Hyperliquid fees explained — maker, taker, the HYPE discount, and what a $10,000 round trip really costs
You have read that Hyperliquid is cheap. Its fee page agrees, up to a point: at the base tier a taker pays 0.045% and a maker 0.015%, below the 0.05% and 0.02% the large centralised exchanges publish. Then the page keeps going — seven volume tiers, six staking tiers, a referral discount, maker rebates, builder codes, growth mode — and what you actually pay depends on which of those apply to you. This guide runs all of them through one $10,000 position, then adds the costs the fee page never mentions.
Key takeaways
- Base tier: 0.045% taker / 0.015% maker on perpetuals, 0.070% / 0.040% on spot (as of 5 Sep 2026). A $10,000 perpetual round trip is $9.00 by market order, $3.00 by limit.
- Every discount the venue offers, stacked — a referral code plus 500,000 HYPE staked — still leaves a market-order round trip at $5.18, more than the $3.00 a resting limit order pays with no discount at all.
- No gas per order, no liquidation clearance fee, a flat $1 to withdraw. The largest cost on the page is not called a fee: a backstop liquidation keeps the maintenance margin, $125 on a $10,000 BTC position.
- Builder-deployed (HIP-3) markets can charge up to six times the base rate, and a third-party app can add up to 0.1% per fill if you approve it. The Fees line on the order form, not the fee page, is the number to trust.
What does Hyperliquid charge per trade, and how do you find your own rate?
Two rate cards, one tier. The venue’s Fees page (read 5 Sep 2026) publishes separate schedules for perpetuals and spot, but a single fee tier applies to everything you trade — perpetuals, builder-deployed perpetuals and spot alike. At the base tier a taker pays 0.045% and a maker 0.015% on perpetuals; on spot the figures are 0.070% and 0.040%.
| Tier | 14-day weighted volume | Perps taker | Perps maker | Spot taker | Spot maker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 (everyone starts here) | < $5M | 0.045% | 0.015% | 0.070% | 0.040% |
| 1 | > $5M | 0.040% | 0.012% | 0.060% | 0.030% |
| 2 | > $25M | 0.035% | 0.008% | 0.050% | 0.020% |
| 3 | > $100M | 0.030% | 0.004% | 0.040% | 0.010% |
| 4 | > $500M | 0.028% | 0.000% | 0.035% | 0.000% |
| 5 | > $2B | 0.026% | 0.000% | 0.030% | 0.000% |
| 6 | > $7B | 0.024% | 0.000% | 0.025% | 0.000% |
Your own rate is printed on the order form. At the bottom of the perpetuals form on app.hyperliquid.xyz there is a line labelled Fees; on 5 Sep 2026, with no wallet connected, it read 0.0450% / 0.0150%, and hovering it produced the venue’s own gloss: “Taker orders pay a 0.0450% fee. Maker orders pay a 0.0150% fee.” The fee formula the venue publishes for developers on the same page builds that number from your tier, your staking discount, your referral discount and the settings of the market you have open — which is why, once a wallet is connected, it is the number to trust, ahead of anything on the fee page or on this one.
A word on the tiers, because the table invites the wrong ambition. Tier 1 needs more than $5M of weighted volume in fourteen days. For a trader whose typical position is $10,000, that is 500 fills — about 18 round trips a day, every day, for two weeks. Retail accounts live at tier 0, and the discounts that actually reach them are the two in the next sections: staking and the referral code.
What does a $10,000 round trip cost, and how does it compare with a centralised exchange?
Take one perpetual position of $10,000 notional and close it. Market order in, market order out: 0.045% twice, $9.00. Limit order in, limit order out, both resting until filled: 0.015% twice, $3.00. One of each, $6.00. Nothing about the position changed — not the size, not the leverage, not the venue — only the order type, and the bill moved by $6.00.
