Affiliate disclosure

Current position

As of the date on this page we have no affiliate agreements, referral agreements, revenue-share arrangements or paid placements with any broker listed on this site. Every outbound link to a broker is a plain link carrying rel="nofollow". We are not paid when you click one, and we are not paid if you open an account.

If that changes

We expect to enter affiliate relationships eventually — it is how independent publications in this category fund themselves without charging readers. The infrastructure is already built, and it is built so that a relationship changes what you see and never changes what we score. Specifically:

• The relationship is recorded in a single register in our codebase
• That broker’s link changes to carry rel="sponsored nofollow"
• A Paid link marker appears on that broker’s row, in every table, everywhere on the site — not buried in a footer
• This page lists the relationship, when it started, and how we are paid
• The score does not move

Why a payment cannot move a score

This is enforced by the structure of the code rather than by policy. The scoring engine imports the broker database and the weight profiles. It does not import the commercial register, which is a separate module. There is no path by which a commercial relationship can reach a sub-score, a weight or a ranking position.

Ranking order is computed at build time from published sub-scores and published weights, with ties broken on safety and then on cost. You can reproduce any total from the numbers printed on the page. A ranking that could be bought would not survive that test, which is the reason we publish the working.

Excluded from scoring regardless

• Sign-up bonuses and cash promotions — time-limited, and not a property of the account
• Deposit-match offers of any kind
• Advertising spend, brand size or market share
• Whether a broker engages with us at all

Coverage decisions

A broker is included because it is relevant to the question a page answers, never because it has an affiliate programme. 1 firm in our database — SoFi Invest — is researched and entity-verified but excluded from every ranking because we could not read its fee schedule. That exclusion is a data problem, not a commercial one, and it is stated plainly on its page.

What we decline

• Paid placement, paid ranking positions and paid inclusion
• Sponsored posts and guest posts
• Any agreement giving a broker approval over how it is described
• Link-building arrangements of any kind