Rebate, cashback and bonus: how do they differ?

These three sound alike because they all mean “extra money”, but the money comes from three different places, and only one of them is yours immediately. A rebate comes out of your introducer's pocket. Cashback comes from the broker. A bonus is not money yet at all, it is balance with a condition attached.

Each carries its own condition, and the third is the only one that is not yours at the moment you receive it.

Three sources, three mechanisms

A rebate and cashback belong to you the moment they land in the account. A bonus does not, even though it shows up in the same balance field.

Why a rebate is not paid by the broker

People often have this backwards, and having it backwards means asking the wrong party when something goes wrong.

The broker pays commission to the introducer, calculated on the volume you trade. The introducer then returns part of it to you.

Exness describes exactly that mechanism in its own documentation: the IB programme has a rebate system that lets partners share part of their reward with the clients they referred.

The practical consequence: if the rebate does not arrive, the party who has to answer is the introducer, not the broker. The broker already paid its share. How to reconcile three numbers to check the money arrived correctly is covered in how to check your rebate actually arrives.

Not every broker offers all three

Checking this takes about a minute in the broker help centre.

Exness states plainly in its help centre that it does not offer any kind of bonus, welcome, deposit or trading. But it does run an IB programme, which means rebates exist. Other brokers push deposit bonuses hard.

There is also a legal tell worth remembering: if you are offered a deposit bonus, your account is almost certainly not under a European or Australian entity, because both ban this kind of promotion for retail clients. Detail in why brokers offer such high leverage.

Put differently, a bonus is first of all information about where you are signing a contract. Whatever benefit comes with it can only be worked out after you have read the volume condition.

The trap specific to bonuses

A bonus enters your balance but not your ownership. To withdraw it you have to reach a set trading volume, usually measured in lots.

What tends to happen: a newcomer sees the balance rise, believes their capital is larger than it is, and opens bigger positions than they should.

Then at withdrawal the bonus is clawed back and the remaining figure is smaller than expected. Many people call that the broker cheating them, when it was in the terms from the start.

One more point few people notice: making small, frequent withdrawals while holding a large bonus usually reduces the bonus proportionally. If you will need the money soon, do not take the bonus.

How to choose, in three sentences

1. A rebate suits everyone, because it is a cost reduction with no condition. The only thing to verify is whether the account is attached to the right rebate provider.
2. Broker cashback needs its campaign dates read carefully, because it usually runs in waves and can stop.
3. A bonus is only worth taking once you have worked out the volume you need to reach, and that volume already sits inside your existing trading plan. Taking the bonus first and then working out how to meet the condition is the wrong order.

To get a concrete figure for your own account type, add up spread and commission, then subtract the rebate: the result shows how much of your total fee the rebate actually offsets.

The right question to ask

With these three, the question is not “which one pays more” but “is this money mine yet, and if not, what do I have to do to make it mine”.

Answer that and the size of the number starts to mean something. A 200 USD bonus with a 40-lot condition is far more expensive than a 3 USD per lot rebate, if those 40 lots sit outside your plan.

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