What is maker / taker fee?

The two-tier fee structure used by most exchanges.

A maker adds an order to the book (limit order) and pays the lower fee; a taker removes liquidity (market order) and pays the higher fee. Every centralized exchange fee page you open is organized this way, with a grid of volume tiers down the side and the two rates across the top.

The thing people get wrong is which column applies to them. Most first buys are taker fills, because the buy button on a simple interface sends a market order. Choosing the advanced trade screen and placing a resting limit order moves you into the maker column, and on many venues that alone roughly halves the trading fee.

How it works

The exchange classifies each fill at the moment it happens, not by the order type you chose. An order that sits on the book waiting is a maker fill when someone else trades against it. An order that executes immediately against existing orders is a taker fill. A large limit order can be split: the part that crossed the spread is charged as taker, the remainder that rests is charged as maker when it later fills.

Your tier is set by rolling trading volume, usually over the previous 30 days, and sometimes by how much of the exchange's own token you hold. The tier is recalculated on the exchange's schedule rather than the moment you cross a threshold.

Typical published ranges run from 0% to about 0.4% per trade before volume discounts, with the taker rate above the maker rate at nearly every tier. Rates vary by exchange and by product, and each venue's own fee schedule is the only reliable source for its current numbers.

Two costs hide outside this grid. The spread you cross on a taker order is a real expense that no fee schedule shows, and simple "instant buy" interfaces often carry a separate, much higher charge than the maker and taker grid at the same venue.

Example

Illustrative arithmetic on a $2,000 buy at a base tier where the maker rate is 0.15% and the taker rate is 0.25%.

The $2 difference is small once. Repeated weekly for a year it is over $100, and the spread avoided is often larger than the fee saved.

Why it matters when you buy

This is the single largest controllable cost of a small purchase. Comparing the maker and taker columns across venues on the fee comparison tells you what your route actually costs, and pairing that with the depth figures on the liquidity pages tells you whether a resting order will fill at all. On a thin pair, a limit order that never fills is worse than a taker fee.

Related terms

• maker rebate — when the maker fee goes negative
• post only order — guarantees you stay a maker
• taker — the side that crosses the spread
• limit order — the order that can rest
• market order — the order that always takes
• trading volume — what moves you down the tiers

Questions

How do I make sure I pay the maker fee?

Place a limit order at a price that does not cross the current spread, and use a post-only flag if the venue offers one. Post-only rejects the order rather than filling it as a taker.

Is the taker fee ever worth paying?

Yes, when certainty of execution matters more than the difference. On a fast-moving or thin market, a resting order may not fill, and the price you miss can cost more than the fee gap.

Do fee tiers reset?

They are recalculated from rolling volume on each exchange's own schedule, commonly every day against the trailing 30 days. Falling below a threshold moves you back up the grid.