Polymarket Perpetual Futures (Perps) 2026: Leverage, Fees, Funding & How to Trade

Polymarket launched perpetual futures on September 3, 2026, adding leveraged long and short trading on crypto, stocks, indices and commodities next to its prediction markets. As of mid-October there are 88 live markets, the same pUSD balance funds both products, and leverage goes up to 50x on the largest markets.

This guide replaces our earlier preview, which was written before launch and got several details wrong. Everything below is based on the live product and Polymarket's published Perps documentation.

Who Can Trade Perps

Start here, because this is the first thing that trips people up. Perps are only offered on Polymarket's international site. Order placement is blocked for:

• United States
• Canada
• Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria
• Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk

U.S. visitors are redirected to Polymarket US, the CFTC-regulated designated contract market. That exchange does not list perpetual futures as of October 2026. Polymarket has filed for U.S. margin trading through an affiliated entity, but nothing has been approved yet. If you are in the U.S., the only CFTC-approved perpetual from a prediction market right now is Kalshi's Bitcoin contract, which was cleared in May 2026.

Everywhere else, the rules are the same as the prediction markets. See our country availability list for the full picture, and Polymarket US vs International for what U.S. users can trade instead.

What Perps Are and How They Differ from Prediction Markets

A perpetual future is a contract that tracks the price of an asset. Go long if you think the price rises, short if you think it falls. There is no expiry date. You hold the position until you close it or until your margin runs out and the exchange liquidates you.

That last clause is the big difference from the Polymarket you already know.

	Prediction Markets	Perps
What you trade	Whether an event happens (Yes/No shares)	The price direction of an asset
Price range	$0.00 to $1.00	Tracks the spot price of the asset
Leverage	None, fully collateralized	Up to 50x
Expiry	Settles when the event resolves	None
Maximum loss	What you paid for the shares	Your margin (isolated) or your whole cross account
Liquidation	Does not exist	Yes, when equity falls below maintenance margin
Holding cost	None	Funding payment every hour
Collateral	pUSD	pUSD, same balance

On a prediction market the worst case is losing what you paid. On a 50x perp, a 1% move against you wipes out the entire margin. We walk through the exact numbers in the liquidation section below.

What You Can Trade

The 88 markets break down into four categories. Maximum leverage is set per market, so the headline "up to 50x" only applies to a handful of them.

Category	Markets	Examples	Max Leverage
Crypto	40	BTC, ETH (50x); SOL, XRP, HYPE (20x); DOGE, LINK, UNI, ZEC, AAVE (10x); TAO, PENDLE, MORPHO, LDO (5x); CASHCAT, PONS, USELESS (3x)	50x
Stocks	38	NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, META, GOOG, COIN, MSTR, HOOD, PLTR, TSM, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix, Alibaba, plus pre-IPO names like SpaceX (SPCX), Cerebras (CBRS) and CXMT	10x for every stock
Indices	6	USA500 (S&P 500) and US100 (Nasdaq 100) at 50x; EWY South Korea ETF at 20x; SOXL, DRAM, NCLD at 10x	50x
Commodities	4	Gold, Silver, WTI Oil, Brent Oil	20x for all four

Three things worth knowing about the list:

Stocks trade around the clock. You can open an NVDA position on a Saturday. The oracle switches to overnight and alternative venues when the U.S. market is closed, so the mark price keeps moving and funding keeps accruing.

Pre-IPO companies are listed. SpaceX, Cerebras and CXMT perps exist here and nowhere in a traditional brokerage. These markets rely entirely on Polymarket's oracle for pricing, so expect wider spreads and bigger gaps than on NVDA or AAPL.

Leverage tiers shrink as positions grow. The 50x on BTC only applies to the first $250,000 of notional. Above that it steps down to 25x, then 20x at $1 million, down to 2x above $10 million. On NVDA, 10x applies up to $500,000 and drops to 5x beyond. Retail traders will never hit these caps, but they are the reason you cannot build an unlimited position at maximum leverage.

The full list with live leverage and funding rates is on the All assets page. The leverage column there is always the source of truth, since Polymarket adds markets and adjusts limits without announcement.

How to Open a Position

If you already have a funded Polymarket account, there is no separate onboarding. Here is the flow for a BTC long.

1. Open the Perps tab. It sits in the top navigation next to Trending and Combos, or go directly to polymarket.com/perps. Filter by Stocks, Crypto, Indices or Commodities in the left sidebar, or search by ticker.

2. Check your available balance. On any asset page the order panel on the right shows "available" under the amount field. That is the pUSD you can post as margin. If it reads $0.00, fund your account first. The documented minimum transfer into the perps account is 10 pUSD.