The same $9.00 looks different depending on how much margin stands behind it. At 20x, the form’s default on BTC, the position is backed by $500 of margin and the round-trip fee is 1.8% of it before price has moved; at 5x it is backed by $2,000 and the fee is 0.45%. Fees do not change with leverage. The share of your collateral they consume does, and that share is what decides whether a scratch trade is a scratch or a loss.
| Venue (regular tier) | Perps, market in and out | Perps, limit in and out | Spot, market in and out | Spot, limit in and out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperliquid | $9.00 | $3.00 | $14.00 | $8.00 |
| Binance | $10.00 | $4.00 | $20.00 | $20.00 |
| OKX | $10.00 | $4.00 | $20.00 | $16.00 |
| Bybit | $11.00 | $4.00 | $20.00 | $20.00 |
So the venue is cheaper for a taker by a dollar or two on $10,000, cheaper for a maker by a dollar, and noticeably cheaper on spot, where a market-order round trip is $14.00 against $20 on all three centralised venues. None of those gaps is large enough to choose a venue on. The gap that is worth choosing on is the $6.00 between the two rows for the same venue, and you control that one with a dropdown. Spread and slippage are not in the table at all; on a thin market either can cost more than every fee in it. If you want the same calculation at your own size and frequency, the fee calculator runs it across the three centralised venues.
How much does the HYPE staking discount really save, and what does it cost to hold?
Staking the venue’s native token buys a percentage off every fee, in six tiers from 5% for more than 10 HYPE staked to 40% for more than 500,000. The Fees page prints the discounted rates directly, so there is no arithmetic to trust: the Wood column of tier 0 reads 0.0428% taker and 0.0143% maker.
| Staking tier | HYPE staked | Fee discount | Tier-0 perps taker | Tier-0 perps maker | Saved on a $10,000 taker round trip |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wood | > 10 | 5% | 0.0428% | 0.0143% | $0.44 |
| Bronze | > 100 | 10% | 0.0405% | 0.0135% | $0.90 |
| Silver | > 1,000 | 15% | 0.0383% | 0.0128% | $1.34 |
| Gold | > 10,000 | 20% | 0.0360% | 0.0120% | $1.80 |
| Platinum | > 100,000 | 30% | 0.0315% | 0.0105% | $2.70 |
| Diamond | > 500,000 | 40% | 0.0270% | 0.0090% | $3.60 |
Now the part the discount table does not say. To hold the discount you must hold the token, in the venue’s staking account, delegated to a validator. According to the Staking page, moving HYPE from spot to staking is instant, each delegation is locked for one day, and moving it back to spot goes through a seven-day unstaking queue. Validators charge a commission on rewards — between 0% and 10% on the public staking screen on 5 Sep 2026 — and there is currently no automatic slashing. Linking a separate staking wallet to a trading wallet, if you use two, is permanent.
Put those together and the discount is not a discount. It is a position in a volatile token with a rebate attached, and a position you cannot fully exit in less than a week. The Wood tier saves $0.44 on a $10,000 market-order round trip; the 10 HYPE that earns it will move by more than that most hours. That is not an argument against holding HYPE — we take no view on the token here, as the profile explains — it is an argument for deciding the two things separately. Decide whether you want the token; then, if you do, enjoy the discount. Never the other way round.
The chart is the reason this section exists. Stack every discount the venue offers — a referral code and the Diamond tier, which needs more than half a million HYPE — and a market-order round trip still costs $5.18. A limit order that rests, with no code and no stake, costs $3.00. The largest discount on the venue is smaller than the dropdown, and the dropdown is free.
Does the referral discount stack, and what does a referral link actually do?
A referral code gives the user 4% off fees for their first $25M of volume, according to the Referrals page. It multiplies on top of the staking discount rather than adding to it: the fee formula the venue publishes for developers applies the tier-and-staking rate first, then × (1 − referral discount). Base rate with a code, $8.64 on the $10,000 taker trip; Wood plus a code, $8.22. The discount does not apply inside vaults or sub-accounts, which the clearinghouse treats as independent accounts.
The other side of the arrangement is worth knowing because it is the arrangement on this page. Whoever issued the code receives 10% of the referred user’s fees, less the discount that user gets, on the user’s first $1B of volume; a code can be created by anyone who has traded $10,000 on the venue. Our link below carries our code. It costs you nothing and it lowers your fee by the same 4% any code would; what you are choosing, if you use it, is who receives the venue’s share. On $9.00 that share is small change — the point of mentioning it is that you should know exactly what a “discount link” is before you trust one, ours included.
IF YOU HAVE DONE THE ARITHMETIC ABOVE
The fee is the smallest cost in this guide. The two that matter are the ones no schedule prints: you hold the keys, so a lost seed phrase is lost money with nobody to appeal to; and the venue checks your leverage once, when the position opens, and never again. If both of those are the arrangement you want, open the screen through the link, enter a code before the first order, and switch the order type to Limit before you type a size.
