One Page, Two Pricing Philosophies: Kraken Charges 0.25% Flat on Perps but Tiered 0.40%/0.80% on Spot
A neutral fee-research note — no sponsored content, no position held.
AI disclosure: This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human editorial review. All quoted figures were fetched directly from the sources cited and re-checked on the publication date.
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Most people read an exchange fee page looking for one number. Kraken's fee page is interesting precisely because it refuses to give you one: on the same URL, at the same time, the same company publishes two completely different pricing philosophies — a flat fee on one product and a two-axis tiered ladder on another. Both are quoted verbatim below, and you can verify every figure yourself in about two minutes.
The flat side: "simple" Perps cost 0.25% per side
Kraken's fee schedule page (kraken.com/features/fee-schedule, fetched 2026-09-18) describes its simple perpetuals product in two sentences:
"A 0.25% fee is applied to the notional value of the trade to open the position. A 0.25% fee is applied to the closed notional value of the trade to close the position."
Notice what that structure means:
- Round trip = 0.50% of notional, paid whether you opened as a maker or a taker.
- No maker discount. Resting liquidity earns nothing extra here.
- No volume discount. The rate does not step down as you trade more.
As a cross-check on stability, the same sentences appear word-for-word in an Internet Archive snapshot of the same page from 2026-08-20 (snapshot id 20260820055608) — so this is not a one-day promotion, it is a standing product design.
The tiered side: the order-book ladder
Scroll a little further on the same page and you are in a different world. Kraken's Pro / order-book pricing is a classic two-dimensional ladder: maker vs. taker rates, banded by 30-day trading volume (and, in the newer presentation, platform assets). The page currently prints two tier tables side by side — a legacy table and the "Cross-platform fee tiers" table that the page announces was "recently introduced". Both begin like this:
| Tier | Spot 30-day volume | Legacy Maker / Taker | Cross-platform Maker / Taker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | $0+ | 0.40% / 0.80% | 0.38% / 0.80% |
| Tier 2 | $2.5K+ | 0.30% / 0.60% | 0.28% / 0.60% |
| Tier 3 | $10K+ | 0.22% / 0.38% | 0.20% / 0.38% |
(Both tables, including the small maker-rate difference at Tier 1-2 between them, are visible in the live page and in the 2026-08-20 archive snapshot. The page itself does not state which of its two tables governs which checkout flow, so this article simply reports what is printed and does not pick a winner.)
The ladder keeps descending: by the higher tiers the maker rate reaches 0.0x% territory while taker stays materially above it — maker/taker is treated as two independent levers, and volume is rewarded on both.
What the same page admits about "simple"
Put the two halves next to each other and the marketing framing of a flat 0.25% "simple perps" fee starts to look like a trade-off rather than a discount:
- A high-volume maker on the order-book side pays 0.22% or less from just $10K of monthly volume (Tier 3) — already cheaper than the flat 0.25%, and the ladder keeps going down while the flat fee never moves.
- At Tier 1, the flat 0.25% is actually cheaper than the 0.80% taker rate on spot's first tier. For an occasional taker, the "simple" product is the cheaper door; for an occasional maker it is roughly comparable; for anyone who grows, it becomes the more expensive one by design.
- The real cost of the simple product is not the headline number — it is the forfeited option to earn maker pricing and to graduate down a ladder.
None of this makes one product "better." A flat per-side fee is predictable and easy to reason about, which has genuine value for someone starting out. The point of reading both halves of the page is simply to know which knob you gave up.
The honest footnote
For completeness: Kraken's public asset-pairs API has historically exposed a separate fee-ladder field whose numbers did not match either table on the fee page, and this observer has previously seen the page and the API disagree. This article deliberately relies only on the fee page text (live fetch plus an archive snapshot from a different date), and flags the API/page mismatch as an unresolved transparency wrinkle rather than using any of those API numbers as a comparison. Treat every rate on any exchange as "as published, subject to change" — pages get revised without notice.
Not financial advice
This article is fee-schedule journalism for developers and cost-aware users. It is not financial advice, not investment advice, and not a recommendation to trade perpetuals, use any named exchange, or adopt any order strategy. Perpetual contracts involve substantial risk, including loss of more than your deposit. Fee tiers, product availability ("currently available in certain geos"), and rules change at the exchange's discretion.
Verify with official sources
Do not take this article's word for anything. Before acting on any number here, check the primary sources directly:
- Kraken fee schedule page:
https://www.kraken.com/features/fee-schedule(the perps paragraph and both tier tables) - Internet Archive snapshot 20260820055608 of the same page (independent earlier time point)
- Kraken's own support articles, linked from the fee page itself, for tier-eligibility details
Data snapshot: live page fetched 2026-09-18; all quotations re-checked on that date.
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