3. Pick an order type and margin mode. The panel has two tabs, Market and Limit. The dropdown on the right of those tabs switches between Isolated and Cross margin. Isolated is the default. Leave it there until you have read the margin section below.

4. Choose Long or Short. Shorting requires no borrowing. You just open a short position.

5. Enter the amount. This is the margin you are posting, not the size of the position. The 25%, 50%, 75% and Max buttons are shortcuts based on your available balance. The minimum order notional is $10.

6. Set leverage. Drag the slider or type a number. BTC defaults to 25x with a 50x ceiling. Position size equals margin times leverage, so $1,000 at 25x controls $25,000 of BTC.

7. Place the order. Market orders fill within seconds. Limit orders sit in the book until the price reaches them. Once filled, your position appears below the panel with the entry price, mark price, unrealized PnL and, most importantly, the liquidation price.

To close, use the close action on your position row, which sends a market order in the opposite direction. For a planned exit, place a limit order on the opposite side instead. Opposite-side fills reduce your position rather than opening a hedge, so you cannot hold a long and a short on the same market at once.

Isolated vs Cross Margin

Isolated gives each position its own margin allocation. If your BTC long is liquidated, you lose only the margin assigned to it. Other positions and the rest of your balance are untouched. This is the default in the web app.

Cross pools collateral across every cross-mode position. Unrealized profit on one trade can cover margin on another, which is more capital efficient. The downside is that liquidation hits the entire cross account at once, and because the liquidation price of each position depends on every other position's PnL, you cannot read your risk off a single number.

All 88 markets currently support both modes. If you are new to leverage, isolated is the right answer.

Fees

Perps have a completely different fee schedule from prediction markets. Prediction markets charge a small fee on profitable trades only (see Fees and Costs). Perps charge a small percentage of the notional value of every fill, win or lose:

30-Day Volume	Taker	Maker
$0+	0.040%	0.0125%
$1M+	0.037%	0.010%
$5M+	0.035%	0.008%
$25M+	0.030%	0.005%
$100M+	0.027%	0.002%
$500M+	0.025%	0.000%
$1B+	0.020%	-0.005% (rebate)

Tiers are recalculated every UTC day based on trailing 30-day volume. New accounts start at the top row.

The percentages look tiny until you remember they apply to notional, not margin. Post $1,000 at 50x and you control $50,000. A market order in and out costs $50,000 × 0.04% × 2 = $40, which is 4% of your margin before the trade has moved a cent. The higher the leverage, the larger the share of your margin that goes to fees. Using limit orders drops the rate to roughly a third of the taker fee.

For comparison, Hyperliquid's base tier is 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker, so Polymarket is slightly cheaper at the entry level.

Funding Rates

Perps have no expiry, so the exchange uses funding payments to keep the contract price anchored to the index (oracle) price:

• When the perp trades above index, the rate is positive and longs pay shorts.
• When the perp trades below index, the rate is negative and shorts pay longs.
• Settlement happens once per hour. That is faster than the 8-hour cycle on Binance and in line with Hyperliquid.
• The hourly rate is capped at ±4%. Normal readings are a few ten-thousandths of a percent.
• Payments move directly between longs and shorts. Polymarket takes no cut.

Under the hood, Polymarket samples a premium index every 5 seconds by walking 1,000 pUSD of depth on each side of the book, averages the samples over the hour, and applies an 8-hour formula divided by 8. Non-crypto markets use a 0.5 scaling factor, so stock and commodity funding runs at half the sensitivity of crypto.

Each asset page shows the current funding rate and a countdown to the next settlement in the overview strip below the chart.

A worked example: BTC funding at 0.0012% per hour on a $50,000 long costs $0.60 per hour, about $14.40 per day, and over $400 per month. Against $1,000 of margin that is a 40% monthly carry. Fine for a day trade, ruinous for a multi-month hold at high leverage.

Note that funding runs 24/7, including weekends when the stock market is closed. Holding a 10x NVDA position over a weekend is not free.

Liquidation: How Far Price Can Move Against You

Polymarket uses a flat maintenance margin rate per market: MMR = 0.5 ÷ the market's maximum leverage. The formula uses the market's maximum, not the leverage you chose.

