DEV Community: Dotrade

What Four Exchanges Actually Charge, in Dollars, at Real Trading Volumes

Dotrade — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:23:19 +0000

Taker fees on crypto futures are quoted in fractions of a percent, which makes them easy to ignore. Run them against a real monthly volume and they stop being fractions.

Here's what OKX, Binance, Bitget and MEXC currently charge on BTC/USDT perpetuals at standard tier, and what that costs over a year at three volumes a working trader might actually hit.

(Chart above: taker/maker fees across six exchanges, read from each exchange's own API or fee page. Full source list below.)

The rates (read 2026-09-04/05, standard tier, no VIP discount)

Exchange	Taker fee	Source
MEXC	0.020%	contract.mexc.com API, read 2026-09-05
OKX	0.050%	OKX fee help page, verified 2026-09-04
Binance	0.050%	Binance futures fee page, verified 2026-09-04
Bitget	0.060%	Bitget academy fee page, verified 2026-09-04

What that costs, by monthly volume

Monthly volume	MEXC/yr	OKX/yr	Binance/yr	Bitget/yr	Cheapest to most expensive
$10,000	$24	$60	$60	$72	$48/yr
$50,000	$120	$300	$300	$360	$240/yr
$250,000	$600	$1,500	$1,500	$1,800	$1,200/yr

That last column is just fee cost on the cheapest of these four minus fee cost on the most expensive, same volume, same year, taker side only. At $250k/month it's $1,200 a year, money that never touched a trade thesis, just the venue.

None of this counts maker rebates, VIP tiers, or funding rates, which move these numbers further at real volume. It also doesn't tell you which exchange to use, liquidity, uptime and what markets you actually need matter more than a fraction of a percent for most people. It just tells you what the fraction of a percent is actually worth once you multiply it by how much you trade.

If you want this for your own volume instead of the three above, returnfee.com/calculator/ runs the same arithmetic live, for any number you type in, across the same four exchanges, no signup. It also shows the same underlying fee-rates.json numbers this post used.

The reason we built that calculator: ReturnFee pays users back a share of these same taker fees on top of whatever the exchange already rebates automatically, funded out of our own affiliate commission with each exchange, free to join, no cost to the trader either way. The rebate side isn't the point of this post; the arithmetic above is true whether or not you ever register with us.

What Holding a Leveraged BTCUSDT Position Actually Costs in Trading Fees, Exchange by Exchange

Dotrade — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:50:43 +0000

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.

What a Month of BTCUSDT Taker Fees Actually Costs You (2026-09-05 Rates)

Dotrade — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:48:56 +0000

If you run market orders on a BTCUSDT perpetual at real size, taker fees are quietly the biggest line item you never look at. Trade $100,000 of notional a month crossing the spread on Gate.io and you've paid $75 in taker fees alone before a single dollar of PnL — more than most traders' entire monthly data/VPN budget, gone to one fee line.

The rates, read straight from the source, 2026-09-05

We keep a small collector that reads maker/taker perpetual fees straight from each exchange's own API (or published fee page, where the API refuses the connection) rather than trusting a stale comparison table. Here's what it read on 2026-09-05T14:17 UTC, standard/VIP-0 tier, BTCUSDT:

Exchange	Maker	Taker	Source
MEXC	0.000%	0.020%	contract.mexc.com API
OKX	0.020%	0.050%	OKX fee help page
Binance	0.020%	0.050%	Binance futures fee page
KuCoin	0.020%	0.060%	api-futures.kucoin.com API
Bitget	0.020%	0.060%	Bitget academy fee page (their API reset the connection twice from our collector)
Gate.io	-0.010%	0.075%	api.gateio.ws API

(The cover chart on this post is generated straight from this same dataset — bar height is the taker rate in bps, the label above each bar is what that rate turns into in dollars at $100,000/month of taker volume.)

