The manual

Polymarket Perps, explained properly

Q: Do Polymarket Perps expire?

No. A perpetual futures contract has no expiry date. A Perps position stays open until you close it or it is force-closed by liquidation. Without an expiry to force convergence, hourly funding payments are what keep the contract tethered to the underlying's price.

Q: Can anyone trade Polymarket Perps?

Anyone in a permitted jurisdiction. Perps opened to the public and no invite code is needed any more. The geographic rule is unchanged: Polymarket does not permit order placement from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk. Reading market data is not restricted anywhere.

Q: What leverage can you get on Polymarket Perps?

Up to 20x, and only on 10 of the 39 listed markets: S&P 500, Gold, WTI Crude Oil, Nasdaq 100, Silver, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid and XRP. Everything else — every individual stock, the smaller tokens and the DRAM index — caps at 10x. The ceiling also falls as your position grows: each market has a risk-tier ladder that caps leverage at larger notionals, and the cap applies to your whole position, not just the portion above the threshold.

Q: How often does Polymarket charge funding?

Every hour. That is unusually frequent — most perpetual venues settle every eight hours. Polymarket samples a premium index off the order book every five seconds, averages those samples over the hour, and settles the resulting rate against every open position at the end of the window.

Q: What are the fees on Polymarket Perps?

New accounts pay 0.0400% taker and 0.0125% maker on notional, and both fall as trailing 30-day volume rises through 7 tiers. At $1B of 30-day volume the maker rate turns into a 0.0050% rebate. Fees are charged per fill as abs(price × quantity) × rate, in pUSD.

Q: Is Polymarket Perps on-chain?

Partly. It is a hybrid exchange: the order book, matching, margin and funding all run off-chain for speed, while deposits and withdrawals settle on Polygon. Trading does not produce a transaction per trade. The exchange periodically commits state roots on-chain so its reported off-chain state can be verified.

Q: What is the difference between Polymarket Perps and Polymarket's prediction markets?

A prediction market resolves: you buy Yes or No shares and they settle at $1 or $0 when the event happens. A perp never resolves. You hold long or short exposure whose value tracks a price continuously, you pay or receive funding every hour while you hold it, and you can be liquidated. They are separate products with separate referral programs.

Published 11 August 2026

Polymarket spent five years building the best place to bet on what happens. Perps is the other half of that sentence: a place to bet on where a price goes, with leverage, with no expiry, and at three in the morning on a Sunday if you like.

Short answer

Polymarket Perps are perpetual futures — leveraged long or short exposure to an asset’s price, with no expiry date. There are 39 listed markets across stocks, crypto, commodities and indices, with up to 20x leverage on the biggest ones. Funding settles every hour rather than every eight, taker fees start at 0.0400%, and maintenance margin is a flat rate per market.

It is live and open to anyone — the invite code that gated early access is gone. Order placement is still blocked from 9 jurisdictions including the US and Canada, which is a separate rule and has not changed.

What Polymarket Perps actually are

A perpetual future is a contract that tracks the price of something without ever settling. You take a position, it gains or loses as the tracked asset moves, and it stays open until you close it or the exchange closes it for you.source

That is the entire product. “Perps” is trader shorthand for perpetual futures.source

The thing that makes a contract with no expiry possible is funding. A normal futures contract converges on the spot price because it has to settle on a date. A perpetual has no date, so instead it charges rent: when the contract trades above the underlying’s fair value, longs pay shorts, and when it trades below, shorts pay longs. That payment is the force pulling the price back.source

No expiry means no natural convergence. Funding is the substitute, and you pay it hourly.

How they differ from prediction markets

If you already use Polymarket, the mental model you have is wrong for this product.

