Funding Rate: What Perpetual Futures Holders Actually Paid, Settlement by Settlement

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-25

Most people meet the funding rate as a small percentage beside the price on a futures screen, and it is easy to read past. It is a real transfer of money between traders, charged on the full size of a position rather than on the margin behind it. This page sets out how one exchange calculates it, then counts what it actually cost across 288 real settlements on bitcoin and ether perpetuals, and across a full year of hourly payments on a second exchange.

How it works

A perpetual futures contract has no expiry date. A dated future is pulled toward the spot price as settlement day approaches. A perpetual never gets there, so something else has to do that job. The crypto futures page covers the contract itself; this page is about the payment.

The payment is the mechanism. When the contract trades above the spot index, the funding rate turns positive and holders of long positions pay holders of short positions. When it trades below, the rate turns negative and the flow reverses. A trader who holds the paying side has a steady reason to close, and one on the receiving side has a reason to open. That pressure pulls the two prices back together.

What it costs, and when it is charged

It is charged on position value, not on margin. OKX’s help page gives the fee as position value times the funding rate. A position worth $10,000 pays on $10,000 even if only $1,000 of margin supports it. That is why a rate that looks tiny can matter once leverage is involved.

You only pay if you hold through the settlement time. On OKX the default schedule is every eight hours, at 00:00, 08:00 and 16:00 UTC. A position closed before a settlement neither pays nor collects for that period. The fee is deducted from the margin behind the position (from the account’s equity in cross margin mode), and OKX’s page notes that the deduction can itself push a thin position into a reduction or a crypto liquidation.

The formula on one exchange

Every exchange writes its own formula. The one below is OKX’s, as published in its help center and last updated on 27 Aug 2026. Other venues use different intervals, caps and inputs.

Two ingredients go in. The first is a fixed interest rate of 0.01% per eight-hour period. The second is a premium index: how far the price at which a set amount could actually be bought or sold on the contract sits above or below the spot index. OKX averages that premium across the period, giving later minutes more weight than earlier ones.

The rate then equals the average premium plus a correction. The correction is the interest rate minus the premium, held between -0.05% and +0.05%. In plain terms: when the premium is small, the correction cancels it and the rate lands on exactly 0.01%. Only when the premium moves outside that window does the rate move away from 0.01%. On the BTC-USDT perpetual, the whole result is also capped at 0.375% either way, per the exchange’s API on 25 Sep 2026.

The baseline has a yearly cost. Three settlements a day at 0.01% is 0.03% a day, or 10.95% a year. That is the price of holding a long perpetual on this formula when nothing else moves the rate.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical $10,000 long position on the BTC-USDT perpetual, held for 30 days, with the position value assumed constant so the arithmetic stays clean.

• At the 0.01% baseline, each settlement costs $10,000 x 0.01% = $1.00. Three a day for 30 days is 90 settlements, or $90.00.
• If the position was backed by $1,000 of margin, those $90.00 are 9% of the money actually put up, before any trading fees and before the price has moved at all.
• For a short of the same size, the same $90.00 would have been received, not paid.

Now the measured version. Across the 288 OKX settlements in the data below, the BTC rate averaged 0.0052% per period rather than 0.0100%. Held through all 288, the $10,000 long would have paid $149.50 instead of the $288.00 a flat 0.01% would have cost. The measured cost was about half the baseline, which is useful to know and says nothing about the next three months.

The original data

The data: every funding settlement OKX’s public API returned for its BTC-USDT and ETH-USDT perpetuals on 25 Sep 2026. OKX serves about three months, which here is 288 settlements, from 22 Jun 2026 08:00 UTC to 26 Sep 2026 00:00 UTC, all eight hours apart. Each one is in a CSV of the OKX settlements.

Bitcoin. 268 settlements were positive and 20 negative. 37 landed on exactly 0.0100%, and none went above it. The mean was 0.0052% per settlement, which annualizes to 5.68%. The lowest was -0.0078%, at 08:00 UTC on 25 Jun 2026. Summed, longs paid 1.495% of position value over the three months.

Ether. 234 positive, 54 negative, 27 at exactly 0.0100% and again none above it. The mean was 0.0037%, or 4.10% annualized; the lowest was -0.0062%, eight hours after bitcoin’s low. Summed, 1.078%, so the $10,000 long would have paid $107.79.

A second exchange, over a full year. Kraken’s multi-collateral perpetuals roll every hour, per its contract specifications, and its API reports one funding rate for each hour. From 25 Sep 2025 00:00 UTC to 24 Sep 2026 23:00 UTC its API returned 8,752 hourly rates for PF_XBTUSD (eight hours of the year are missing from the feed). Of those, 6,064 were positive and 2,688 negative, which is 30.7% of hours. Summed, a long paid 3.17% of position value over the year: $317.20 on $10,000. The ether contract, PF_ETHUSD, came to 3.16%, with 5,964 hours positive and 2,788 negative, or 31.9%.

The year was not one steady cost. Summing Kraken’s BTC rates by calendar month, in percent of position value, October 2025 to August 2026 read 0.542, 0.484, 0.430, 0.651, -0.064, -0.086, -0.283, 0.040, 0.019, 0.467 and 0.454. January was the most expensive month for a long. February, March and April all netted negative, so for those three months the shorts were paying. Then the payments swung back. The monthly totals are in a CSV of Kraken’s monthly funding.

What the figures show, and what they don’t. On both exchanges the rate spent most of the time positive, so longs were usually the payers. On OKX it never went above the 0.01% baseline in these three months, which means the contract did not trade at a large premium to spot in that window. None of it says where the rate goes next; a quarter and a year of history are a description of those periods only.

When it fails

When the rate is treated as fixed. It is recalculated every period. A carry that looks cheap at the moment a position opens can turn into a steady cost within days, as Kraken’s April-to-July swing shows.

When it is compared with margin instead of position size. The fee is charged on the full position. At ten times leverage, a 0.01% payment is 0.1% of the margin, every settlement.

When funding is read as a price signal. A positive rate says longs were willing to pay to hold, not that the price will rise. The data above records who paid, not what the price did afterward.

When the payment drains a thin position. OKX deducts funding from the position’s margin. On a position already close to its maintenance level, a funding debit can be what tips it over.

When one exchange’s number is assumed to hold everywhere. Intervals, caps and formulas differ. OKX settles every eight hours by default; Kraken’s multi-collateral contracts report an hourly rate. The same headline rate means different amounts on each.

Related

The crypto futures page covers the perpetual contract the funding rate belongs to, and leverage trading explains why a fee charged on position size bites harder on a small margin. Crypto liquidation sets out what happens when a position’s margin runs out, and bitcoin covers the asset most of this funding is paid on.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.