Maker and taker fees are the two-tier pricing model that most crypto exchanges use to charge for trading, and understanding the difference between the two is one of the more immediately useful things a trader can learn, since it affects the cost of every single order placed. The split exists because the two order types serve different roles in a market, and exchanges price them to reflect that difference.
A maker order adds liquidity to the order book: it is a limit order placed away from the current market price that sits and waits to be matched against, effectively offering to trade at a specific level. A taker order removes liquidity: it executes immediately against whatever is already resting on the book, typically a market order or a limit order priced to fill right away. The distinction is about behavior, not intent — a limit order that happens to be priced aggressively enough to fill instantly is treated as a taker order, regardless of the order type selected.
A resting limit order gives other traders something to trade against, which is genuinely valuable to a market: it improves depth and tightens the gap between the best available buy and sell price. An order that fills immediately consumes that depth instead of contributing to it. Charging makers less than takers, and sometimes paying makers a rebate, is how exchanges incentivize traders to add depth, which keeps the order book healthier for everyone trading on it.
Most centralized exchanges scale fees by trailing trading volume, usually measured over a rolling 30-day window: a trader who trades more pays progressively less per trade, on both the maker and taker side, as they move up through defined tiers. Some venues layer an additional discount on top for holding or staking the exchange's own native token. This tiered approach rewards high-volume traders directly, and it also means the fee a new trader sees advertised on a homepage is frequently the top-tier rate.
On some venues, maker fees go negative at higher tiers: instead of paying to add liquidity, the trader is paid a small rebate for doing so. Rebates are most common on the most liquid pairs, where exchanges have the strongest incentive to keep the order book deep, and they are typically much smaller for thinner, less-traded pairs. A negative maker fee changes the economics of certain strategies meaningfully — market-making and some high-frequency approaches depend directly on collecting rebates as a core part of their return.
Not every venue uses a tiered maker/taker structure. Some perpetual DEXs charge a single flat rate regardless of order type or trailing volume, which trades the potential for a rebate against the simplicity of one number that applies to every trade. Canborsa charges a flat 0.07% per side, 0.14% round trip, with no separate maker and taker rate to track and no volume threshold to qualify for a lower tier — a trader entering their first position pays the same rate as one who has traded for months. That simplicity comes at the cost of never collecting a maker rebate, which matters most to traders whose strategy specifically depends on one.
A published fee rate is almost always applied to the notional size of a position. On a leveraged perpetual, that distinction matters far more than it does in spot trading: a position opened with 10x leverage pays the fee on ten times the margin deployed, since the fee is a percentage of the actual exposure being traded. It is a detail worth checking directly on any fee schedule before assuming a low-looking headline rate translates into a proportionally low dollar cost on a leveraged position.
On a tiered venue, the most direct lever is trading volume itself — consolidating activity on fewer venues to reach a lower tier faster. On a flat-fee venue, the lever shifts: since the rate per trade is fixed, the main way to reduce total fee drag is trading less frequently and holding positions longer relative to the size of the expected move, so the fixed round-trip cost is amortized over a larger gain. Either way, fees are only one line of the total cost of a position — the holding cost guide covers how trading fees combine with funding and slippage into the full picture, and volume trading discounts covers the tiered model in more depth. Whichever model a venue uses, the fee schedule is worth checking directly, since it is one of the few costs known with certainty before a trade is even placed.
It is a two-tier pricing model where a maker order, which adds liquidity by resting on the order book, is charged less than a taker order, which removes liquidity by filling immediately. The lower maker rate compensates traders for improving market depth.
Exchange fees can also include withdrawal fees, deposit fees on certain payment rails, and in some cases a separate funding or borrow charge layered on top of the trading fee itself. The maker-taker fee specifically refers to the cost of executing a trade, not these other charges.
Commission is another term for the trading fee charged on entering or exiting a position, whether structured as a tiered maker-taker rate or a single flat rate. It is charged once per side and is separate from ongoing costs like funding that accrue while a position stays open.
Perpetual markets for stocks, gold, indices and pre-IPO names — settled on-chain, no wallet-to-exchange transfers.
