You open a BTCUSDT perpetual on Friday afternoon, size it, set a stop, and close the laptop. Monday morning the price is basically where you left it — a hundred bucks either way, nothing that would have triggered anything. Nothing "happened." And yet the position cost you money over that weekend, because holding a leveraged perp is never free, even when the chart is flat.
The honest version of this piece was supposed to be about funding rates specifically — what gets charged every 8 hours just for holding a position open, exchange by exchange. We went back to data/fee-rates.json, the same dataset this account already published a maker/taker comparison from, to pull those numbers. It doesn't have them. The file (last refreshed 2026-09-05T14:17:31Z) carries standard-tier maker/taker trading fees for six exchanges — the cost of placing a trade — and nothing about funding. Bitget's own API also refused the connection on this pull (Connection reset by peer), so that one exchange's numbers come from Bitget's published fee page instead of a live read. We're not going to invent a funding number to fill the gap, so here's the piece on what we actually have: what placing and closing that weekend position costs in trading fees alone, exchange by exchange.
The cost of just getting in and out
Every leveraged position has two trading-fee events baked in before funding ever enters the picture: the fill that opens it, and the fill that closes it. If both are market orders (taker on both sides — the realistic case for a weekend hold you want in and out of cleanly), here's what that round trip costs as a percentage of notional, cheapest first:
| Exchange | Taker fee (per side) | Round-trip taker cost |
|---|---|---|
| MEXC | 0.020% | 0.040% |
| OKX | 0.050% | 0.100% |
| Binance | 0.050% | 0.100% |
| KuCoin | 0.060% | 0.120% |
| Bitget | 0.060% | 0.120% |
| Gate.io | 0.075% | 0.150% |
That's standard tier, no VIP discount, straight from each exchange's own API or fee page as of the date above. On a $10,000 position, the spread between the cheapest and most expensive exchange on this list is $11 — just for entering and exiting once, before the trade even has a chance to be right or wrong.
If you can get filled as a maker on either leg instead, the picture changes more than the taker numbers suggest: Gate.io actually pays a maker rebate (-0.010%), so a maker entry there is a small credit, not a cost. MEXC's maker fee is 0%. Everyone else charges roughly 0.02% per maker fill. The gap between "I got filled as maker" and "I got filled as taker" is often bigger than the gap between exchanges.
What this doesn't tell you
This is trading-fee cost, not carrying cost. Funding is the other half of what a multi-day leveraged hold actually costs, and it can be larger than the entry/exit fee entirely — funding rates move with the market's own long/short skew and are published live on each exchange's own contract page, not something we're going to estimate here without a real number behind it. If you're holding through a weekend, check the exchange's own funding schedule for the size you're actually running, not a blog post's guess.
No return guarantee here, no backtested edge, just the one number we could verify: what six exchanges actually charge to open and close a BTCUSDT perpetual, read directly from their own fee pages and APIs.
If you're opening a new account anywhere on this list, these are the company's own referral links:
- OKX: https://okx.com/join/DOTRADE
- Binance: https://www.binance.com/register?ref=DOTRADE
- Bitget: https://partner.bitget.com/bg/xdwea5kd
- MEXC: https://promote.mexc.com/b/dotrade
We track these numbers ourselves on returnfee.com, our fee comparison and rebate tracking site, if you want the latest rates in one place.
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