Pip Value Calculator: How to Work Out Pip Value for Any Pair
Pip value calculator guide: the formula for dollar, yen and cross pairs in any account currency, with a full pip value table and step-by-step examples.
You set a 40-pip stop on GBP/JPY and size the trade as if each pip were worth $10 a lot. On GBP/JPY it is about $6.67, and the difference becomes your risk. A pip value calculator closes that gap, as long as you know what it is doing.
Quick answer: Pip value is pip size × units traded, a figure in the quote currency, converted into your account currency. In a US dollar account, a standard lot is worth $10 a pip on pairs ending in USD, $10 ÷ price on pairs starting with USD (about $6.67 on USD/JPY at 150), and needs a third rate on crosses.
What a pip value calculator does (and the one formula behind it)
Every pip value calculator, whether it sits on a website, inside your trading platform or in your head, runs the same two-step sum. If pips themselves are still new, our guide to what a pip is covers counting them; this article picks up where that one stops and works through every type of pair.
Step one multiplies the pip size by the number of units you trade. A pip is 0.0001 on most pairs and 0.01 on pairs quoted in Japanese yen, and a standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency. So one standard lot is always worth 10 units of the quote currency per pip, or ¥1,000 per pip on a yen pair. That part never changes, whatever the price.
Step two converts that amount into the currency your account is held in. This is the only step that varies, and it is where almost every pip value mistake happens. Written as one line:
Pip value = pip size × units traded × value of 1 unit of the quote currency in your account currencyThere is a useful way to read that formula. Pip value per standard lot is ten units of the quote currency, priced in your money. Asking “what is a pip on this pair worth?” is really asking “what is the quote currency worth to me?” If the quote currency is your own, a pip is a flat 10. If it is worth more than your currency, a pip is worth more than 10; if it is worth less, a pip is worth less.
So the first job is always to identify the quote currency. In GBP/JPY it is the yen, which means every pip on that pair starts life as yen, not pounds and not dollars. Tap through the parts of the quote below if base and quote are still easy to mix up.
JPY is the quote currency. The price says how much JPY one GBP costs. Profits and losses are counted in JPY first.
In GBP/JPY the yen is the quote currency, so every pip is first worth yen: ¥1,000 per standard lot. The prices and spread shown are illustrative.
The second job is to see where your account currency sits in the pair. There are only three possibilities, and each has its own rule.
The Academy lesson on currency pairs and quotes covers base and quote in more depth, and our guide to base currency vs quote currency explains why profits always arrive in the quote currency first. The rest of this article takes each branch of the tree in turn.
Pip value when the quote currency is your account currency
This is the easy branch. For a US dollar account it covers every pair that ends in USD: EUR/USD, GBP/USD, AUD/USD and NZD/USD. Step one already produces dollars, so step two has nothing to do. One standard lot is worth $10 a pip, a mini lot $1, a micro lot 10 cents and, where a broker offers them, a nano lot 1 cent. Our guide to lot sizes in forex covers that ladder in detail.
The figure stays at $10 whatever the exchange rate does because one pip on GBP/USD means one pound costs 0.0001 dollars more or less. On 100,000 pounds, that is 10 dollars, and the price of the pound never enters the sum. At 1.2700 a standard lot of GBP/USD has a full value of $127,000; at 1.3000 it is $130,000. The margin your broker sets aside grows with that full value, but the pip value does not move at all.
That makes this the only case where the pip value of an open trade is completely fixed. You can size the trade, leave it running for a week, and the stop will still cost exactly what you planned, apart from slippage and the spread. Try a 50-pip move on GBP/USD in the counter below, then change the prices: the pip count changes, but the value per pip stays put.
The highlighted digit is the pip. For USD/JPY the pip is the second decimal and its dollar value depends on the price.
The same branch exists for every account currency, but the pairs change. For a sterling account, the flat case is a pair quoted in pounds, such as EUR/GBP, where one standard lot is worth £10 a pip. A euro account has a quirk: by market convention the euro is the base currency of every standard pair it appears in (EUR/USD, EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY and so on), so a euro account has almost no flat-rate pairs at all. Every pip it trades needs converting.
Pip value when your account currency is the base: USD/JPY, USD/CAD, USD/CHF
Now the dollar sits on the left of the pair. On USD/JPY, USD/CAD and USD/CHF, step one gives you yen, Canadian dollars or Swiss francs, and you need dollars. Conveniently, the pair you are trading is itself the exchange rate between the two. It tells you how many units of the quote currency one dollar buys, so you divide by the pair’s own price.
