What Is a Funding Rate in Crypto? Funding Rates Explained, With Live Rates and Real Costs

Funding Rate Calculator — What your position pays or receives per hour, day and month, and over your hold, with the right payment interval on Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster, edgeX, Binance and Bybit. — Open the calculator →

1. What a funding rate is: positive vs negative

A perpetual contract never expires, so there is no settlement date to pull its price back to the underlying asset. Funding is the substitute. Every interval, the side of the market that is paying a premium hands a small percentage of its position value to the other side. If the perp trades above spot the rate is positive and longs pay; if below, shorts pay. Traders arbitrage the payment away, and the perp price converges on spot without anyone forcing it. (New to perps? Read what are perpetual futures first.)

Three things it is not. It is not a fee the exchange collects: Binance's documentation states it "only helps facilitate the exchange of funding amounts" and charges no service fee, Hyperliquid's says funding is "purely peer-to-peer and no fees are collected on the payments", and Lighter's says the same. It is not part of your trading fee, which is charged separately on each fill. And it is not an interest rate on your margin: it is charged on the full notional of the position, so a 10x-leveraged $1,000 margin position pays funding on $10,000.

2. The funding rate formula

Almost every crypto exchange, centralised or decentralised, uses the same formula; Binance's funding-rate FAQ (first published in 2019) is the reference most people quote. Hyperliquid, Lighter and Aster use the same structure, with their own sampling and caps. The 8-hour rate is:

F = P + clamp(I − P, −0.05%, +0.05%)

• I, the interest rate — fixed at 0.01% per 8 hours (0.03% per day). It represents the cost of holding dollars instead of the coin. Binance sets it to 0% on a few pairs such as ETHBTC; Aster sets 0% on BNBUSDT and some others.
• P, the premium index — how far the perp's order book sits from the spot index: P = [max(0, impact bid − index) − max(0, index − impact ask)] / index. Impact bid and ask are the average prices you would get trading a fixed "impact notional" through the book (Hyperliquid uses 20,000 USDC for BTC and ETH, 6,000 USDC for other assets). Binance and Aster sample P every 5 seconds and weight later samples more over the interval; Hyperliquid samples every 5 seconds and averages over each hour; Lighter samples once a minute at a random second and averages 60 samples per hour.
• The clamp — pulls the rate back to I whenever P is within ±0.05% of it. Binance spells out the consequence: as long as the premium is between −0.04% and +0.06%, the funding rate is exactly 0.01%. That is why liquid coins print the same number for days.

Worked example (Binance's own). Average premium index 0.0429%. Clamp(0.01% − 0.0429%) = −0.0329%, inside the ±0.05% band. F = 0.0429% − 0.0329% = 0.0100%. The perp was trading four basis points rich and the rate still landed on the baseline. Now push the premium to 1% (Hyperliquid's documentation uses the same example): the clamp saturates at −0.05% and F = 0.95% per 8 hours — a long pays $95 per $10,000 every 8 hours until the premium collapses, unless the venue’s cap bites first (Binance and Aster cap BTCUSDT at 0.3% per 8 hours, so $30).

Interval scaling. The formula gives an 8-hour rate. Hyperliquid and Lighter pay one eighth of it every hour; Aster and Binance divide it by 8/N for an N-hour interval, so a 4-hour market pays half the 8-hour rate twice as often. Same cost per day, different number on the screen.

Caps. Binance caps USDⓈ-M funding at ±0.3% per interval on BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT and at ±2% on most other contracts (696 of 791 on September 27, 2026), with tighter caps on some, such as ±0.375% on SOL and XRP; Aster uses the same levels on BTC and ETH (±0.3%), and Bybit's BTCUSDT cap is ±0.333%. Hyperliquid caps at 4% per hour for every asset — far looser, deliberately. Lighter caps at 4% per 8 hours (0.5% an hour) and scales the premium by 1/2 on RWA markets and 1/100 on pre-IPO markets.