Market Max Leverage	Maintenance Margin	Examples
50x	1% of notional	BTC, ETH, USA500, US100
20x	2.5%	SOL, XRP, HYPE, Gold, Silver, Oil
10x	5%	Every stock, most altcoins
5x	10%	TAO, PENDLE, MORPHO

Your position is liquidated when its equity (margin plus unrealized PnL) falls below notional × MMR. Three examples with $1,000 of margin:

BTC at 50x. Notional $50,000, maintenance margin $500. You are liquidated after losing $500, which is a 1% adverse move in BTC. After the opening fee, slightly less than 1%.

NVDA at 10x. Notional $10,000, maintenance margin $500. Liquidated after a 5% adverse move. One earnings release will do it.

BTC at 5x. Notional $5,000, but MMR is still 1%, so maintenance margin is only $50. You can lose $950 before liquidation, which is a 19% move.

Compare the first and third examples. Lowering leverage on the same market does not just shrink your position, it moves the liquidation line from 1% away to 19% away. That is the most practical reason to start with low leverage.

When liquidation triggers:

1. The position is flagged and new orders are blocked. Isolated flags only that market; cross flags the whole account.
2. The system closes the position with reduce-only market orders in batches. Each fill pays the normal fee plus a 0.5% liquidation fee.
3. If equity falls below two-thirds of maintenance margin, the insurance fund takes over the position and whatever margin is left.

There is a warning stage before liquidation. When equity drops below initial margin but is still above maintenance margin, the account enters a margin call and becomes reduce-only. A deposit during a margin call restores normal status immediately. If you see that warning, act on it.

Mark Price, Oracle Price and Last Price

Each asset page shows several prices. They do different jobs:

• Mark price is what your unrealized PnL, margin checks and liquidation are calculated against. Liquidation is triggered by mark, not by the last trade.
• Oracle (index) price is Polymarket's estimate of the asset's fair value, aggregated from external feeds. It is the anchor for funding.
• Last price is the most recent fill in Polymarket's own order book. It is informational only and plays no role in risk.

Mark and oracle are usually within a few dollars of each other on BTC. When they diverge, the funding rate widens to pull the contract back in line.

Withdrawals With Open Positions

While you have open positions, the account must keep at least 10% of total open notional (at mark price) in pUSD. A $100 position at 50x only needs $2 of initial margin, but you still have to leave $10 in the account. The restriction disappears once everything is closed.

Perps vs Hyperliquid and Other Perp DEXs

Polymarket is not trying to out-list Hyperliquid, which has 300+ markets, deeper books and years of track record. Its pitch is different:

• One balance for events and perps. You can hedge a "Will BTC hit $100k" market with a BTC short without moving funds between platforms.
• Stocks and commodities with real depth. Most perp DEXs are crypto-first. Polymarket launched with 38 equities, four commodities and the two major U.S. indices.
• Pre-IPO exposure. SpaceX, Cerebras and CXMT perps are unique to Polymarket.
• Lower entry-tier fees. 0.04% / 0.0125% vs Hyperliquid's 0.045% / 0.015%.

Where Polymarket is weaker: thinner order books on the smaller markets, no stop-loss orders in the web interface yet, and the geographic restrictions above.

Practical Advice for First-Time Perp Traders

1. Trade a $20 position first. The minimum is $10. Opening, watching the liquidation price move, and closing a tiny position teaches more than any guide.
2. Start at 2x to 5x. The liquidation line is far away and you still get meaningful exposure.
3. Use limit orders to enter. Maker fees are roughly a third of taker fees, and the savings compound.
4. Check the funding sign before holding overnight. In a euphoric market, longs pay heavily. Sometimes the funding alone makes a short worthwhile.
5. Avoid 10x stocks around earnings and 10x indices around CPI or FOMC. A 5% gap is routine on those days and it is exactly your liquidation threshold.
6. Remember that weekends are not free. Stock and commodity perps charge funding while the underlying market is closed.
7. Never run cross margin until you understand it. One bad position can take every other position with it.

Regulatory Context

Polymarket's perps run on its offshore entity, outside U.S. jurisdiction. The split traces back to the 2022 CFTC settlement, in which Polymarket paid $1.4 million and agreed to block U.S. users from its international site. The CFTC-licensed Polymarket US exchange handles U.S. event contracts only. Polymarket has filed for U.S. margin trading through an affiliate, and Kalshi's CFTC-approved Bitcoin perpetual shows the regulator is open to onshore perps, but as of October 2026 nothing has changed for U.S. Polymarket users. Keep an eye on our CFTC rulemaking tracker for updates.

Related Reading

• How to Buy Shares on Polymarket if you want the prediction market basics first
• Limit Orders Guide for the cheapest way to enter a perp
• Funding Methods for how pUSD gets into your account
• Where Is Polymarket Available for the full country list