- USD/JPY at 150.00: ¥1,000 ÷ 150 = $6.67 per standard lot.
- USD/CAD at 1.3600: C$10 ÷ 1.36 = $7.35 per standard lot.
- USD/CHF at an illustrative 0.8000: CHF 10 ÷ 0.80 = $12.50 per standard lot.
Notice that USD/CHF comes out above $10. That is the “what is the quote currency worth to me?” idea at work. At 0.80, one franc is worth $1.25, so ten francs are worth $12.50. One yen, by contrast, is worth a fraction of a cent, and one Canadian dollar about 74 cents, so those pips are worth less than $10. Whenever the price of a dollar-base pair is below 1.0000, its pip value is above $10; when the price is above 1.0000, the pip value is below $10.
Because the price itself is the divisor, the pip value moves every time the pair moves. The chart below shows one standard lot of USD/JPY at a range of hypothetical prices.
On a dollar-base pair, the pip value changes during your trade. Say you buy 0.10 lots of USD/JPY at 150.00 and close at 152.00. That is 200 pips at ¥100 a pip, or ¥20,000. Converted at 152.00, the gain is about $131.58, not the 200 × $0.667 = $133.33 you would get from the pip value at entry. Each pip was worth slightly less by the time you closed.
The difference is small on ordinary moves and grows on large ones, which is one reason your platform’s profit rarely matches your mental arithmetic to the cent. Brokers convert the yen result at, or very close to, the rate when the trade closes. The counter below values each pip at the closing price, so its figures match the converted result.
The highlighted digit is the pip. For USD/JPY the pip is the second decimal and its dollar value depends on the price.
Our USD/JPY trading guide covers what drives that pair; for pip value, the one rule to remember is divide by the price, and use a current price.
Pip value for cross pairs, including yen crosses
A cross pair is one in which your account currency does not appear at all. For a dollar account, that means EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY, EUR/CHF, AUD/CAD, AUD/NZD and many more. Step one still gives you the quote currency. Step two needs a third exchange rate: the pair that links the quote currency to your account currency. Call it the link pair.
The rule for using the link pair is short. Look at where the quote currency sits in it. If the quote currency is the base of the link pair, multiply by its price. If the quote currency is the quote of the link pair, divide by its price.
Work through the common crosses with that rule and a pattern appears.
- EUR/GBP: the quote is the pound. The link pair is GBP/USD, with the pound as its base, so multiply: £10 × 1.27 = $12.70.
- EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY, AUD/JPY, CAD/JPY: the quote is the yen every time. The link pair is USD/JPY, with the yen as its quote, so divide: ¥1,000 ÷ 150 = $6.67.
- EUR/CHF, GBP/CHF: the quote is the franc. The link pair is USD/CHF, so divide: CHF 10 ÷ 0.80 = $12.50.
- AUD/CAD, EUR/CAD: the quote is the Canadian dollar. Divide by USD/CAD: C$10 ÷ 1.36 = $7.35.
- AUD/NZD: the quote is the New Zealand dollar. The link pair is NZD/USD, with the kiwi as its base, so multiply: at an illustrative 0.6000, NZ$10 × 0.60 = $6.00.
The pattern is that the base currency of a cross plays no part in its pip value. Every pair quoted in yen has the same pip value as USD/JPY, whichever currency sits in front. One standard lot of GBP/JPY is worth exactly what one standard lot of EUR/JPY or USD/JPY is worth, about $6.67 at 150. That is worth holding on to, because GBP/JPY has a reputation for being expensive to trade. Its large swings come from moving many pips in a day, not from each pip being worth more; our GBP/JPY trading guide looks at why it moves so much.
The base currency does matter elsewhere. It sets the full value of the position, and therefore the margin, which is why, at the same leverage, one lot of GBP/JPY ties up more margin than one lot of AUD/JPY even though their pips are worth the same. Our guide to leverage in forex covers that side.
Pip value table for major and cross pairs (US dollar account)
Here are the results side by side for a US dollar account. They use the same illustrative rates as our other guides (EUR/USD 1.0800, GBP/USD 1.2700, USD/JPY 150.00, USD/CAD 1.3600) plus an illustrative USD/CHF of 0.8000. Mini and micro values are a tenth and a hundredth of the standard figure, rounded to the cent.