3. Intervals, caps and what price is used

Official docs re-read September 27, 2026; Aster, Binance and Bybit intervals and caps from their public fundingInfo / instruments endpoints on September 26–27, 2026.

Two details trip people up. First, the payment goes to whoever holds a position at the settlement timestamp: on Binance that is 00:00, 08:00 and 16:00 UTC for 8-hour markets (plus 04:00, 12:00, 20:00 for 4-hour ones); on Hyperliquid it is every hour on the hour. There is no pro-rating — hold for 59 minutes and close, and you pay nothing. Second, the notional is priced differently: Binance and Aster use the mark price, Hyperliquid the oracle (a weighted median of CEX spot prices), Lighter the index. On a liquid major the difference is noise; on a thin market where mark and index diverge it is not. The Hyperliquid funding rate mechanics in full (formula, hourly cap, oracle pricing) have their own guide, and the three DEXs are compared line by line in section 9.

4. Reading the number: hourly, 8-hour and annualised

The single biggest source of confusion is that venues display the rate on different bases. Hyperliquid shows an hourly rate; Binance and Bybit show a per-interval rate that is usually 8-hourly. A Hyperliquid "0.00125%" and a Binance "0.01%" are the same thing. To compare, multiply Hyperliquid's number by 8 — or use Hyperliquid's own Funding Comparison page, which does it for you.

Annualised = 8-hour rate × 3 × 365. Hyperliquid's docs quote 11.6% APR for the baseline (compounded); simple arithmetic gives 10.95%. Aggregators such as CoinGlass show an "OI-weighted" or "volume-weighted" rate across exchanges — useful for sentiment, useless for working out what your position on your exchange will pay.

5. What funding costs, and how to estimate it

Cost of holding a $10,000 long — notional, not margin — at various rates. A short at the same rate receives the same amounts.

Put that next to trading fees. A $10,000 round trip at Hyperliquid's base taker rate (0.045%) costs $9.00. At baseline funding, that is about three days of holding; at 0.1% per 8h it is about seven hours. Leverage is what turns funding from a rounding error into the main cost: with 20x leverage, $500 of margin controls the $10,000 above, so the $90 baseline month is 18% of your margin, and the 0.3%-per-8h row would burn several times your margin in a month — the position would be liquidated long before the month was out.

Estimate your funding cost

Enter your position and the rate your exchange shows. The buttons load the live BTC rate from the table below in each venue's own interval.

Funding Rate Calculator — Funding per payment, day, month and hold for any Hyperliquid perp at its current rate, with each venue's own interval and cap (hourly on Hyperliquid and Lighter, per market on Aster, longer on edgeX, Binance and Bybit) side by side. — Full calculator →

For trading fees and funding together across venues, use the DEX fee calculator.

6. Live funding rates across exchanges

The same six coins on five venues, converted to an 8-hour basis so they can be compared directly (hourly rates × 8, 4-hour rates × 2), with the simple annualised rate underneath. Positive = longs pay. The cheapest venue for a long in each row is highlighted.

Build-time data: Hyperliquid metaAndAssetCtxs (Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:53 UTC); Lighter, Binance and Bybit from Lighter’s public funding-rates feed, which normalises all three to 8 hours (Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:53 UTC); Aster premiumIndex and fundingInfo (Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:53 UTC). Binance and Aster pay HYPE every 4 hours; Aster and the CEXs show the rate for the next payment.

The usual pattern: most hours, Hyperliquid and Lighter sit at their baselines on the majors (Lighter records its default as 0.0012% an hour, 0.0096% per 8 hours), while the CEXs and Aster often print below baseline on BTC, so a BTC long is frequently cheaper to hold there. HYPE is where venues disagree most, sometimes with opposite signs. Rates move every interval, so treat any single reading as a snapshot and check the history below before choosing where to hold for days.

