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Guides · 4 min
Which exchange has the lowest fees for perpetual futures?
The honest answer is that it depends on how you trade — and the difference between the right answer and the wrong one is measured in thousands of dollars a year.
There is no single cheapest exchange, and any page that gives you one number is answering a question you did not ask. The venue that is cheapest for a scalper doing 90% of their volume as taker is not the venue that is cheapest for someone carrying a leveraged position for three weeks.
What we measured
This is not a survey of marketing pages. We track 825 perpetual contracts across 5 exchanges, 241 of them listed on every venue, and 95 fee tiers have been checked by hand against the exchanges' own published schedules. What that data shows is the point made below: entry-tier fees barely differ between venues, and the cost that separates them is funding.
What follows is how the answer actually breaks down, and what to compare.
Published fees are the smallest part
Most fee comparisons stop at the maker/taker table. That table covers one of three costs, and usually not the largest one.
Total cost of trading a perpetual is:
trading fee + funding + half the spread you cross
For a day trader who never holds across a settlement, the trading fee dominates and funding is zero. For anyone holding positions for days, funding is routinely two to four times the commission. Comparing venues on published fees alone answers the first case and gets the second badly wrong.
The entry tier is nearly identical everywhere
At the base level, major venues often cluster near 0.02% maker and roughly 0.05–0.06% taker, but the exact rate depends on venue, product and region. The visible difference may look small; repeated entry and exit turnover makes even a fraction of a basis point material.
The differences that matter show up elsewhere:
- Funding. Set independently by each venue from its own book. Same contract, same moment, materially different rate — and occasionally a different sign.
- Tier structure. Ladders diverge sharply above the entry level. Two venues with identical base rates can differ by half at the volume you actually trade.
- Rebates. A referral rebate is a flat percentage off every fill, which at the entry tier is a larger effect than moving up a tier.
- Spread. On a liquid contract this is fractions of a basis point and barely registers. On a thin one it can exceed the commission several times over.
How to work out your own answer
Three inputs decide it, and you already know all three:
- Monthly notional turnover. Opening and closing both count — the same basis the exchange uses for your tier.
- Your taker share. What proportion of your volume is market orders. Most people guess too low.
- Average holding time. This is the one that decides whether funding matters at all. Under eight hours, it mostly does not. Over a few days, it dominates.
Put those into the cost calculator and it computes all three components on every venue and ranks them by total annual cost. Change the holding time from 4 hours to 96 and watch the ranking reorder — that reordering is the entire point.
Three cases, three different answers
The scalper. High turnover, high taker share, positions measured in minutes. Funding is irrelevant; the taker rate and the tier ladder are everything. Their leverage is volume: they reach discount tiers quickly, so the shape of the ladder above the entry level decides it.
The swing trader. Moderate turnover, mixed maker/taker, positions held for days. Funding is usually the largest line. The cheapest venue is whichever is paying or charging least on the contracts they actually trade, and that changes week to week.
The carry trader. Deliberately holding to collect funding. For them the "cheapest venue" framing inverts entirely — they want the venue paying the most, and the trading fee is a rounding error against the carry.
The mistake worth avoiding
The most expensive decision is not picking the wrong exchange. It is trading as a taker out of habit.
On a 2 bps maker / 5 bps taker example, moving from 80% taker to 50% taker lowers the blended rate from 4.4 bps to 3.5 bps — about one fifth. That is an illustration, not a universal promise: a resting order carries non-fill and adverse-selection risk, and the venue's current rates still matter.
After that, in order of size: check funding before holding anything overnight, take a referral rebate if one is available at signup, and only then worry about which logo is on the exchange.
Current published ladders for each venue are on the fee pages, with head-to-head comparisons between any two.
Sources and scope
Venue schedules and funding rules were checked on 3 September 2026. This comparison uses published base rates unless a page explicitly says otherwise; account-specific VIP, regional and promotional pricing may differ.