| Pair | One pip, 1 lot, in quote currency | Conversion | Standard lot | Mini lot | Micro lot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | $10 | none | $10.00 | $1.00 | $0.10 |
| GBP/USD | $10 | none | $10.00 | $1.00 | $0.10 |
| AUD/USD | $10 | none | $10.00 | $1.00 | $0.10 |
| USD/JPY | ¥1,000 | ÷ 150.00 | $6.67 | $0.67 | $0.07 |
| USD/CAD | C$10 | ÷ 1.3600 | $7.35 | $0.74 | $0.07 |
| USD/CHF | CHF 10 | ÷ 0.8000 | $12.50 | $1.25 | $0.13 |
| EUR/GBP | £10 | × GBP/USD 1.2700 | $12.70 | $1.27 | $0.13 |
| EUR/JPY | ¥1,000 | ÷ USD/JPY 150.00 | $6.67 | $0.67 | $0.07 |
| GBP/JPY | ¥1,000 | ÷ USD/JPY 150.00 | $6.67 | $0.67 | $0.07 |
| EUR/CHF | CHF 10 | ÷ USD/CHF 0.8000 | $12.50 | $1.25 | $0.13 |
| AUD/CAD | C$10 | ÷ USD/CAD 1.3600 | $7.35 | $0.74 | $0.07 |
Read the table by its second column rather than its first. Pairs that share a quote currency share a pip value, so the whole table collapses into a handful of numbers, one per quote currency. The chart below shows the same idea, with an exotic pair added to show how far the range stretches.
Two habits follow. First, recalculate rather than remember. Every figure except the dollar-quoted rows drifts with exchange rates: a 5% rise in USD/JPY cuts the dollar value of every yen pip by a little under 5%, so last year’s figure may be noticeably out. Second, check the quote currency first; it tells you which row you are in, even for a pair that is not listed.
If you want to sanity-check a conversion rate against an official source, the European Central Bank publishes euro reference exchange rates every working day. They are published for information rather than trading, so your broker’s live price will differ slightly, but they are close enough to catch a misplaced decimal.
Pip value when your account is not in US dollars
Nothing in the method assumes a dollar account. Swap in your own currency and the same three branches apply: no conversion when the quote currency is yours, divide by the pair’s price when your currency is the base, and use a link pair for everything else. What changes is which pairs fall into each branch.
The table below uses the same illustrative rates, with the crosses that follow from them: EUR/GBP 0.8500, EUR/JPY 162.00 and GBP/JPY 190.50 (which is 1.27 × 150).
| Pair | Sterling account, 1 lot | How | Euro account, 1 lot | How |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | £7.87 | $10 ÷ GBP/USD 1.27 | €9.26 | $10 ÷ 1.08 |
| GBP/USD | £7.87 | $10 ÷ 1.27 | €9.26 | $10 ÷ EUR/USD 1.08 |
| USD/JPY | £5.25 | ¥1,000 ÷ GBP/JPY 190.50 | €6.17 | ¥1,000 ÷ EUR/JPY 162 |
| EUR/GBP | £10.00 | none | €11.76 | £10 ÷ 0.85 |
| EUR/JPY | £5.25 | ¥1,000 ÷ GBP/JPY 190.50 | €6.17 | ¥1,000 ÷ 162 |
| GBP/JPY | £5.25 | ¥1,000 ÷ 190.50 | €6.17 | ¥1,000 ÷ EUR/JPY 162 |
Look at EUR/USD, the pair most people learn on. In a dollar account it is the simple $10 case. In a sterling or euro account, it becomes a conversion pair like any other, and its pip value falls below 10 because a dollar is worth less than a pound or a euro at these rates.
The same logic works for any account currency. An Australian dollar account trading EUR/USD gets $10 per pip per lot in the quote currency; the link pair is AUD/USD, with the dollar as its quote, so divide. At an illustrative 0.6600, that is $10 ÷ 0.66 = A$15.15 a pip. Because the Australian dollar is worth less than the US dollar at that rate, the pip is worth more than 10 in the account’s own money.
Your platform does all of this automatically, but you size the trade before it has anything to show you. Our guide to how to calculate forex profit applies the same conversions to finished trades.
Step by step: EUR/GBP and GBP/JPY in a dollar account
Pip value matters most at one moment: when you turn a stop distance and a risk per trade into a lot size. The position size formula is lots = money at risk ÷ (stop in pips × pip value per lot), and pip value is the input people get wrong. Here are the two crosses that trip up dollar accounts most often, worked from start to finish.
Two pairs, the same account and the same $50 at risk, but different stops and very different pip values, so the sizes come out differently. You can run both examples in the calculator below. Enter the balance, risk and stop, then type the pip value per standard lot you worked out: 12.70 for EUR/GBP, or 6.667 for GBP/JPY.