Hyperliquid right now: highest and lowest funding

Hyperliquid rates below come from the public API when this page was built. Only markets with more than $5M of 24-hour volume are listed. Of 178 perps, 159 were positive, 19 negative and 145 exactly at the 0.00125%/h baseline as of Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:53 UTC.

The full list of all 178 markets with volume, open interest and funding is on the Hyperliquid markets data page.

7. Funding rate history: what a position paid over 7 and 30 days

Headline rates tell you the next payment; history tells you what a position costs. Total funding paid by a long, summed from each venue’s history endpoint, for the 7 days and the 30 days to September 26, 2026 16:00 UTC. Multiply by 100 for dollars per $10,000 (0.2181% = $21.81).

Payments after 2026-09-19 16:00 UTC (7 days) and 2026-08-27 16:00 UTC (30 days), up to and including 2026-09-26 16:00 UTC. Hyperliquid and Lighter pay hourly (168 / 720 payments); Aster, Binance and Bybit every 8 hours (21 / 90), except HYPE on Aster and Binance every 4 hours (42 / 180). Read on September 26, 2026.

Over 30 days a BTC long paid about 0.76% on Hyperliquid and Lighter and 0.43–0.52% on Aster, Binance and Bybit: $76 against $43–52 per $10,000. The hourly DEXs sit on the baseline almost every hour, while the CEX rates dip below it often enough to add up. Aster was cheapest for a BTC long over 7 days but not over 30; Bybit was cheapest on SOL in both windows. There is no permanently cheapest venue, which is why the table is worth checking before a multi-week hold. For Hyperliquid’s own 30-day hour-by-hour data, see the Hyperliquid funding rate guide.

Worked example: a $10,000 BTC long held for one week at 5x leverage ($2,000 of margin), opened and closed with market orders:

On BTC, funding and fees were the same order of magnitude, and on the hourly DEXs a week of funding cost more than a round-trip fee. Funding is a subscription; the fee is paid once. At 20x the same $10,000 needs only $500 of margin, and Hyperliquid’s $30.81 becomes 6.2% of it in a week.

Crowded coins are where funding bleeds. The same week on Hyperliquid, per $10,000 long, among the 43 perps with more than $5M of daily volume:

Hyperliquid fundingHistory, 168 hourly payments to 2026-09-26 16:00 UTC; max leverage from the API on September 26, 2026.

An AERO long at 3x (at least $3,334 of margin for $10,000) paid $85.62 in a week, 2.6% of its margin, before any price move; at the same rate a month costs about 11% of margin. That is the "bleed": a trade that never hits its stop can still lose money.

8. How to check the funding rate

On the exchange. Every perp exchange shows the current rate next to the price, with a countdown to the next payment. On Hyperliquid the market header reads Funding / Countdown (hourly rate), the Funding tab beside the chart plots the rate over time, and the Funding History tab under the chart lists every payment you made or received, with Export as CSV. Lighter has a Funding tab on each market and a Funding History tab in the account panel. Aster shows the rate and countdown on the trade page and lists every symbol with its interval on its real-time funding page.

Across exchanges. Trackers put many exchanges on one screen:

• CoinGlass — a coin-by-exchange table, OI- and volume-weighted averages, a heatmap and accumulated funding.
• CoinMarketCap — average, highest and lowest rates with a table by coin.
• Coinalyze — current and predicted rates by exchange, with charts.
• Hyperliquid Funding Comparison — Hyperliquid next to Binance and Bybit on one basis, free and without login.
• Exchange pages: Binance's real-time funding rate page and Aster's real-time and history pages list every contract with its interval.

Coverage of Lighter and Aster on third-party trackers varies, and aggregated averages are not what your position pays, so confirm on the venue (or with the endpoints below) before acting. The live table in section 6 covers the three DEXs we track next to Binance and Bybit.

Funding rate APIs (Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster)

All three DEXs publish funding through public endpoints that need no API key; this page is built from them. Endpoint names below were checked against each venue's API docs on October 4, 2026.