	Prediction market	Perp
What you buy	Yes or No shares in an outcome	Long or short exposure to a price
How it ends	Resolves to $1 or $0	Never — you close it, or you get liquidated
Worst case	The shares go to zero	Your margin goes to zero, faster, with leverage
Cost of holding	Nothing	Funding, every hour, in either direction
Leverage	None	Up to 20x
Referral program	Its own, tracked separately	Its own code, 20% of trading fees

The difference that catches people is the third row. A prediction market position can go to zero and that is the end of it. A leveraged perp position can be closed against your will, at a price you did not choose, while you are asleep — and it charges you an extra fee on the way out for the privilege.source The full comparison is here.

What you can trade

39 markets: 24 individual stocks, 9 crypto assets, 3 commodities and 3 indices.source

Stocks — the semiconductor complex is unusually well covered (NVIDIA, AMD, Micron, Broadcom, TSMC, ASML, Arm, Qualcomm, Intel), alongside the megacaps and the crypto-adjacent names. Up to 10x.
Crypto — bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP and HYPE at 20x; Pump.fun, Zcash, LIT and KPEPE at 10x.
Commodities — gold, silver and WTI crude, all at 20x.
Indices — the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 at 20x, plus a DRAM index at 10x.

All of them match orders continuously, including overnight and at weekends. What changes when the underlying market is shut is not the perp — it is which external price feeds Polymarket uses to work out what the underlying is worth.source Which feeds, and when, is here.

The full market list, with live funding and leverage for each.

Leverage and margin

Two numbers govern a leveraged position. Initial margin is what you must post to open it. Maintenance margin is the floor you are liquidated at.source

IM = Notional / Leverage
MM = Notional × MMR      where MMR = 0.5 / MaxLeverage

Initial margin is your choice. Maintenance margin is the market's.

So the room a leverage setting actually buys you is the gap between the two. At 20x on a 20x market you post 5% and are liquidated at 2.5%, which is a 2.56% adverse move — not 5%, and not quite 2.5% either, because maintenance margin is charged on the notional at the liquidation price rather than at entry.source

There is a second cap. Each market has a risk-tier ladder that lowers the maximum leverage as a position grows, and the cap applies to your entire notional rather than bracket by bracket. Try to grow past a threshold without lowering your leverage setting first and the order is rejected outright.source The arithmetic at every leverage setting is here, and isolated versus cross is here.

State	Condition	What you can do
Healthy	Equity ≥ IM	Normal trading.
Margin call	MM ≤ Equity < IM	Reduce-only. Close exposure or deposit collateral.
Liquidation	Equity < MM	The system starts closing the position.

The three states an account is always in.

What it costs

Seven volume tiers, charged per fill on notional. New accounts start at the bottom and tiers are re-evaluated once every UTC day.source

30-day volume	Taker	Maker
New account	0.0400%	0.0125%
$1M+	0.0370%	0.0100%
$5M+	0.0350%	0.0080%
$25M+	0.0300%	0.0050%
$100M+	0.0270%	0.0020%
$500M+	0.0250%	0.0000%
$1B+	0.0200%	-0.0050% rebate

Only the top tier earns a maker rebate. Everything below it pays a maker fee.

Those rates look small enough to ignore, and at 1x they are. At 20x they are not: a round trip at the bottom tier costs 0.0800% of notional, which is 1.6% of the margin you actually posted, before funding and before slippage. The fee page has a calculator that shows this.

Funding

Polymarket settles funding every 1 hour. Most perpetual venues settle every eight; Hyperliquid is the notable exception and also pays hourly. It cuts both ways: your carry cost is smoother and more current, and there are twenty-four occasions a day to pay it rather than three.source

The rate is built from a premium index sampled off the order book every 5 seconds, by walking each side of the book for $1K of notional and comparing the result to the index price. Those samples are averaged over the hour and pushed through a formula with a fixed interest leg.

PremiumIndex = IPD / Index
F_8h  = scale × (mean_P + clamp(0.0001 − mean_P, ±0.0005))
FR_1h = clamp(F_8h / 8, ±0.04)

scale is 1.0 for crypto markets and 0.5 for everything else.

