Slippage vs requote vs gap: why did you get a different price?

You clicked at one price and ended up at another. Slippage, a requote and a gap can all do that, but they are three different events: slippage is an order filled at a price other than the one you asked for, a requote is an order the broker refused to fill at your price, and a gap is the market itself jumping with nothing traded in between.

Telling them apart matters because each one has a different fix. And which of the first two you get depends on how your broker executes the symbol and, in one of those modes, on a setting in your own platform.

Three events, one symptom

Read the last row. A gap is the only one of the three that happens with no order involved at all, but any stop sitting inside it comes out the other side as slippage.

Slippage: filled, but not where you clicked

Slippage is the difference between the price you asked for and the one your order actually filled at. As our explainer on why the spread widens overnight puts it, it happens when there aren't enough orders at your price at the instant of your entry, so the system fills you with the next ones available.

Which orders can slip is written into the MetaTrader 5 (MT5) help on performing trades. A stop order is executed "at the price equal to the specified one or worse", so if the market moves against it, "the order will be filled with a slippage". A limit order is the mirror image: it fills at its price or better, "no slippage occurs", but its execution "is not guaranteed".

That is the choice behind every order type. In the help's own terms, a stop order guarantees the fill and not the price, and a limit order guarantees the price and not the fill.

Requote: the broker says no to your price

A requote only exists in some execution modes. In MT5's Instant Execution the platform attaches the current price to your order, and if the price moves by more than the "Deviation" you set while the order is being processed, "the dealer (server) can refuse to accept the order and offer new execution prices".

You then get a window with Accept and Reject, and the new prices are valid for a few seconds only. If you don't decide in time, the window says "Price changed" and you are back at the order ticket.

Request Execution works the other way round: you ask for a price first, then confirm or reject it. In Market Execution there is no conversation at all. The help says the broker decides the price "without any additional discussion with the trader", and that sending an order in that mode "means advance consent to its execution at this price".

The setting that turns one into the other

The Deviation field is where the first two meet. The help defines it as "the difference between the order execution price and the specified price to which a trader agrees", and spells out what it does: "If the deviation is equal to or less than this value, the order is executed at the new price without any notification." Beyond it, the broker returns new prices.

So in Instant Execution, a small price change inside your deviation arrives as silent slippage, and a larger one arrives as a requote. A wider deviation means fewer requotes and more slippage that nobody announces; a narrower one means the opposite.

Which mode your account runs is not your choice. It is set by the broker for each symbol, and you can read it in MT5: right-click the symbol in Market Watch, open Specification and look at the Execution line, which says Instant, Request, Market or Exchange.

Gap: the market jumped

A gap is not about your order. It is price moving from one level to the next with nothing traded in between, typically when the market reopens after the weekend or in the second a big number prints, when liquidity vanishes at that exact instant.

We measured weekend gaps in our own one-minute MT5 price feed: the last price on Friday against the first one when the market reopened on Sunday at 17:00 New York time. The table covers the 20 of the 22 weekends between 24 April and 20 September 2026 in which the feed was running at both ends, and it measures the size of the gap in either direction.

The largest one shows what a gap does to a stop. GBP/USD closed on Friday 8 May at 1.3634 in our feed and reopened on Sunday 10 May at 1.3548, and an hour later it was still close to 60 pips under Friday's close.

A long position with its stop-loss at 1.3600, 34 pips under that close, could not be filled at 1.3600, because the market did not trade there when it reopened. The first price available was 52 pips beyond the stop. On one standard lot in a USD account, where a pip of GBP/USD is worth $10, that is about $520 more than the stop was set to allow.

That is slippage, and the gap is what caused it. The stop did exactly what the help says a stop does: it was executed, at its price or worse.

Which one hit you?

• Your order was filled, at a different price. Slippage. If it happened on a stop over a weekend or around a release, look at the chart for the jump: the slippage came from a gap.
• A window asked you to accept a new price. A requote. Your symbol runs in Instant Execution and the price moved by more than your deviation.
• Your stop was filled far beyond its level on the first price of the week. A gap, paid as slippage.

What you can do about each

• Slippage. Trade the hours when the market is full, and use a limit order when the price matters more than the fill. For a stop entry there is the stop-limit order, which the help says is used "when a trader wants to set a stop order and limit the slippage". It inherits the limit order's catch, a fill that is not guaranteed, so it is an entry tool rather than a stop-loss, because an exit that may not fill in a gap does not protect you.
• Requotes. The deviation decides how many you see, not how far the price moved. Widening it swaps requotes for slippage; it does not remove the move.
• Gaps. Nothing in the order ticket stops one. What protects you is the size of the position and the decision to hold it over the weekend or through a release at all, which is the case our weekend gap guide makes.
• The broker. Our broker checklist says it plainly: ask about its slippage policy and whether it requotes, and test it yourself on a news release with small size before trading seriously.

What this does not tell you

• Whether your broker's fills are fair. We have not measured any broker's slippage. The gap table comes from our own MT5 price feed, not from any broker's real fills, and your broker's first Sunday price can differ.
• The cause of those gaps. Our news archive only goes back to mid-August, so the table says how big the gaps were, not what caused them.
• Slippage in money. Like the fourth cost in what a trade really costs, it has no fixed size.
• Other platforms. The execution modes and the quotes here come from MT5's documentation; we have not checked how other platforms handle requotes.
• A backtest. Nothing here shows up in one: in its no-delay mode, MT5's strategy tester fills every order at the requested price with no requotes.

The takeaway

Slippage and requotes answer the same question: what happens when the price moves while your order is on its way? Your broker's execution mode picks the answer. A gap is a different question: whether there was any price at all between where the market was and where it went.