The True Cost of a 100% Deposit Bonus: The Turnover Maths Most Traders Skip

A 100% deposit bonus is the most effective marketing instrument in retail brokerage, and the least understood product a trader ever accepts. It is not free capital. It is a loan of margin priced in transaction costs, and the price is written in the turnover clause almost nobody reads to the end.

What you are actually agreeing to

The typical structure: deposit $5,000, receive $5,000 in bonus credit, and unlock it by trading a required volume — commonly expressed as lots per unit of bonus. A representative condition is 1 standard lot per $100 of bonus. On a $5,000 bonus, that is 50 standard lots before any of it becomes withdrawable.

Price it in spread, not in lots

Fifty lots sounds abstract. Convert it into what it costs you at the round-turn cost of your account and it stops being abstract immediately.

• One standard lot of EUR/USD at a 1.0 pip all-in cost ≈ $10 per round turn.
• 50 lots × $10 = $500 in transaction costs to release a $5,000 bonus.
• At a 1.6 pip all-in cost — common on bonus-eligible accounts — the same requirement costs $800.
• Trade a wider instrument such as GBP/JPY at 3 pips and the same 50 lots costs roughly $1,500.

So the bonus is not free; it costs somewhere between 10% and 30% of its face value in guaranteed, certain expense, paid to the same firm that issued it. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on whether you were going to trade that volume anyway.

The volume trap

This is where accounts die. A trader who normally turns over 8 lots a month accepts a 50-lot condition and, consciously or not, starts trading to hit the number. Position sizes rise, marginal setups get taken, and the strategy that produced the deposit stops being the strategy being traded.

If a bonus changes how much you trade, it has already cost you more than it can ever pay.

The only bonus worth accepting is one whose turnover requirement sits comfortably below your existing monthly volume — meaning you would have paid those transaction costs regardless.

Read these five clauses before the headline number

1. Withdrawable or credit-only? Credit-only bonuses inflate usable margin but can never be withdrawn. They increase how large a position you can open, which is not the same as increasing your capital.
2. What happens on drawdown? Many agreements remove the bonus proportionally, or entirely, once equity falls below the original deposit — withdrawing the margin precisely when it was doing something useful.
3. Is early withdrawal penalised? Withdrawing your own funds before the turnover is met commonly voids the bonus, and on some terms voids the profit made using it.
4. Is there an expiry? A 30- or 60-day window converts a marketing offer into a deadline, and deadlines are what push traders into size.
5. Which trades count? Hedged positions, trades closed within a few minutes, and certain instruments are routinely excluded from turnover calculations.

When a bonus is genuinely worth taking

• The required turnover is below what you already trade in the qualifying period.
• The bonus is withdrawable, not credit-only, and survives a normal drawdown.
• The account’s all-in cost is competitive with the same broker’s non-bonus account — verify this, it frequently is not.
• The firm is regulated somewhere with a functioning complaints process.
• Nothing about the offer changes your position sizing.

Fail any one of these and the correct decision is to decline the bonus and negotiate on cost instead. A permanent 0.2 pip reduction in spread is worth more over a year than almost any one-off credit, and brokers grant it far more readily than their marketing suggests.

The alternative worth asking for

Rebates. A per-lot cashback of $3–$7 paid on every round turn is unconditional, withdrawable, and does not require you to trade a single extra lot. For an active trader it usually beats a headline bonus by a wide margin — and unlike a bonus, it improves the economics of the strategy you already run rather than distorting it.

Bonus terms are set by the provider and change without notice; verify current conditions directly before depositing. This is research, not advice — see our risk and affiliate disclosure.