What that spread actually means at volume

At $100,000/month of taker-side volume, the gap between MEXC's 0.020% and Gate.io's 0.075% is $55/month — nothing dramatic at that size, but it scales linearly with volume and it's paid every single month regardless of whether the underlying trade was profitable. Push the same ratio to $1M/month and it's a $550/month gap, purely from which exchange the order routed to.

Maker fees don't get discussed nearly as often, but they matter more the more your strategy actually rests orders instead of crossing the book: Gate.io's -0.010% maker rate means you're paid to add liquidity there, while most of the others charge 0.020% on both sides of a purely passive strategy.

Where the referral link comes in

We run an affiliate arrangement with Bitget, disclosed here because it's ours: our Bitget referral link. Signing up through it doesn't change Bitget's own published maker/taker schedule above — it's a separate rebate arrangement on top of trading fees you'd pay Bitget regardless of which link you used to register. We're not going to attach a number to what that rebate is worth to you here, because it depends on Bitget's own current terms at the time you sign up, and we'd rather you check that directly than trust a number we didn't just re-verify.

No return guarantee, and this isn't investment advice — fee schedules change, VIP tiers and fee-token discounts (BNB, KCS, etc.) shift these numbers materially at real volume, and liquidity/uptime/market access still matter more than a few bps of taker fee for most trading decisions. Check each exchange's own current fee page before assuming any number above still holds by the time you read this.

We track these numbers ourselves on returnfee.com, our fee comparison and rebate tracking site, if you want the latest rates in one place.

BTCUSDT Perpetual Fees Across 6 Exchanges (Live-Collected, 2026-09-04)

Dotrade — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:24:01 +0000

Why this comparison

We pulled BTCUSDT perpetual maker/taker fees directly from six exchanges' own public fee schedules (API where the exchange exposes one, published fee page where it doesn't), collected 2026-09-04 09:44 UTC, standard/VIP-0 tier. No estimates, no rounding tricks — just what each exchange currently publishes for a retail account.

The numbers

Exchange	Maker	Taker	Source
MEXC	0.000%	0.020%	contract.mexc.com API
Gate.io	-0.010%	0.075%	api.gateio.ws API
OKX	0.020%	0.050%	OKX fee help page
Binance	0.020%	0.050%	Binance futures fee page
KuCoin	0.020%	0.060%	api-futures.kucoin.com API
Bitget	0.020%	0.060%	Bitget academy fee page (Bitget's own API reset the connection twice from our collector, so this one came from their published page instead of a live API read)

(Chart of the same numbers is the cover image on this post.)

Reading it

Gate.io pays makers a small rebate (-0.010%) and has the highest taker fee of the six. Good for pure limit-order flow, expensive if you're crossing the spread a lot.
MEXC has the lowest taker fee (0.020%) and a flat 0% maker fee — the cheapest all-around on this list for perpetuals, at least at standard tier.
OKX and Binance land on identical numbers (0.020% / 0.050%) at standard tier.
KuCoin and Bitget are also identical to each other (0.020% / 0.060%), the most expensive taker side of the six.

None of this accounts for VIP tiers, funding rates, or fee-token discounts (BNB, KCS, etc.), which change these numbers materially at volume — check each exchange's own tier table before assuming standard-tier numbers apply to you.

Signing up

If you're opening a new account anyway, these are our own referral links (no benefit to you beyond what the exchange itself offers, but it's how this comparison gets funded):

OKX: https://okx.com/join/DOTRADE
Binance: https://www.binance.com/register?ref=DOTRADE
MEXC: https://promote.mexc.com/b/dotrade
Bitget: https://partner.bitget.com/bg/xdwea5kd

We don't have referral programs set up with KuCoin or Gate.io yet, so those are just their exchanges' own sign-up pages: KuCoin / Gate.io.

No return guarantees here — fees are one input into where you trade, not the only one. Liquidity, uptime, and what markets you actually need matter too.

We track these numbers ourselves on returnfee.com, our fee comparison and rebate tracking site, if you want the latest rates in one place.