The short answer
Some forex brokers restrict trading around high-impact news because spreads widen structurally as liquidity providers pull their quotes, and the broker simply cannot fill orders at calm-market prices during the few minutes a release lands. The restriction is a consequence of how the market is built, not a tactic aimed at the trader (forexbastion).
The heavy releases that trigger it are the scheduled ones, chiefly Non-Farm Payrolls, FOMC decisions, CPI prints, and central bank rate calls, plus the daily rollover at 21:00 to 22:00 UTC. I cover why spreads explode, how brokers restrict, and how to trade around it on this page, and the wider broker landscape starts at the forex hub.
Why spreads explode during high-impact news
The spread is the gap between the bid and the ask, and during a major release that gap can widen to many times its normal size in a matter of seconds. The cause is not the broker deciding to charge more, but the liquidity providers that supply the broker's quotes withdrawing from the market the instant volatility is about to spike (alphatradecircle).
A liquidity provider that quotes a firm bid and ask into a fast market risks being picked off by a faster participant, so the rational move is to widen or pull the quote until the new price settles. The broker passes that widened spread through to the retail trader, because the broker is itself trading against those same provider quotes.
I treat news spread widening as structural rather than anomalous, because the Q1 2026 NFP data shows it repeating on every first Friday with the same pattern, not appearing as a one-off. The broker that promises calm spreads through a release is promising something the underlying market is not offering.
The releases that trigger restrictions
Non-Farm Payrolls, released on the first Friday of each month, is the most impactful regular event, though FOMC decisions and central bank rate calls can produce larger and longer-lasting volatility. The scheduled calendar is what makes the risk manageable, because the trader knows exactly when to expect the spike (forexbastion).
CPI inflation prints sit in the same category, since they move rate-expectation and hit the dollar pairs hard, and each major economy adds its own releases on top. The trader's job is to keep the full high-impact calendar visible, not just the headline US numbers.
The daily rollover at 21:00 to 22:00 UTC is the event traders most often miss, because it produces a smaller but reliable spread widening every single day. EUR/USD spreads average 1.0 to 1.5 pips across brokers during rollover, roughly ten times the peak-session level, which is enough to stop out a tight trade (lowspreadbroker).
How brokers actually restrict news trading
Restrictions fall into four methods, and a broker may use any combination depending on its execution model. The passive method is spread widening, where the broker lets the market spread pass through to the trader without an outright block (FP Markets).
| Method | What the broker does | What you experience |
|---|---|---|
| Spread widening | Passes the widened market spread through | Much higher transaction cost at entry and exit |
| Requote / order rejection | Refuses to fill at the requested price | Order fails or fills at a worse price |
| Margin hike | Raises margin requirement around the release | Less buying power, possible margin calls |
| Position block | Disables new positions in a buffer window | Cannot open trades for several minutes |
The spread-widening method is the most common and the least visible, because it does not refuse the trade but makes it expensive enough to remove the edge a news-spike strategy relied on. The position block is the bluntest instrument, and it tends to appear at brokers whose model cannot absorb the release risk at all.
Slippage: why market orders fill badly during news
Slippage is the gap between the price you requested and the price you got, and during a news release it can be severe. A market order instructs the broker to fill immediately at the best available price, and in a fast, thin market the best available price moves between the moment you click and the moment the order fills (FP Markets).
The result is that a buy order placed at the printed ask can fill pips higher, and a stop-loss can trigger and fill far worse than its level. Slippage is not the broker cheating, because the broker is filling against a market that genuinely moved, but it is the reason a market order is the wrong tool for a release.
I never use a market order inside a news window, because the order type guarantees a fill at whatever price exists when it lands, which is the exact moment prices are most disordered. The cost of slippage is the hidden tax on undisciplined news trading.
How to trade around the restrictions
The first defence is timing, because standing aside for the few minutes around a scheduled release removes the restriction from your trading entirely. A trader who is flat through NFP does not care how wide the spread goes, since they have no order in the market to suffer it.
The second is order type, because a limit order only fills at your stated price or better, which means no fill rather than a bad fill when the market gaps. The trade-off is that a limit may be skipped entirely if price blows past it, but that is the cheaper failure than a market order filled pips into a spike.
The third is position sizing that accounts for the wider spread, because a normal-sized position can become oversized once the spread eats into the margin. The method that keeps any of this survivable is volatility-based position sizing, which sizes down when volatility, and therefore spread, is high.
The broker choice: news-friendly versus restrictive
For a trader whose strategy depends on the release, the broker model is the deciding factor, because an ECN or RAW-spread account routes orders to direct interbank quotes rather than through a dealing desk that widens the spread. The cost is a commission in place of the markup, and the benefit is that the spread you see is the market's spread, not the broker's.
The broker's leverage policy during news also matters, since a firm that hikes margin requirements into a release can force closures on positions that were fine a minute earlier. The detail on leverage ceilings and how they are set is in the guide to how much leverage is allowed in the UK.
I pick the broker to match the strategy, because a news trader needs an ECN execution model and a swing trader does not, and the spread comparison by currency pair shows which brokers run the tightest calm-market spreads that precede the news widening.