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Guides · 4 min
How perpetual futures trading fees actually work
Maker, taker, VIP tiers, token discounts and referral rebates — what each one is, how they combine, and how to work out the rate you are really paying.
The fee you pay to trade a perpetual contract is not one number. It is four, stacked, and only the first is printed on the exchange's front page.
Maker and taker
Every fill is one or the other.
A taker order removes liquidity: it matches immediately against an order already resting on the book. Every market order is a taker fill, and so is a limit order priced aggressively enough to cross the spread on arrival.
A maker order adds liquidity: it rests on the book and waits. Exchanges charge makers less — sometimes nothing, and at the top tiers on some venues a maker is paid a rebate — because resting orders are what makes the market tradeable.
On major perpetual venues the entry-level maker rate is often around 0.02%, while the taker rate commonly sits around 0.05–0.06%. The exact rate varies by venue, product and region: for example, Bybit currently publishes 0.0200% maker and 0.0550% taker for non-VIP perpetuals, while Bitget publishes 0.02% and 0.06%. Always treat the account's live fee page as the final rate.
Note what that implies. Moving even part of your flow from market orders to resting limit orders is usually the single largest fee reduction available to a retail trader, and it costs nothing but patience and some fill risk.
Volume tiers
Exchanges discount fees as 30-day volume rises, in bands usually labelled VIP levels. Two details matter more than the headline table.
The volume that counts is notional turnover, not profit. Opening and closing both count. A trader turning over the same $50,000 of capital ten times a month generates $1,000,000 of qualifying volume, not $50,000.
Spot and futures ladders are separate. The qualifying volume, balance requirements and region-specific rates can differ by product. A tier shown on a spot fee page should not be assumed to apply to perpetuals; check the futures column and the fee page attached to the account you will actually trade from.
Some venues also accept an asset balance as an alternative route to a tier: hold enough on the exchange and you get the discount without the volume. Whether that is worth it depends on what the capital would otherwise earn — and on your view of exchange custody risk, which is not a fee question.
The published ladders for each venue are on the fee comparison pages.
Token discounts
Some exchanges cut fees or alter tier qualification when you hold or use the platform's own token. The size, eligible product and availability of the discount change over time and by region, but the trade-off is stable: receiving the discount can require holding a volatile asset you did not otherwise want.
Treat it as what it is. A 20% fee discount funded by holding a token that can fall 40% is not a 20% saving; it is a fee discount plus an unhedged position. This site's comparisons deliberately use the standard published rate rather than the token-discounted one, so that venues are compared on the same basis.
Referral rebates
The fourth layer is referral pricing. Some affiliate programmes return a share of eligible fees to the referrer, and some referrers pass part of that share back to the user. Eligibility, duration and product coverage vary, so the rebate shown at signup must be checked against the programme terms rather than assumed to last forever.
Two things determine whether it is worth anything: the affiliate's commission tier, and how much of it they return. A rebate is also only ever available at signup — most programmes attribute on the first registration, so an existing account generally cannot be retrofitted.
We disclose ours plainly: exchange links on this site are referral links, and where a rebate applies the calculator says so and lets you switch it off to compare published rates like for like.
Putting the four together
The rate you actually pay is:
effective fee = base tier rate
× (1 − token discount)
× (1 − referral rebate)
blended across your maker/taker split
Worked through: a trader doing $2,000,000 of monthly volume, 80% as taker, at an entry tier of 2 bps maker and 5 bps taker, pays a blended 4.4 bps — $880 a month, $10,560 a year. A 20% referral rebate takes that to $8,448. Shifting from 80% taker to 50% taker takes it to $8,400 more still.
Fees are also not the whole cost. Funding and the spread you cross are frequently larger than the commission, especially for anyone holding positions rather than scalping them. The cost calculator computes all three together and ranks venues by the total.
Sources and scope
Fee schedules change. The examples above were checked on 3 September 2026 against the venues' own documentation; the live rate shown inside your account remains authoritative.