Referral link — the venue pays us a share of its fees at no extra cost to you, and under its published referral rules the code gives you 4% off for your first $25M of volume. It does not change what is written on this page. Education only; most retail traders lose money.
What else leaves the account besides the trading fee?
Four things, and the fee page lists none of them. The chart below draws all of them on one scale with the trading fee, for the same $10,000 BTC position.
- Gas. None per order — the onboarding page says trading on Hyperliquid is gas-free. You pay network gas once, to deposit, which is why the venue tells you to hold a little ETH on Arbitrum alongside your USDC. The amount is set by the network, not the venue; your wallet shows it before you sign.
- Withdrawal. The API documentation states a $1 fee for withdrawing “at the time of this writing”, with withdrawals finalising in about five minutes; the support pages repeat that you need 1 USDC to withdraw. Flat fees punish small round trips: on a $100 deposit, 1% of it goes to a single withdrawal. Two related floors from the same pages: the minimum deposit is 5 USDC, and the minimum order value is $10.
- Funding. Paid every hour, peer to peer, and the venue takes no cut — the Funding page says so in those words. It is a cost all the same if you hold. The formula has a fixed interest component of 0.01% per eight hours, so in a calm market a long pays roughly $1.00 per eight hours on $10,000: three days of that is $9.00, exactly one market-order round trip. The rate is capped at 4% per hour and is charged on the oracle price, not the mark. On the BTC screen on 5 Sep 2026 the coming hour showed 0.0007%, about $0.07 an hour on $10,000 — a reading, not a forecast; it changes every hour.
- Liquidation. The Liquidations page says it directly: “Unlike CEXs there is no clearance fee on liquidations.” Most liquidations are sent to the order book, and whatever margin survives is returned to you. But if account equity falls below two-thirds of the maintenance margin, the liquidator vault takes the position and the maintenance margin is not returned. For BTC, whose maximum leverage is 40x, maintenance is 1.25% of notional: $125 on the $10,000 position — fourteen taker round trips, kept in one event.
Compare that last item with the centralised venues in the table above. Binance charges a 1.25% liquidation clearance fee on BTC on every liquidation; Hyperliquid keeps 1.25% only when a backstop is needed. The percentage is the same; the trigger is different. What removes both is a stop-loss placed above the liquidation price, which is the sentence the venue’s own documentation ends on. The start-trading guide works through where that stop belongs at each leverage.
Which fees are not on the fee page?
Where it can cost you: the fee page is the cleanest thing about the venue, and the expensive parts are elsewhere. Each of the following is documented; none of them is on the schedule you read first.
- Builder-deployed markets (HIP-3). The HIP-3 specification is the venue’s route for markets listed by outside deployers — the layer where non-crypto perpetuals such as stocks and indices live — and it lets a deployer add a fee share of 0% to 300% on top of the protocol rate; above 100%, the protocol’s own fee rises to match. Run the venue’s published formula at the maximum and the multiplier is six: a base taker rate of 0.045% becomes 0.27%, $27.00 per fill and $54.00 for a round trip that costs $9.00 on BTC. We could not read any specific market’s setting without connecting a wallet, so we quote the ceiling, not a rate. The Fees line on the form for that market is where the real number is.
- Growth mode, the opposite case: a deployer of a non-crypto market can switch on a fee reduction of 90% or more, taking the all-in taker rate to 0.0045%–0.009%. It is not available for crypto perpetuals or anything that wraps them.
- Builder codes. A third-party app or bot trading on your behalf can charge its own fee on each fill — at most 0.1% on perpetuals and 1% on spot — but only after you sign an approval for that builder from your main wallet, and you can revoke it. At the maximum it is $10.00 per fill on $10,000, more than double the venue’s taker fee. The official app charges none; read the number before you sign.
- Quote-asset effects. Spot pairs and HIP-3 markets collateralised in an “aligned” stablecoin get 20% lower taker fees; spot pairs between two quote assets get 80% lower. Outcome markets charge a fee only when a position is closed or settled, never on opening.
The pattern is the same in every case: the headline rate is a starting point that the market, the collateral and the app you use can move in either direction. You do not have to memorise the rules. You have to look at the Fees line before every first trade on a new market.
Where do the fees go, and why does that matter for what you pay?