The calculator is only as good as the pip value you give it, so slow down on choosing the link pair and the direction. The Academy lesson on position sizing has practice questions on the formula, the lesson on risk per trade covers how to choose the percentage, and our full guide to position sizing in forex covers rounding, minimum lots and margin.
Check yourself before moving on. Three questions, each on a different branch of the decision tree:
Pip value check
Question 1 of 3
Your account is in US dollars and USD/JPY is 150.00. What is one pip on 1 standard lot of CAD/JPY worth?
Question 2 of 3
Which rate converts a EUR/GBP pip into US dollars?
Question 3 of 3
USD/CHF is trading at 0.8000. For a dollar account, a pip on 1 standard lot is worth:
Checking against your platform
Most platforms let you see pip value indirectly, and the figure is worth comparing with your own sum the first time you trade a pair. Many show a tick size and tick value in the instrument’s contract specification. On a five-decimal quote, a tick is a pipette, one tenth of a pip, so the tick value is a tenth of the pip value: multiply it by ten before comparing. If your sum and the platform’s figure differ by roughly a factor of ten, you are looking at ticks; if they differ by a few per cent, the conversion rate has moved.
Common pip value mistakes
Using $10 for every pair
The $10 figure is true only when the quote currency is your account currency. On yen pairs it is about a third lower; on EUR/GBP and USD/CHF it is a quarter higher. Using $10 everywhere does not make you consistently cautious or consistently aggressive. It makes your real risk random from pair to pair.
Converting a cross with its own price
On a dollar-base pair such as USD/JPY, dividing by the pair’s own price is correct. On a cross such as GBP/JPY, it is not, because the answer comes out in the base currency, not in dollars. ¥1,000 ÷ 190.50 is £5.25, a perfectly good pip value for a sterling account. Typed into a calculator as $5.25, it makes every position about 27% larger than you intended.
Mixing up ticks, points and pips
Platform fields and contract specifications often work in ticks or points, which on a five-decimal quote are pipettes. A tick value of $1 on EUR/USD is a pip value of $10. Always check which unit a figure is in before you use it.
Assuming every instrument behaves like a major pair
Exotic pairs, metals and indices can all break the patterns above. On an exotic such as USD/ZAR at an illustrative 18.00, a standard lot is R10 ÷ 18 = about $0.56 a pip, but the pair routinely moves many more pips than a major, so a small pip value does not mean small risk. Metals and indices often use different contract sizes and define a pip or point differently from one broker to the next. Read the contract specification before trading them, and see our guide to major, minor and exotic currency pairs for how those groups differ.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate pip value?
Multiply the pip size by the number of units traded. That gives the pip value in the quote currency: 10 units per standard lot on most pairs, or 1,000 yen on yen pairs. Then convert it into your account currency at the current rate. If the quote currency is already your account currency, there is nothing to convert.
How much is 1 pip worth on GBP/JPY?
One standard lot of GBP/JPY is worth 1,000 yen a pip. For a US dollar account, divide by USD/JPY: at 150.00 that is about $6.67 a pip, $0.67 on a mini lot and $0.07 on a micro lot. Every yen-quoted pair, including USD/JPY and EUR/JPY, has the same pip value.
Why is pip value different for each currency pair?
Because a pip is always measured in the quote currency, and each quote currency is worth a different amount in your account currency. A pip on one standard lot is 10 units of the quote currency. Ten pounds, ten Canadian dollars and ten US dollars are worth different amounts, so the pip values differ.
How much is a pip worth on EUR/GBP?
On one standard lot of EUR/GBP, a pip is worth 10 pounds. For a sterling account that is the final figure. For a US dollar account, multiply by GBP/USD: at 1.27, that is $12.70 a pip, or $1.27 on a mini lot. For a euro account, divide by EUR/GBP: at 0.85, about 11.76 euros.
Does pip value change while a trade is open?
On pairs quoted in your account currency, no: EUR/USD stays at $10 a lot for a dollar account. On every other pair, yes, slightly, because the conversion rate moves. On USD/JPY the pip value in dollars falls as the price rises, which is why a platform's profit figure rarely matches a quick pips-times-value sum exactly.
How do I work out pip value if my account is in pounds or euros?
Use the same method with your own currency. A pair quoted in your currency, such as EUR/GBP for a sterling account, is a flat 10 per lot. If your currency is the base of the pair, divide by the price. Otherwise, convert through the pair that links the quote currency to your currency.
Free course
Learn this step by step
“Forex Foundations” is a free BrokerCut Academy course: 11 short lessons (about 92 minutes), quizzes, interactive tools and a certificate when you finish.
Enrol free
