Margin is the slice of your balance a broker locks up as collateral while a gold position is open — not the amount you can lose, and not the cost of the trade. Enter your lot size, entry price and leverage below to see exactly how much of your account the position will hold, and how much stays free.
Same position, same price, six leverage tiers. The notional never moves — only the collateral behind it does.
| Leverage | Margin % | Margin required | Margin per lot |
|---|
Every leveraged gold trade carries two numbers. The first is the notional value: the full dollar amount the position controls. One standard XAU/USD lot is 100 troy ounces, so at $4,180 an ounce a single lot represents $418,000 of exposure. Nobody funds that from their own pocket. Instead the broker accepts a deposit — the margin — as security, and the rest is effectively borrowed for the life of the trade.
The second number is the margin requirement, which is simply the notional divided by the leverage you selected. At 100:1 the $418,000 position needs $4,180 of collateral; at 500:1 it needs $836. Both give you identical exposure to the gold price. The difference is how much of your account is frozen, and therefore how much room you have before the position is closed against your will.
Margin is not cost. It is refundable: it returns to your available balance when the position settles, minus any loss. It is not a fee, commission or spread. Traders who treat margin as "the price of the trade" misjudge their risk, because a position holding $4,180 of margin can lose far more than $4,180 if price runs against it.
For a standard gold lot, the contract size is 100 ounces, which reduces to a convenient shortcut: one lot at $4,000 with 100:1 leverage holds $4,000 of margin, because the 100 ounces and the 100:1 leverage cancel out. That shortcut is why gold margin is often described as "the price, per lot, at 100:1".
Three inputs move the result, and they move it in different directions:
Contract size matters when you are not trading a standard lot. A mini lot is 10 ounces and a micro lot is 1 ounce, so 0.10 mini lots and 0.01 standard lots both represent one ounce. Checking that field against your platform's specification avoids a tenfold sizing error.
You want to buy 0.50 lots of XAU/USD at $4,180 with 200:1 leverage on a $5,000 account. The notional is 0.50 × 100 × 4,180 = $209,000. Divide by 200 and the required margin is $1,045 — about 21% of the account. Free margin is $3,955, and the margin level sits at 478%, comfortably above any liquidation threshold.
Now the same trade at 20:1. The notional is unchanged at $209,000, but the margin is $10,450, more than twice the account balance. The order would be rejected or filled at a smaller size. Nothing about the trade idea changed; only the collateral rule did.
Finally, consider what a $5 move in gold does to that 0.50 lot position: fifty ounces times five dollars is $250, roughly a quarter of the margin held at 200:1. That ratio, dollar risk against margin held, is the number that tells you whether the leverage you chose is sensible.
Equity is your balance plus or minus open profit and loss. Margin is what the broker reserves. Free margin is the difference — the only part of the account available for new positions or for absorbing losses. Margin level expresses equity as a percentage of used margin, and every broker sets a threshold below which positions close automatically, often between 50% and 100%.
Because margin level is a ratio, it deteriorates quickly when leverage is high. At 500:1 a 0.5% adverse move in gold can wipe out half of the collateral behind the position; at 20:1 the same move costs a tenth as much relative to margin. This is the real trade-off of leverage: not the ability to open a bigger position, but the distance between your entry and the point where the platform takes control of your exit.
Margin requirements on XAUAD are reserved when a position opens and released when it settles. Leverage tiers and any size-dependent requirements are listed on the trading specifications page; the numbers here are illustrative and assume a fixed leverage per position.
Treat margin as a constraint, not a target. Size the trade from the risk side first — how many dollars you are willing to lose if the stop is hit — then check that the margin fits inside the balance. If it eats more than a fifth of the account, the position is too large or the leverage too aggressive.
For the sizing step, the position size calculator converts a risk percentage into lots. For the mechanics behind leverage tiers and margin calls, see leverage and liquidation in the academy. When you are ready to put a number on a live chart, the gold trading page shows the current bid and ask.
Multiply lots by the contract size (100 ounces for a standard lot) by the gold price, then divide by the leverage. One lot at $4,180 with 100:1 leverage requires $4,180 of margin; 0.10 lots at the same price and leverage requires $418.
No. Leverage changes only how much collateral is reserved, never the notional exposure. At 500:1 the same lot size needs one fifth of the margin it needs at 100:1, so a given dollar loss consumes five times as much of the reserved collateral — which pushes the liquidation price much closer to your entry.
Required margin is the collateral locked behind open positions. Free margin is equity minus that collateral, and it is what remains available to open new trades or absorb adverse moves. When free margin reaches zero, the margin level has hit 100% and the account is at the edge of a margin call.