold; failed to define the target market for its instruments proportionately; failed to identify reliably the conflict of interest around the "HOT list" it published to clients while executing their orders on its own account; and gave clients "unreliable and misleading information regarding the financial instruments that are the subject of the brokerage services provided by this firm, as well as regarding all risks associated with contracts for difference".
PLN 20m is roughly €4.6m, 1.9% of half-year net profit, about three and a half days of earnings, and the largest KNF penalty of 2026 against a standalone brokerage. It is not the only open file. The Czech National Bank closed an inspection of the Prague branch with a non-final CZK 2.0m penalty XTB has appealed. Spain's CNMV has inspected the Spanish and Portuguese branches on anti-money-laundering compliance. The DFSA finished an AML review of XTB MENA on 6 April 2026, recommendations still being implemented.
On the registers themselves: the KNF's own list of Polish brokerage houses carries XTB S.A., formerly X-Trade Brokers Dom Maklerski S.A., at ul. Prosta 67 with an authorisation dated 8 November 2005, and the activity codes on that entry do not include investment advice or discretionary portfolio management. The CySEC register lists XTB Ltd, licence 169/12, granted 18 April 2012, company number 296794. The DFSA register carries XTB MENA Limited under reference F006316, licensed 8 July 2021, with dealing as principal restricted to matched-principal business only. Companies House confirms XTB Limited, number 07227848, active since 19 April 2010, at One Canada Square. The FCA publishes firm reference 522157 for XTB Limited on its own clone-warning pages, so the number is real, but the register itself met every route I tried with a Cloudflare challenge or a 403. The Belize licence I could not verify at all: the FSC's register sits behind an API that returns access denied.
Two different companies are called XTB Limited
The half-year accounts name XTB Limited in Great Britain and XTB Limited in Cyprus, the latter filed at CySEC as XTB Ltd. Separate legal persons, different supervisors, different numbers: the UK site states that 74% of retail accounts lose money, the Cyprus site 77%.
The offshore arrangement matters more than the naming. XTB International Limited sits in Belize and the accounts are explicit about its role: it "acquires clients from Latin America and the rest of the world (without Europe)", regions supplying 7.7% of group revenue. Its own commission table, dated 29 April 2026, is not the British document. Leverage runs to 1:500 rather than 1:30. Custody above €250,000 costs 0.2% a year rather than 0.02%, a factor of ten. Withdrawals below US$50 carry a US$30 charge, so a client taking out US$40 surrenders three quarters of it.
None of it is hidden. All of it is published, in a PDF, on a site most European clients will never see, under a brand whose British page says withdrawals are free. The pattern rhymes with ThinkMarkets, though XTB's version is cleaner: the European client does get the European entity.
What the savings-app story leaves out
XTB's H1 press release says that "83% of new users now prioritize stocks, ETFs, or personal Investment Plans, while dependency on CFD transactions is gradually decreasing". Client assets did reach €11.7bn. The roadmap is real: ISAs in Britain, PEA in France, 190,000 IKE accounts in Poland, options in six markets.
Then look at the revenue split in the same filing. CFDs produced 95.98% of the gross result on financial instruments, commodity CFDs alone 75.3%, up from 33.1% a year earlier, on gold, silver, crude and cocoa. The stocks-and-ETFs business that 83% of new clients came for generated the PLN 16.0m fee line, 0.77% of revenue. Both statements are true at once: most new clients arrive for the investing product, and almost none of the money comes from them.
That is not a criticism of the accounting. It is the market maker model working as designed, and XTB describes it plainly in the same document: a business that "combines features of the agency model and the market maker model, in which the Company is a party to transactions concluded and initiated by clients". When a retail trader loses on a commodity CFD, the counterparty is usually XTB. That is legal, disclosed and normal here. It is also why the per-lot number nearly doubled in a volatile half without clients trading an extra lot.
Omar Arnaout, CEO of XTB S.A., put the strategy this way in the H1 results release on 29 July 2026: "we intend to develop XTB as the first-choice application for people who want to invest, save, and manage their finances in one place." Marketing cost PLN 435.5m in the half, 49.2% of all operating expenses, at an average acquisition cost of PLN 619 a client. Paweł Szejko, the management board member responsible for finance, told the results press conference on 30 July that XTB is "maintaining our intention to recommend future dividend payouts at a level of 50 to as much as 100 percent of standalone net profit", as reported by Strefa Inwestorów. Standalone profit for the half was PLN 1,021.1m. The sponsorships, the dividend and the €106 per lot are one cash flow at three points on its journey.
