United Kingdom · GB · Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

Investing from United Kingdom

The UK offers broader protection than the United States in one specific respect: the FSCS can compensate for bad investment advice, not only for assets going missing. What it does not do is protect you from an investment falling in value. We have not yet researched which brokers accept UK residents or which entity would hold the account, so there is no ranking on this page.

Written by: Juan Manuel Gonzalez
Published: August 31, 2026
Data verified: August 31, 2026

Investor protection — FSCS

£85,000 per eligible person, per firm

Applies to firms that failed on or after 1 April 2019. Unusually, it covers both a shortfall in money or assets held for you and losses caused by bad investment advice — the advice limb has no US equivalent. It does not cover poor investment performance, and it only applies where the firm was FCA or PRA authorised and the service was a regulated activity.

FSCS — What we cover: investments

What we verified

Read August 31, 2026

Regulator: Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), with the PRA for prudential supervision of some firms
Tax wrappers with no US analogue: The ISA and the SIPP are the wrappers most UK readers are actually choosing between. Neither maps onto a US account type, and a US-focused ranking cannot answer that question.
What changed after Brexit: Entity structures shifted materially. A broker's UK entity and its EU entity are frequently different companies under different regulators, which is exactly the distinction this page exists to flag.
The brand is not the company: Fidelity in the United States is Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC (CRD 7784), covered by SIPC to $500,000. Fidelity in the United Kingdom is Financial Administration Services Limited (FCA firm reference 122169, registered in England and Wales as 1629709), covered by the FSCS to £85,000. These are not the same company and not the same corporate group — the UK business sits under FIL Limited, which separated from Fidelity Investments decades ago. Reading our Fidelity review and then opening an account at fidelity.co.uk means contracting with a different firm than the one we scored. Fidelity UK — regulatory statement
Where the same company does carry across: Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited, FCA firm reference 208159, registered in England and Wales as 03958476, is a subsidiary of the same group as the Interactive Brokers LLC we scored — but it is still a separate legal person under a separate regulator, and FSCS rather than SIPC stands behind it. Its own disclosure also states that cryptoassets are unregulated in the UK, so nothing there is FSCS-covered. Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited — regulatory statement
Who a UK reader is actually choosing between: Not the firms we scored. The platforms with the largest UK retail followings — Hargreaves Lansdown Asset Management Limited (FCA 115248), Interactive Investor Services Limited (141282), AJ Bell Securities Limited (155593), Trading 212 UK Limited (609146) — mostly have no US presence, and the UK market competes on percentage-of-assets custody charges rather than per-trade commissions. That is why a ranking here has to be researched from scratch rather than translated, and why there is not one yet. FCA Financial Services Register
Why the reference number matters more here than the name: Reading the FCA register on 31 August 2026, we found explicit unauthorised-firm warnings sitting alongside the genuine entries for AJ Bell, interactive investor, Trading 212 and Vanguard Asset Management — clones using the real firm's name. A brand name is exactly what an impersonator copies; a firm reference number is what it cannot. Check the number, not the logo. FCA Financial Services Register
One brand can be two authorised firms: AJ Bell Securities Limited (155593) and AJ Bell Management Limited (211468) are separately authorised, share a Salford address, and both trade as “AJ Bell”. A customer sees one brand. Which company holds a given account decides whose failure the FSCS would be responding to — and it is not a question the marketing answers. Two further AJ Bell entities appear on the register as no longer authorised, as do the previous entities of Trading 212 and interactive investor, so checking a stale record can give a misleading answer about a firm that is perfectly sound. FCA Financial Services Register

Why there is no ranking on this page

Ranking brokers for United Kingdom means knowing which legal entity would hold a resident’s account — and for most global brands that is not the US broker-dealer whose name is on the app. It is a different company, under Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rather than the SEC, with different protection behind it. Publishing our US ranking here and changing the country name would be the single most misleading thing this site could do.

What is on this page instead is the part we could verify from primary sources: who regulates brokers here, and what happens to your assets if one fails. That is the question most comparison content skips, and it is the one that does not change with a fee schedule.

What has to be verified before we rank anything here

01Which legal entity of each broker would hold a resident's account, and its licence number with the local regulator
02Whether that entity publicly accepts residents of this country, and what identity documentation it requires
03Accepted deposit and withdrawal methods, and any local payment rails
04Available base currencies and the published currency conversion cost
05Which products are restricted or unavailable to residents
06General tax treatment of brokerage accounts held by residents, framed as background rather than advice

Scheduled for phase 2 of our market roadmap. In the meantime, our guide to investor protection covers what these schemes do and do not do, and why the entity matters more than the brand.

Affiliate disclosure

We currently have no affiliate or commercial relationship with any broker on this site, and every outbound link is a plain link. If that changes, it will be disclosed here and on the broker's row. Read the full disclosure.

Risk warning

Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Nothing on this site is personalized investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or a solicitation. Figures are read from public sources on the dates shown and can change without notice — verify anything you intend to act on with the provider directly. Read the full risk disclosure.