Nobody publishes a fee schedule to inform you. It is a pricing structure designed to change what you do, and every feature of it exists because it produces behaviour the venue wants. Reading it that way makes the arithmetic obvious and stops several expensive habits before they start.
The cost of processing a trade is essentially the same whichever side you are on, and fee schedules do not resemble that at all. The gap between the two sides, the tiers, the rebates and the discounts are all deliberate distortions, each one paying for a behaviour: resting orders make the book look deep, volume makes the venue look active, and a token discount makes you hold something the venue issued.
| Market | Maker | Taker | Comes back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spot | 0.100 % | 0.100 % | 0.0100 % |
| Perpetual futures | 0.020 % | 0.060 % | 0.0060 % |
Reading a schedule with that lens answers most questions about it. Every number is a price the venue is willing to pay or charge to make a particular thing happen, and the interesting question is never whether a number is low but whether the behaviour it is buying is one you were going to do anyway. Being paid for what you already do is a discount; changing what you do to collect it is usually a cost.
Tiers are almost always based on volume traded over a rolling window, most commonly thirty days, recalculated periodically. Two details in that sentence do the damage. Rolling means the volume that qualified you drops out of the window as it ages, so maintaining a tier requires maintaining the volume indefinitely rather than reaching it once. And periodically means the recalculation happens on a schedule, so a tier earned today may not apply until the next update.
The consequence is that a tier is a subscription paid in trading activity, and its price is the cost of the trades required to hold it. A trader who reached a level during an active month and now trades less will drop back, and the drop is invisible until a fee appears higher than expected on a statement nobody reads closely.
The detail worth checking on any specific schedule is what counts toward the volume. Some count both sides of every trade, some count notional on derivatives and settled value on spot, and some exclude certain instruments entirely. Two venues quoting the same tier thresholds can require substantially different amounts of actual trading to reach them.
At the higher tiers, some venues stop charging for resting orders and start paying for them. The payment is real money credited to the account, and it comes from the fees paid by the participants who traded against those orders. A rebate is therefore a transfer between two classes of customer, mediated by the venue, which keeps the difference.
This is worth stating plainly because it explains what a rebate is for. The venue wants a deep book, because a deep book attracts flow, and paying for depth is cheaper than having none. The rebate is the price of that depth, and the trader collecting it is being paid to perform a service rather than receiving a discount on a purchase.
It also explains the qualification requirements. Rebates typically require both a volume tier and a maker ratio, meaning a minimum share of your activity must be resting rather than crossing. That second condition is the one that catches people: reaching the volume and continuing to cross the book earns nothing, because the volume was never the thing being bought.
The calculation is short and almost nobody does it. Take the volume gap between your current activity and the next threshold. Multiply it by your total round-trip cost, which is the fee plus the spread plus your own market impact rather than the fee alone. Compare that against the saving the new tier produces, applied to the volume you would have traded anyway.
Done honestly, the answer is negative in the large majority of cases, and the reason is that the fee is the smallest of the three costs being paid to generate the extra volume. Trades entered purely to reach a threshold cross a spread and move a book, and those costs are typically several times the fee saving they unlock.
There is a narrow case where it works, and it is worth naming because it is real. If the extra volume consists of trades you were going to make anyway and had been distributing across venues, consolidating them onto one to reach a tier costs nothing additional and captures the saving. That is a routing decision rather than a trading decision, and it is the only version of this that reliably pays.
Trading more to pay less per trade is arithmetic that almost never works, because the fee is the cheapest part of a trade and the extra trades pay all of it.
A common structure offers a reduced rate to holders of the venue's own token, sometimes scaled by the amount held. The discount is genuine and the arrangement quietly requires you to take a position: you now hold an asset whose value depends on the venue's fortunes, in an amount determined by your trading volume rather than by any view on the asset.
The honest way to evaluate it is to price the position separately. The discount is worth a computable amount per year given your volume. The holding is exposed to a volatile asset correlated with the health of the platform you are trading on, which is a concentration you may already have through the balance you keep there. If the annual saving is small relative to the holding required, the discount is a fee reduction financed by an undeclared investment.
