Forex brokers by country: regulators, legal status and local rules

Each guide ranks brokers for that market, explains the legal position, and shows local market hours. Kenya and South Africa have active local licensing, so you can look up a broker yourself. Nigeria's SEC published proposed rules in September 2026, and Ghana's SEC set a licensing deadline of 31 August 2026 for online trading platforms.

Pick your country below. If yours is not listed, the licence advice still applies: find your own regulator's public register, and search for the legal company name on your account agreement. A brand name alone proves nothing, because one brand can run 5 or more companies under very different rules.

Kenya's CMA has licensed online forex firms since its 2017 regulations, with capital requirements of KSh 50 million for dealing brokers and KSh 30 million for non-dealing brokers. South Africa's FSCA uses FSP numbers, and it requires a separate derivative provider authorisation for firms issuing CFDs as principal. Both publish searchable lists.

The UK, the USA, Australia, Canada and the UAE all run full licensing, with leverage caps from 30:1 to 50:1 on majors. Uganda and Tanzania have no retail forex licence yet.

Nigeria's proposed rules would require N3 billion for market-maker brokers and cap retail leverage at 1:400 on major pairs. Ghana's SEC directive covers online investment and trading platforms, while its central bank treats unauthorised online forex business as a breach of the Foreign Exchange Act. Those last two are moving quickly, so read the current notices.

Choosing forex brokers by country means reading the rules first, since they shape every other choice.

A local licence gives you a regulator in your own country, working in your own time zone and legal system. That matters most when a withdrawal stalls. Several brokers on our Kenya page hold CMA licences, and Exness, HFM and AvaTrade show FSP numbers on our South Africa page.

An offshore licence from Seychelles, St. Vincent or Vanuatu offers much thinner protection, and a complaint runs through a foreign body with little reason to hurry. Traders in Nigeria and Ghana have no local option yet, so keep balances modest, and diversify across brokers once your account grows past USD 1,000.

Local payment access is the hardest fact to confirm, as brokers rarely publish it by country. Deriv lists M-Pesa from USD 5 to USD 1,000 and MTN from USD 5 to USD 150, and Exness promotes M-Pesa on its Kenyan pages. Most other brokers show only global routes such as cards, wires, Skrill and Neteller.

Trust the deposit screen in your client area above any social media post. Compare the rate you get with our mid-market converter, since a 3% conversion gap costs more than the spread on most small trades. Test a USD 20 deposit and a USD 10 withdrawal early, so you know how the route behaves.

Our other calculators turn those costs into pips, and our feature shortlists show who publishes which route.

Our African markets sit between UTC+0 and UTC+3, so the busiest forex hours fall inside the African working day. The London and New York overlap runs 13:00 to 17:00 UTC in standard time, which is the afternoon in Lagos and Accra, and late afternoon into evening in Johannesburg and Nairobi.

Our market hours tool shows the current sessions in your own time zone. The forex broker comparison on our home page reorders its list when you choose your country in the finder, so you can start from whichever suits you.

Forex brokers by country also list these hours in local time on each guide.