Knowing your entry and exit price tells you the direction a trade moved. It doesn't tell you what that move was actually worth in dollars — for that you need position size and the pair's contract math too. Here's the full calculation, worked through with real numbers.
The core formula
For a buy (long) trade:
Profit = (Exit price − Entry price) × Units traded
For a sell (short) trade, it's reversed since you profit when price falls:
Profit = (Entry price − Exit price) × Units traded
"Units traded" is your lot size multiplied by the contract size for that instrument — a standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency, so 1.0 lots on EUR/USD is 100,000 units. If the result comes out in a currency other than your account currency, it gets converted at the current exchange rate for that pair.
Worked example: EUR/USD buy
Buy 1.0 standard lot of EUR/USD at 1.0850, close at 1.0925:
- Price difference: 1.0925 − 1.0850 = 0.0075
- In pips: 0.0075 ÷ 0.0001 = 75 pips
- Profit: 0.0075 × 100,000 = $750.00
Since EUR/USD is quoted directly in USD, no currency conversion step is needed here — the raw calculation is already in dollars.
Worked example: USD/JPY sell
Sell 1.0 standard lot of USD/JPY at 151.50, close at 150.80:
- Price difference (sell, so entry − exit): 151.50 − 150.80 = 0.70
- In pips: 0.70 ÷ 0.01 = 70 pips
- Profit in JPY: 0.70 × 100,000 = ¥70,000
- Converted to USD at roughly 151.00: ¥70,000 ÷ 151.00 ≈ $463.58
This is the extra step that trips people up on yen pairs and other cross pairs — the raw price-difference math happens in the quote currency, and only gets converted to your account currency afterward. Skip that step and the number you get is off by whatever the exchange rate happens to be.
What this number doesn't include
Both examples above are the raw price-move calculation only. Spread, commission, and swap (overnight financing) all subtract from the actual result you'd see in a live account, and none of them show up in the entry/exit price difference itself. A trade that looks like a $750 win on paper might net meaningfully less after a few pips of spread and a commission per lot — worth checking your broker's actual cost structure rather than assuming the raw calculation is the final number.
It's also worth keeping the resulting figure in context: return on balance (profit ÷ account balance) usually matters more for risk management than the raw dollar amount — a $750 gain means something very different on a $5,000 account than on a $500,000 one.
Skip the manual conversion step
The math itself isn't hard, but the currency-conversion step on non-USD-quoted pairs is exactly where manual calculations go wrong. PipDesk's Forex Profit Calculator runs this instantly for any pair, direction, and lot size using live exchange rates — and if you need the per-pip breakdown specifically, the Pip Value Calculator covers that half of the math in more depth.