Lighter funding rate API in one call. curl https://mainnet.zklighter.elliot.ai/api/v1/funding-rates returns an array of {market_id, exchange, symbol, rate} rows for lighter, hyperliquid, binance and bybit; rate is a fraction per 8 hours (0.000096 = 0.0096%). For history, /api/v1/fundings?market_id=1&resolution=1h&start_timestamp=…&end_timestamp=…&count_back=168 gives hourly rows with rate in percent and a direction field (long = longs paid). Market ids come from /api/v1/orderBooks (BTC is 1, ETH is 0).

Hyperliquid. curl -X POST https://api.hyperliquid.xyz/info -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"type":"fundingHistory","coin":"BTC","startTime":1790000000000}' returns {coin, fundingRate, premium, time} per hour; fundingRate is a fraction per hour. Open interest, mark and oracle price for every market come from the same metaAndAssetCtxs call: see the open interest request in our Hyperliquid API guide. Why the payment uses the oracle while liquidations use the mark: mark price vs index price.

Aster. curl 'https://fapi.asterdex.com/fapi/v1/fundingRate?symbol=BTCUSDT&limit=21' returns the last 21 payments (one week on an 8-hour market) in ascending order; read the interval from fundingInfo before you sum.

A simple hourly poller: fetch the three current-rate calls, convert to 8 hours (× 8 for Hyperliquid, × 8 / N for Aster using fundingInfo; Lighter's feed is already on 8 hours), and flag coins where the gap between venues exceeds your round-trip fee hurdle (Hyperliquid 0.045% taker, Lighter 0% on Standard, Aster 0.04% taker; see DEX vs CEX fees). What a flagged spread actually earned over a week on five venues, after fees: funding rate arbitrage worked example.

9. Hyperliquid vs Lighter vs Aster: the mechanics side by side

The three DEXs use the same skeleton (interest 0.01% per 8 hours plus a premium clamped to ±0.05%), which is why liquid majors print the same baseline on all three most of the time. What differs is how the premium is sampled, how hard the rate is capped and which price the payment uses.

Official docs (Hyperliquid funding and contract specifications, Lighter trading/funding, Aster funding-rate) re-read September 27, 2026, and Aster’s fundingInfo endpoint on September 26, 2026.

• Caps decide how bad a squeeze can get. Hyperliquid’s 4%-per-hour cap is loose by design, so a crowded small-cap can charge the paying side far more per hour there than on Lighter (0.5% an hour) or on Aster (±2% per 4–8h interval on most alts). If you are on the paying side of a crowded trade, the tighter cap is the safer venue.
• Aster can change the rules in volatile markets. Its docs reserve the right to adjust the funding interval, cap and floor in extreme volatility. Read the interval from the fundingInfo endpoint or Aster’s real-time funding page before you hold, not from memory.
• Timing matters only on longer intervals. On Hyperliquid and Lighter each payment is 1/24 of a day’s funding, not worth dodging. On an 8-hour Aster market a full interval lands at once, and Aster’s docs add a 15-second deviation: a position opened at 16:00:05 UTC may still be charged for the 16:00 interval.
• Margin can pay the bill. On Aster, funding comes out of the Perps balance and, if that is short, out of position margin, which moves your liquidation price.
• Mid-caps are where spreads live. On BTC, ETH and SOL the three usually sit within a few ten-thousandths of a percent of each other on an 8-hour basis. Wider spreads appear on mid-caps and new listings, which is what cross-venue funding arbitrage trades.