Pros and cons
What XTB does better than its peer group. It publishes audited half-year accounts, quarterly KPI tables and a per-lot revenue figure, so an outsider can price its economics without guessing. No private CFD broker here discloses anything comparable. Withdrawals on the UK entity are free, negative balance protection is stated, custody is free below €250,000, and stock commission genuinely is zero below €100,000 of monthly turnover. Capital ratio 197.8% at 30 June.
RelatedEightcap Review 2026: €75 in Costs, No Published Swaps
What it does worse. It publishes no spread. Not an average, not a typical, not a maximum, on any instrument, on any entity, anywhere on its own site. A trader cannot compute the cost of a EUR/USD round turn at XTB from XTB's own documents, a strange gap at a firm that discloses its per-lot take to the zloty. The KNF has now found against it, finally, on client-facing disclosure. The Belize schedule carries fees the British one does not.
The verdict
I rate XTB 3.4 out of 5, and the two halves of that score point in opposite directions.
As a counterparty, XTB is among the strongest retail brokers a European trader can reach: supervised in Warsaw, listed, audited, profitable at a 49.2% net margin, carrying a capital ratio near 200%. Money held there is unlikely to disappear for balance-sheet reasons, which is more than a good part of this industry can say. For a client who buys and holds shares below €100,000 a month, the all-in cost is close to zero apart from the 0.5% conversion fee.
As a price, XTB is opaque in exactly the place that matters. On the evidence of two consecutive half-years, an active CFD trader pays a three-figure euro sum per lot in spread and swap without ever seeing a spread quoted in advance. The benign reading is that the €106 average is inflated by an extraordinary commodity half and reverts toward the PLN 215 of full-year 2025, near €50 a lot. The harsher one is that it does not revert, because the mix has shifted to commodity CFDs where spreads are wider, and 2026 becomes the new base.
What would change my mind is one document: an average or typical spread table, per instrument, per entity, on xtb.com. XTB discloses more about its profitability than any competitor here and declines to disclose the number that produces it. Publish that table and the rating moves up. The KNF decision going final on 28 August is already priced into the 3.4; a second finding on client-facing disclosure, or a repeat of the misleading-information count, moves it down further. Our Capital.com review and Swissquote review sit at opposite ends of the same question.
FAQ
Is XTB actually commission-free?
On CFDs, yes, in the literal sense: the published commission is 0%, and on stocks and ETFs it is zero below €100,000 of turnover a month. The filings show what that means in practice. Fee and commission income was PLN 16.0m in H1 2026 against PLN 2,086.6m of operating income. The revenue arrives as spread, swap and the market-making result, not as a line item on a contract note.
What does one CFD lot cost at XTB?
XTB does not publish a per-lot cost, and its specification table lists every spread as "variable". It publishes the reverse view: net CFD trading result divided by lots traded, PLN 459 (€106.38) in H1 2026 and PLN 215 for 2025. That is an average across all instruments, not a quote for any single trade.
Which XTB entity will a client deal with?
It depends on the country page. British clients contract with XTB Limited in London, Cypriot and several EU clients with XTB Limited in Cyprus, Polish clients with XTB S.A. in Warsaw, and Latin American clients with XTB International Limited in Belize. The Belize schedule carries a US$30 fee on withdrawals under US$50 and permits 1:500 leverage. The British one does neither.
Is the KNF penalty still open?
No. The KNF upheld it on 28 August 2026, making the 30 March decision final. XTB's half-year accounts, signed the day before, still describe it as non-final, and no subsequent current report corrects that. The PLN 20m is about €4.6m and 1.9% of half-year net profit. The financial impact is trivial; the finding on client-facing disclosure is not.
Disclaimer
This review is analysis and information, not investment advice or a recommendation to open an account with any broker named in it. Contracts for difference are leveraged products and carry a high risk of rapid loss; XTB's own UK site states that 74% of retail investor accounts lose money trading CFDs with the firm. Every fee, spread and regulatory figure above was retrieved on 7 September 2026 from the source named beside it and may change without notice. Capital is at risk.