There is a second-order effect worth noticing. Because the requirement is denominated in units of the token rather than in value, a fall in the token's price can drop you below the threshold at the same moment the holding has lost value, and restoring the discount requires buying more of something that just declined.
Most venues pay a share of the fees generated by users somebody introduced. From the perspective of a trader being introduced, this is worth understanding for one reason: the person recommending a platform may be receiving a share of what you pay, indefinitely, and that is rarely disclosed in the recommendation.
It does not make the recommendation wrong, and it does explain a pattern that otherwise looks like coincidence. Comparison content that ranks venues frequently ranks them by what the author earns from each, and the schedule quoted is often the standard one rather than the best available. Checking whether a comparison discloses its arrangements takes seconds and changes how much weight it deserves.
The mirror side is that many venues share part of the referral fee back with the referred user, as a permanent discount, and it applies only if the link was used at signup. That is a genuine saving available for no behaviour change at all, and it is unavailable retroactively, which makes it one of the few fee decisions with a deadline.
The number in a comparison table is the top tier's taker rate, or occasionally the best rate available to anybody, and neither is what a normal account pays. The applicable rate depends on your tier, your maker ratio, whether a token discount applies, whether a referral reduction is attached, and which instrument you traded.
The number that answers the question is on your own statement rather than on the schedule. Total fees paid over a month, divided by total volume traded, gives your effective rate, and it is frequently substantially higher than the figure you believed applied. Computing it once removes the entire category of assumption from any comparison you make afterwards.
It also reveals the composition, which is more useful than the rate. A trader whose effective rate is dominated by taker fees has a different problem from one whose costs are mostly funding, and the schedule cannot tell them apart because it does not know how they trade.
The comparison that means something takes your own trading rather than a hypothetical. Take last month's actual activity, broken into maker and taker volume by instrument, and apply each venue's schedule to it including whichever tier that volume would place you in. The result is two numbers that answer the question directly, and they frequently rank differently from the headline rates.
Then add what the schedule does not contain, because it is usually larger. The spread on each venue for the instruments you trade, measured at the hours you trade them. The depth, which determines your impact. And the withdrawal fee, which is fixed and matters more the smaller the account. A venue with a marginally worse fee schedule and a consistently tighter book is cheaper, and no comparison table will ever show that.
The whole exercise takes an hour, uses data you already have, and it settles a question most traders answer with a marketing page. It also tends to be stable: the ranking it produces holds until your own trading pattern changes, which is far less often than fee schedules do.
Almost never. Compute it: multiply the volume gap by your full round-trip cost, which is the fee plus the spread plus your own impact, and compare against the saving on volume you would have traded anyway. The extra trades pay all three costs to unlock a reduction in the cheapest one.
Almost always on a rolling window, commonly thirty days, recalculated periodically. Rolling means qualifying volume drops out as it ages, so a tier is a subscription paid in trading activity rather than something you reach once. Check also what counts, since venues differ on whether both sides and which instruments are included.
The venue pays you for resting orders, out of the fees paid by participants who trade against them. It is a transfer between two classes of customer, and it exists because the venue wants a deep book. You are being paid to perform a service rather than receiving a discount.
Because rebates usually require a maker ratio as well as a volume threshold: a minimum share of your activity must rest in the book rather than cross it. Reaching the volume while continuing to take liquidity earns nothing, since the volume was never the behaviour being purchased.
Only if the annual saving is large relative to the holding required, because the arrangement obliges you to take a position in a volatile asset correlated with the platform you trade on. Price the position separately. Note also that a falling token price can drop you below the threshold at the worst moment.
It costs nothing and frequently saves something, since many venues share part of the referral fee back with the referred account as a permanent discount. It applies only if the link was used at signup and is not available retroactively, which makes it one of the few fee decisions with a deadline.
Total fees paid last month divided by total volume traded, from your own statement. It is frequently substantially higher than the rate you believed applied, because the headline number is usually the best tier's rate. Computing it once removes assumption from every comparison you make afterwards.
Apply both schedules to your own last month of activity, split by maker and taker and by instrument, at the tier that volume would place you in. Then add the spread and depth on the instruments and hours you actually trade, plus the withdrawal fee. A slightly worse schedule with a tighter book is cheaper.