Lighter funding in detail: hourly formula, market types and holding cost

Lighter is the venue where funding is closest to a fixed fee, and on its default Standard account (0% taker, 0% maker) funding is the only cost of holding a position: the docs list no overnight, rollover or borrow fee on perps. How the hourly rate is built, step by step:

1. A premium sample every minute. At a random second in each minute Lighter measures how far the impact bid sits above the index, or the impact ask below it. The impact size is 500 USDC divided by the market's initial margin fraction ($5,000 on a 10x market), so one small order cannot move funding.
2. An hourly average. The 60 samples are averaged and multiplied by the market's premium multiplier (1 on crypto, 1/2 on RWA, 1/100 on pre-IPO).
3. The small clamp. Lighter adds clamp(interest − premium, ±0.05%). Any premium within 0.05% of the 0.01% interest rate (8-hour basis) lands exactly on the interest rate.
4. The cap, then ÷ 8. The result is capped at ±4% per 8 hours and paid hourly as one eighth: at most 0.5% an hour. As of September 25, 2026 the API showed a looser cap on two markets (RIVER and ARC).

So on a quiet crypto market a long pays 0.00125% an hour, which Lighter's records show as 0.0012% because its API keeps four decimals. Worked examples on the 8-hour basis: a +0.03% average premium still pays the default; the docs' own +0.10% example clamps to 0.05% and pays 0.00625% an hour ($0.63 per hour on $10,000); a −0.20% discount becomes −0.15% and a long receives 0.01875% an hour. The payment is size × index price × rate, peer-to-peer.

docs.lighter.xyz “Funding” (multipliers) and the public API orderBookDetails (interest rate, multiplier, caps per market), read September 25, 2026.

What 30 days actually cost on Lighter. Every hourly payment from the public fundings endpoint for the 720 hours from 14:00 UTC on August 26 to 13:00 UTC on September 25, 2026 (positive = longs paid):

Lighter public API /api/v1/fundings (resolution 1h), read September 25, 2026. Totals are simple sums of hourly rates.

• BTC and ETH funding was almost a fixed fee. BTC paid exactly the default in 78% of hours and never more; its quietest hour was −0.0008%.
• Crowded alts cost more. ZEC cost longs 1.29% over the month, with a peak hour almost ten times the default.
• RWA and FX are cheaper at the default, not always in practice. Gold's default is 0.0004% an hour, but its measured month was 0.66% because the premium often sat above the clamp; EUR/USD paid nothing in most hours; US500 shorts paid longs in the last week.

Holding cost of a $10,000 BTC long on Lighter Standard (no trading fee, so funding is the whole bill):

Funding is charged on notional, so leverage multiplies it against your margin: the same day costs 0.29% of $1,000 of margin at 10x, and a month at 50x would eat over a third of the margin. A short receives what the long pays, and Lighter's multi-asset margin lets you post ETH against an ETH short for a basis trade. A position opened and closed inside the same hour never touches a payment. On a Premium account add 0.028% taker on the way in and out.

Lighter against Hyperliquid over the same 720 hours: BTC funding was a wash (0.7640% vs 0.7664%), ETH about 20% cheaper on Lighter (0.6573% vs 0.8277%), and Lighter never printed Hyperliquid's short spikes (BTC's highest hour was 0.0012% against 0.00898%) because of its tighter cap. Hyperliquid's answer is depth, which matters more than a few dollars of funding once orders are large.

Venue reviews: Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster, or all of them compared on the best DEXs page.

10. Funding as sentiment: high, negative, contango

Because the clamp pins the rate at baseline until the premium moves more than about 0.05% away from it, any sustained move off baseline on a liquid coin is information: the market is paying to be positioned that way.

What is a high funding rate? On an 8-hour basis: 0.01% is neutral (about 11% a year); 0.03–0.05% is elevated (33–55% a year); 0.1% or more is extreme (about 110% a year) and usually means a crowded, leveraged long; anything near the cap (0.3% per 8h on Binance BTC) is a squeeze. On Hyperliquid, divide by 8 to compare with the hourly number on screen.

Is negative funding bullish? Negative funding says shorts are crowded and paying. After a sharp drop that is a common setting for short-covering bounces, but funding can stay negative for days in a downtrend, and it is not a buy signal on its own. What it does guarantee is that a long position gets paid while it lasts.

