Maker, taker, and the fee tier you will actually pay

Exchange fee pages are technically accurate and systematically misleading, in the same way a headline interest rate is. The number displayed most prominently is the one fewest customers pay.

Maker and taker are different roles

A maker order adds liquidity: it rests on the book waiting to be filled. A taker order removes liquidity: it executes immediately against something already there.

Venues charge takers more, and sometimes charge makers nothing or pay them a rebate. The reasoning is straightforward — resting orders make the market usable, so they are subsidised by the orders that consume them.

The practical consequence is that a market order is always a taker order. If you press buy and it fills instantly, you paid the taker rate. Most retail activity is taker activity, and the taker rate is generally the higher of the two figures shown.

Tiers are volume-gated, and the gates are high

Fee schedules are presented as tables with rates declining as volume rises. The lowest rates are real, and they are typically reached at monthly volumes far above what an individual generates.

Read the table from the top row, not the bottom. The top row is the default and the one that applies to you until proven otherwise. Whether volume is measured over thirty days, calendar month, or a rolling window changes when you qualify and when you drop back down, and that detail is usually in a footnote.

Some venues also grant discounts for holding a native token or paying fees in it. Those are real, and they carry their own exposure: the discount is denominated in an asset whose price moves independently of your trading.

The fee is not the cost

This is the more important point. Even the correct fee figure understates what a trade costs, because the fee is only one of several charges and rarely the largest for smaller trades.

• Spread. Buying at the ask and selling at the bid costs the difference, whether or not any commission is charged. On a wide market this dwarfs the fee — the spread cost calculator puts a number on it.
• Slippage. Orders larger than the size resting at the best price fill progressively worse.
• Withdrawal fees. Charged per withdrawal and frequently well above the underlying network cost. See the network fee impact tool.
• Conversion. Deposits and withdrawals in a currency the venue does not natively hold usually cross a spread you are not shown.

Fees compound in a way people underestimate

A fee charged on both sides of a trade, repeated across many trades, on a balance that shrinks each time, is not a linear cost. Fifty round trips at a low rate consume a meaningfully larger share of a balance than multiplying the rate by the number of trades suggests. The trading fee impact calculator compounds it properly, and the useful output is the gain required per trade simply to stay level.

Comparing venues honestly

To compare two venues, use the taker rate at the top tier — the default — plus the observed spread on the pair you actually trade, plus the withdrawal fee for the asset you actually withdraw. Comparing bottom-tier maker rates is comparing two prices neither of you will pay.

We do not publish a table of named exchanges’ fees, for reasons set out on our tools page: those figures differ by tier, jurisdiction and payment method, and change without notice, so a table would be a set of confident claims we could not keep true.

How to place a maker order deliberately

Since the maker rate is the lower one, it is worth knowing how to qualify for it rather than treating it as something that happens to other people.

A limit order priced so it will not fill immediately rests on the book and earns the maker rate when someone trades against it. A limit order priced aggressively enough to cross the spread executes immediately and is charged as a taker despite being a limit order — the label depends on behaviour, not order type. Some venues offer a post-only instruction that cancels rather than filling if the order would cross, which removes the ambiguity entirely.

The trade is real: a resting order may not fill, and waiting has its own cost if the price moves away. For anything urgent the taker fee is the price of certainty. For anything patient, the difference between the two rates is available for the asking.

Where the tier is calculated matters

Volume is usually aggregated per account, but the details vary and change the answer. Whether spot and derivatives volume are combined, whether accounts within one household or organisation aggregate, and whether the window is calendar or rolling all shift when you qualify.

The direction of travel also matters. Most schedules recalculate periodically, so a tier earned in a busy month can lapse in a quiet one. If a fee assumption underpins a strategy, check what happens when volume falls rather than only what happens when it rises.

Putting a number on it before you trade

The way to make this concrete is to compute the all-in cost of a representative trade rather than compare rate cards. Take the size you actually trade, the taker rate at the default tier, the current spread on the pair, and the withdrawal fee for the asset you would move out.

Expressed as a percentage of the trade, that figure is comparable between venues in a way that no individual line item is. It is also frequently a surprise: on a small trade the withdrawal fee alone can exceed every other cost combined, which argues for consolidating withdrawals rather than for changing venue.

Our calculators cover each component separately — spread, fee compounding, network cost — and the useful exercise is running all three on the same hypothetical trade, because the ranking of venues can invert depending on which cost dominates at your size.