Because it explains the incentives. The Fees page says the venue’s fees are “entirely directed to the community” — to HLP, the protocol vault that market-makes and performs backstop liquidations; to the assistance fund, which converts fees into HYPE and burns it; and to deployers, who may keep up to half the fees of an asset they listed. There is no market-making programme, no special rebate and no latency advantage for anyone — the Market making page says so in one line. Maker rebates exist, but only for accounts with more than 0.5% of the venue’s entire 14-day maker volume, which describes a firm, not a person.
We report the mechanism because you will meet it in every discussion of the venue, and we stop there. A token whose supply is reduced by trading fees is a fact about the protocol; what it means for the token’s price is a separate question this site does not answer. What the structure does mean for your fees is simple: the deployer share on HIP-3 markets and the builder-code share for apps are how third parties are paid, and both come out of the number on your form.
Anyone optimising fees before they have a stop-loss habit. The $6.00 between market and limit is real, and the $125 in the last bar of the chart above is fourteen times larger; if you do not yet place a stop above the liquidation price on every position, the fee schedule is the wrong page to be studying. Start with how leverage and margin work and what self-custody changes, then come back.
Anyone who would buy HYPE for the discount. Read the staking section again: it is a position, and a slow one to leave.
Common mistakes
- Reading the fee page and stopping. The trading fee is the smallest unavoidable cost of a position; the maintenance margin in a backstop liquidation, funding over a long hold, and a deployer surcharge on a HIP-3 market are all larger.
- Buying the token for the discount. The Wood tier saves $0.44 per $10,000 market-order round trip. The 10 HYPE that earns it will move by more than that in an ordinary hour, and takes seven days to unstake.
- Paying the taker rate on a trade that could rest. If you are not in a hurry, a limit order at or near the mid pays a third of the fee. The form’s Mid shortcut fills the price for you.
- Trading a stock or index perpetual at the crypto rate in your head. HIP-3 markets can carry up to six times the base rate. Look at the Fees line for that market first.
- Approving a builder fee without reading it. A third-party app can charge up to 0.1% per fill, more than double the venue’s own taker fee, and it only needs one signature from you.
- Withdrawing in dribs. Each withdrawal costs $1 and takes about five minutes. Batch them.
- Hearing “no liquidation fee” as “liquidation is free”. A book liquidation returns what survives; a backstop liquidation keeps the maintenance margin. A stop above the liquidation price is the only thing that avoids both.
Frequently asked questions
What are Hyperliquid’s trading fees?
As of 5 Sep 2026, the base tier is 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker on perpetuals and 0.070% taker and 0.040% maker on spot. Fees fall through six further tiers as your rolling 14-day volume passes $5M, $25M, $100M, $500M, $2B and $7B, and staking HYPE cuts them by 5% to 40%. The order form prints your own current rates on its Fees line.
Does Hyperliquid charge gas fees for trading?
No. Placing and cancelling orders is gas-free according to the official onboarding page. You pay network gas once, to deposit, which means holding a little ETH on Arbitrum or the native token of whichever chain you send from. Withdrawing to Arbitrum carries a flat $1 fee and takes about five minutes.
Is Hyperliquid cheaper than Binance?
Slightly, on the trade itself: a $10,000 perpetual round trip by market order costs $9.00 on Hyperliquid against $10.00 on Binance at the regular tier, and by limit order $3.00 against $4.00. The larger structural difference is elsewhere: Binance charges a 1.25% clearance fee on a liquidated BTC position, while Hyperliquid charges none and only keeps the maintenance margin if a backstop liquidation is needed.
Does staking HYPE reduce Hyperliquid fees?
Yes, by 5% for more than 10 HYPE staked up to 40% for more than 500,000, and the referral discount multiplies on top. On a $10,000 market-order round trip the smallest tier saves $0.44. Staked HYPE is locked for a day per delegation and takes seven days to move back to your spot balance, so the discount is only as good as your willingness to hold the token.
Is there a liquidation fee on Hyperliquid?
The documentation says plainly that, unlike centralised exchanges, there is no clearance fee on liquidations. Most liquidations go to the order book and any remaining margin is returned. If account equity falls below two-thirds of the maintenance margin, the liquidator vault takes the position and the maintenance margin — 1.25% of a BTC position, $125 on $10,000 — is not returned.
Why does the fee shown on the form differ from the fee page?
The form shows the rate for the market you have open and the account that is connected. Builder-deployed (HIP-3) markets can carry a deployer fee share of up to 300% on top of the protocol rate, a third-party app may add a builder fee you approved, and staking or a referral code lowers the number. The fee page is the starting point; the Fees line on the form is the price.