Maker and taker fees: what the two prices on a fee schedule mean

A maker fee is what you pay when your order waits in the order book and someone else trades against it. A taker fee is what you pay when your order fills the moment you send it, against an order that was already waiting. Same market, same instrument, two prices, and the thing that decides which one applies is whether your order added an order to the book or removed one.

Why a venue needs resting orders enough to discount them

An order book is a list of unfilled orders: everyone who has said they will buy at a given price, and everyone who has said they will sell at a given price. Those unfilled orders are the only thing that makes immediate trading possible. If you want to sell right now, you need someone’s buy order to already be sitting there. If nothing is sitting there, your order has nothing to hit.

So a venue has a supply problem. It needs a continuous stock of resting orders on both sides, at tight prices, in useful size. Those orders are costly for the person who places them. A resting order is a standing commitment to trade at a fixed price while the market moves. If the price runs away, the resting order gets filled at a price that is now stale, and the person who placed it eats the difference. That is a real risk, taken in advance, for the benefit of whoever shows up later wanting to trade immediately.

The split fee is how the venue pays for that supply. The side that supplied the resting order, the maker, is charged less. The side that showed up and consumed it, the taker, is charged more. The taker is buying immediacy, and immediacy is the product. The maker manufactured it.

This also explains why some venues set the maker fee at or near zero, and occasionally pay a small rebate instead of charging anything. A venue with a deep book attracts more flow, which attracts more resting orders, which deepens the book further. Discounting the maker side is the lever that starts that loop. The taker fee funds it.

What decides which fee you pay

Not your intention. Not whether you were buying or selling. Not, strictly, the order type you clicked. Only one question matters: at the moment your order reached the matching engine, did it rest, or did it fill?

If it rested, you added liquidity, and you pay maker when it eventually fills. If it filled on arrival, you removed liquidity, and you pay taker.

That maps onto order types loosely, which is where most of the confusion lives. A market order always takes, because it is an instruction to fill now at whatever price the book offers. A limit order usually makes, because it specifies a price and will wait for it. But a limit order that is priced aggressively enough to cross the current best price on the other side will fill immediately, and that fill is a taker fill, billed at the taker rate, regardless of the word “limit” on the ticket.

A partial fill can land on both sides. If your limit order is larger than the resting size available at your price, the part that matches instantly is a taker fill, and the leftover rests in the book and becomes a maker fill when it is eventually taken. One order, two fees.

Working the cost out on a hypothetical trade

Suppose a venue charges 0.1% as its taker fee and 0.02% as its maker fee. Both of those are made up for this example; they are not what any venue charges. Say you want to trade a $20,000 position, again a made-up size.

As a taker, in and out: $20,000 × 0.1% = $20 to open, $20 to close, so $40 in fees for the round trip.

As a maker on both sides: $20,000 × 0.02% = $4 to open, $4 to close, so $8 for the round trip.

The gap is $32 on a single round trip, on the made-up rates above. Run thirty round trips a month at that size and the gap is $960 against $240, a difference of $720 for doing nothing differently except how the orders reached the book.

That arithmetic is why high-frequency and high-volume approaches care so much about the maker side. It is also why the gap barely registers for someone who places four trades a year. The relevant number is not the fee, it is the fee multiplied by how often you pay it. A calculator makes that easier to see across your own order sizes: try the crypto fee calculator with your real volume and the rates from your own schedule.

The mistake: treating the maker fee as a free saving

The common error is to read the two numbers, notice that maker is cheaper, and conclude that placing resting orders is simply the better way to trade. The fee saving is real. The cost of obtaining it usually is not counted.

To pay the maker fee, your order has to wait. Waiting has two outcomes. Either the market comes to your price and you fill, which is what you wanted, or it does not, and you are left holding an unfilled order while the price goes somewhere else. In that second case you either cancel and chase the market at a worse price, or you miss the move entirely. Using the made-up rates above, a $20,000 position saves $16 per side by making instead of taking. A price that has moved against you by 0.2% while your order sat there costs $40. The saving is smaller than the slippage it bought.

There is a second version of the same mistake: assuming an order marked “post only” or “maker only” guarantees the better fee at no cost. It does guarantee the fee, because it cancels rather than fill as a taker. What it does not guarantee is a fill. The protection against paying the taker fee is also the mechanism that can leave you with no position.

The useful way to hold this is as a trade: the maker fee is the price of patience, the taker fee is the price of certainty. Which one is cheaper for a given trade depends on whether being in the position right now is worth more to you than the fee difference. For something you intend to hold for weeks, it almost never is worth paying up for speed on the entry. For an exit during a fast move, it almost always is.

Reading a two-column fee schedule

When you look at a schedule showing two columns, you are reading the venue’s answer to one question: how much does it pay for liquidity, and how much does it charge for it. The gap between the columns tells you how hard that venue is working to attract resting orders. A wide gap means it is leaning on takers to subsidise makers. A narrow gap means it is not.

Both columns usually sit inside a tier structure, where the rates fall as your traded volume rises, and the maker column often falls faster. How those tiers are measured and reset is its own mechanism, covered in how exchange fee tiers work. If you are comparing a crypto venue’s two-column schedule against a forex account’s pricing, the structures are not directly comparable, and commission versus spread accounts explains why. Perpetual futures add a separate charge that has nothing to do with maker or taker: see funding rates. Definitions for the terms above are in the glossary.

Education only, not financial advice, and trading carries a risk of loss.