Gold (XAU/USD) at IC Markets From Pakistan: the Cost of Carry
Pakistan is onboarded to a Swap Free branch, and gold carries the largest published holding fee on the whole symbol list: USD 62 per lot per night. This page starts from that number and works back to margin, rollover time in PKT and the currency step a rupee budget meets first.
Open IC Markets Account →One lot of XAU/USD is 100 ounces, so at an illustrative gold price of USD 4,300 an ounce a single lot carries USD 430,000 of notional value. Leverage on MetaTrader is banded rather than flat, and the first 0-25 lots sit in the 1:5000 band: three gold lots, USD 1,290,000 of notional, lock roughly USD 258 of margin. Leave those three lots open for ten nights on a Swap Free account and the published flat holding fee of USD 62 per lot per night adds USD 1,860 - about seven times the margin that opened the position.
Why this page starts with carry rather than entry
Entry is cheap and loudly advertised: Raw Spread charges USD 3.50 per lot per side, USD 7.00 for the round turn. Carry is neither cheap nor advertised. Pakistan is onboarded to a branch the brand registration feed marks eligible for Swap Free, and on that account a single night on one gold lot costs about nine round turns, with nothing on the order ticket saying so. Everything below is arranged around that figure: platforms, bands and minimums follow the cost of holding, instead of leading.
The step before any of it
There is no rupee rail and no PKR balance here. The account settles in one of ten base currencies, none of them Pakistani, and SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022 treats remitting funds to an offshore CFD platform as a breach of section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, instructing banks to identify and block such payments. That is a fact about the payment leg, not about the metal.
Trading gold (XAU/USD) at IC Markets — key facts
| Gold at IC Markets, read from Pakistan | |
|---|---|
| Instrument | XAU/USD, spot gold as a CFD, one lot equal to 100 ounces |
| Max leverage | Banded by size: 1:5000 to 25 lots, 1:3000 from 25 to 50, 1:1000 past that on MetaTrader; cTrader fixed at 1:1000 |
| Platforms | MetaTrader 4, 5 and WebTrader stamped out of New York; cTrader and TradingView out of London; plus the IC mobile app |
| Minimum deposit | Nothing at all on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread or Standard; USD 5,000 for Raw Pro and USD 100,000 for Raw Pro+ |
Every figure here was read from the brand pages on 2 September 2026 and is indicative: spread, commission and margin all move intraday, and the Swap Free holding fee is set symbol by symbol rather than per account. Gold at USD 62 per lot per night is the largest published entry on that table; silver (XAGUSD) sits at USD 9 and the US30 index at USD 25. Confirm the live figures inside your own platform before trading.
What a gold lot costs to keep open, night by night
- One lot is 100 ounces of XAU/USD, cash-settled as a CFD: you hold the price exposure long or short and never take delivery of metal.
- The symbol is quoted on MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, MetaTrader WebTrader, cTrader, TradingView and the IC mobile app, but the rollover stamp differs by platform: MetaTrader answers to servers in Equinix NY4 in New York, cTrader to servers in London.
- Margin is banded by size, not fixed: the first 0-25 lots draw 1:5000, the next 25-50 lots draw 1:3000 and anything past 50 lots draws 1:1000 on MetaTrader, with cTrader held at 1:1000 across the whole range - so a large gold position locks noticeably more than the headline ratio suggests.
- Opening the account costs nothing on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread and Standard, USD 5,000 on Raw Pro and USD 100,000 on Raw Pro+ - yet a gold lot left open across ten nights on Swap Free costs USD 620 whichever of those you picked.