Contango and backwardation. On dated futures, a contract priced above spot is in contango and one below spot is in backwardation; the gap shrinks to zero at expiry. A perpetual never expires, so the same premium or discount is paid out continuously through funding instead: positive funding is the perp's contango, negative funding its backwardation.

• High positive funding plus rising open interest: longs are crowding in with leverage. On September 21, 2026, as BTC rallied from 81,221 to 87,471, Hyperliquid’s hourly BTC rate hit 0.00898% at 10:00 UTC, about seven times the baseline; BTC then traded down to 82,835 over the following three days. That is one example, not a rule.
• Negative funding with rising open interest and a falling price: new shorts are piling in. Negative funding as open interest falls usually means shorts are closing. How to read open interest itself: open interest on perp DEXs.
• Funding diverging between venues: one exchange’s users are more one-sided than another’s (HYPE in the live table often shows it). Hold your position where your side pays least.
• What it is not: a timing tool. Crowded markets stay crowded, and Hyperliquid’s 4%-per-hour cap means the paying side can bleed for a long time before anything reverses. For a fuller sentiment toolkit (OI, long/short ratios, liquidation maps), see the Hyperliquid whale tracker.

11. How to stop funding bleed

Funding bleed is the slow equity drain of paying funding on a position you did not plan to pay for. Five habits fix most of it.

1. Measure before you hold. Note the rate and the interval, then compute rate × notional × number of payments for your planned hold (the estimate above does it; the funding rate calculator adds each venue's interval and cap). If expected funding is more than about a quarter of the profit you are aiming for, shorten the hold or skip the trade. Log funding paid next to fees and slippage in your journal.
2. Shorten the hold when you are the payer. In a positive-funding market, every extra hour is a cost. Enter closer to your catalyst and do not leave crowded altcoin longs running for days. When you receive funding, a longer hold is fine only if the liquidation risk still is.
3. Choose the venue with the better all-in rate. Over the 30 days in section 7, a BTC long cost $76 per $10,000 in funding on Hyperliquid and $45 on Aster. Compare on one basis first; a slightly higher trading fee can be cheaper than several days of higher funding.
4. Cap leverage and hold time together. Funding scales with notional, so the same rate drains a 20x account four times faster than a 5x one in percentage terms. Set a maximum hold (for example 48 hours unless you re-approve the thesis) and keep enough margin for an adverse move plus the next several payments.
5. Use spot for multi-week longs. Spot never pays funding. If you want exposure for weeks in a positive-funding market, hold spot and use a smaller perp for the leveraged part, or hedge with a short perp where funding is high (section 12).

Two timing details: on 8-hour venues, opening at 07:59 UTC means paying a full interval a minute later, so check the countdown; on hourly venues, each payment is one eighth as large and not worth dodging. And watch the premium field on Hyperliquid’s API: when it climbs past about 0.05% on an 8-hour basis, the next print leaves baseline.

12. Funding rate arbitrage in brief

Hold the side that receives funding and hedge the price. Cash-and-carry: buy the coin on spot, short the same number of coins on the perp, collect funding with no price exposure. Cross-venue: short the perp where funding is high, long it where it is low, keep the spread. At the baseline the gross yield is about 11% a year before fees, so it only earns its keep when a market is well above baseline. In the week above, shorting NIL on Hyperliquid would have received 1.38% before fees and hedging costs, while a BTC short received 0.22%. The risks that actually lose money are liquidation of the short leg, funding flips, basis moves and fees on both legs. Live spreads on Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster, edgeX and Binance, a 7-day worked example after fees and a calculator are in our funding rate arbitrage guide.

13. FAQ

Disclosure: HOLYGRAIL, 718610TD and DTLpLc are our referral codes; we earn a share of referred accounts' trading fees at no cost to you. The formula and caps are from the exchanges' official documentation and APIs; the live tables refresh at build time (every 6 hours) and the 7- and 30-day history was read from public APIs on September 26, 2026. Not investment advice.