Every fee schedule you have ever looked at has two columns, and most people read only the second one. The gap between them is the largest single discount available to a trader, and unlike VIP tiers it does not require any particular volume to access.
What separates a maker from a taker
The order book is a list of resting offers to buy and sell. An order is a maker when it joins that list and waits — it adds liquidity to the book. It is a taker when it matches against something already there and executes immediately — it removes liquidity.
In practice: a market order is always a taker. A limit order placed away from the current price rests on the book and is a maker when it eventually fills. A limit order placed at or across the current price executes immediately and is charged as a taker, despite being a limit order — this catches people out constantly.
The order type is not what decides it. What decides it is whether your order sat on the book before it filled. Most venues offer a post-only flag that cancels the order rather than letting it execute as a taker, which is the reliable way to guarantee the maker rate.
Why exchanges price them differently
An exchange with an empty book is worthless. Traders who leave resting orders are supplying the inventory that makes the venue tradeable at all, so the exchange pays them for it — in the form of a lower fee, and on some venues historically a negative fee, an actual rebate.
Takers are consuming that inventory. They get immediacy, and immediacy is the thing being charged for. The price of certainty is roughly three times the price of patience.
What the gap is worth
| Exchange | Futures maker | Futures taker | Taker premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| MEXC | 0.010% | 0.040% | 4.0x |
| Phemex | 0.010% | 0.060% | 6.0x |
| Binance | 0.020% | 0.050% | 2.5x |
| Bybit | 0.020% | 0.055% | 2.8x |
| Bitget | 0.020% | 0.060% | 3.0x |
| WEEX | 0.020% | 0.080% | 4.0x |
Put a number on it. A trader doing 5,000,000 USDT of monthly futures volume on Bybit entirely as a taker pays 33,000 USDT a year. The same volume entirely as a maker pays 12,000. Half and half is 22,500.
Moving from all-taker to half-maker saves 10,500 USDT a year on that volume. There is no VIP tier, token discount or promotion that comes close, and it is available on day one at any volume.
When paying the taker fee is correct
This is not an argument for never using market orders. It is an argument for knowing what each one costs.
Pay the taker fee when the move is the point. If you are entering on a breakout, exiting a position that has gone wrong, or trading a news event, the fill matters far more than three basis points. A limit order that misses a 2% move to save 0.035% is a catastrophic trade.
Take the maker fee when you have time. Scaling into a position over hours, accumulating spot, running a grid, working a mean-reversion entry — in all of these the fill can wait, and a resting order is close to free money.
Always take the maker fee on exits you have planned. Take-profit levels you decided in advance are the easiest maker orders in trading. They are already limit orders sitting on the book; you simply need to make sure they are not placed across the spread.
The interaction with cashback
Fee cashback returns a share of whatever you paid, so it applies to maker and taker fees alike. That means the two levers compound: shifting to maker orders shrinks the fee, and cashback then returns a share of the smaller number.
A Bybit trader at 0.055% taker with 40% cashback pays an effective 0.033%. The same trader at the 0.020% maker rate with the same cashback pays 0.012%. The full discount stack walks through combining both with VIP tiers.
The one habit worth building
Look at your last month of fills and work out what share were taker. Most traders guess about 60% and find it is closer to 90%, because market orders are the default path in every trading interface and limit orders take one extra decision.
Getting that number from 90% to 60% costs nothing except a small amount of patience on the trades where patience is free. It is worth more than every other fee optimisation combined.
See what your fee mix costs