Does taking a rebate change your trading conditions?
It is a fair suspicion. If somebody is being paid on your trades, it seems natural that the cost has to come from somewhere, and the obvious candidate is you: a slightly wider spread, a slower fill, a worse price at the moment it matters.
The answer is that it does not work that way, and the reason is structural rather than a promise.
Where the IB sits in the broker's books
A broker's pricing and a broker's partner payouts live in two different places.
Pricing is set by the account type you opened. Spread, commission per lot, swap, leverage and the instrument list are attached to that account type and applied by the trading server at execution. The server does not consult a partner table before it fills your order.
The partner share is calculated afterwards, from the revenue the trade already produced. It is an accounting step on money that has already moved.
That is why attaching an IB cannot widen your spread: the spread was already applied before anyone worked out who gets a share of it.
The test you can run yourself
You do not have to take this on trust.
- Note your account type and the pair you trade.
- Look at the spread on that pair, on that account type, before you attach a partner.
- Attach the partner and look again.
The figure comes from the same feed either way. Our [spread checker](/compare/spread) reads it straight from broker servers, so you can compare account types side by side rather than compare a memory against a claim.
What you will see is that spread varies by account type, by instrument and by time of day, and not by whether a partner code is set.
What actually does change your conditions
Since the honest answer to the headline question is "nothing", it is worth naming the things that genuinely do move your costs, because those are what deserve attention:
- Account type. This is the big one. A raw spread account with commission and a standard account without commission produce very different totals for the same trade.
- The instrument. Metals and indices behave nothing like major currency pairs.
- Session. Spread widens outside the main trading hours and around news.
- Holding overnight. Swap is charged per night and is easy to forget when comparing costs.
Every one of those is worth more attention than the partner field, and none of them is affected by it.
The one thing to actually check
There is a version of this worry that is real, and it is worth separating from the myth.
Some brokers offer different account types through different partner programmes. If somebody moves you to a new account in order to attach you, the conditions can change, because the account type changed, not because a partner was attached.
So the question to ask is not "will a partner widen my spread". It is: am I still on the same account type? If the answer is yes, your conditions are the ones you already had.
Attaching a partner to an existing account does not touch your balance, your open positions or your trade history. [Changing your partner](/transfer-ib) is a field change on the broker's side.
Next
- [Who is the IB in forex, and where does their money come from](/bai-viet/who-is-the-ib-in-forex)
- [Is a rebate a bonus, or your own money coming back](/bai-viet/is-a-rebate-a-bonus)