Funding is a straight transfer between longs and shorts — the protocol takes no cut — and it keeps running when the underlying market is closed.source The funding page explains the rest and tracks what every market is paying right now.

How you get liquidated

When equity falls below maintenance margin, the system starts closing your position with reduce-only immediate-or-cancel orders. They are market-priced and there is no protective spread — they sweep whatever is resting on the book at the moment they land.source

You also pay for it. While an account is flagged, every fill carries an extra liquidation fee on top of the normal maker or taker rate — 0.5% of notional on every listed market, 12.5 times the bottom-tier taker fee.source What that does to the round trip, with a calculator.

If the breach is severe enough that the order book cannot recover the value — below two-thirds of maintenance margin — Polymarket skips the book entirely and absorbs the position into its insurance fund. If the fund cannot safely take it, the position is force-closed against the most profitable, most leveraged traders on the other side. That is auto-deleveraging, and it can happen to a position of yours that is doing perfectly well.source

The three prices

Polymarket runs three different prices for every market, and only one of them can liquidate you.source

Index price — Polymarket’s estimate of what the underlying is actually worth, aggregated from external feeds and republished five times a second.
Mark price — the median of three independently-built candidates. This is the one used for your PnL, your margin, your liquidation trigger and your stop-loss.
Last trade price — the most recent fill on the book. The number on the chart. Used for margining: never.

So “I got liquidated but the chart never touched my liquidation price” is a coherent sentence. The mechanism, and how mark resists being pushed around, is here.

Getting in

Perps is open. Markets are live, and the invite code that gated the early-access period is no longer required — you connect a wallet, fund it and trade.source

Referral codes still exist; they just are not a door any more. A code pays the referrer a share of the fees you generate, it can be applied to an account exactly once, and an account keeps the first one it is given. You cannot switch later, and you cannot refer yourself.source What a code does now that it is not the way in.

The gate that did not come off: Polymarket does not permit Perps order placement from United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk. Reading market data is unrestricted; placing an order is not.source The full picture on availability.

Funding the account, picking a margin mode, choosing an order type, setting the exit before you need it: the walkthrough is here.

Questions people ask

Do Polymarket Perps expire?

No. A perpetual futures contract has no expiry date. A Perps position stays open until you close it or it is force-closed by liquidation. Without an expiry to force convergence, hourly funding payments are what keep the contract tethered to the underlying's price.

Can anyone trade Polymarket Perps?

Anyone in a permitted jurisdiction. Perps opened to the public and no invite code is needed any more. The geographic rule is unchanged: Polymarket does not permit order placement from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk. Reading market data is not restricted anywhere.

What leverage can you get on Polymarket Perps?

Up to 20x, and only on 10 of the 39 listed markets: S&P 500, Gold, WTI Crude Oil, Nasdaq 100, Silver, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid and XRP. Everything else — every individual stock, the smaller tokens and the DRAM index — caps at 10x. The ceiling also falls as your position grows: each market has a risk-tier ladder that caps leverage at larger notionals, and the cap applies to your whole position, not just the portion above the threshold.

How often does Polymarket charge funding?

Every hour. That is unusually frequent — most perpetual venues settle every eight hours. Polymarket samples a premium index off the order book every five seconds, averages those samples over the hour, and settles the resulting rate against every open position at the end of the window.

What are the fees on Polymarket Perps?

New accounts pay 0.0400% taker and 0.0125% maker on notional, and both fall as trailing 30-day volume rises through 7 tiers. At $1B of 30-day volume the maker rate turns into a 0.0050% rebate. Fees are charged per fill as abs(price × quantity) × rate, in pUSD.

Is Polymarket Perps on-chain?

Partly. It is a hybrid exchange: the order book, matching, margin and funding all run off-chain for speed, while deposits and withdrawals settle on Polygon. Trading does not produce a transaction per trade. The exchange periodically commits state roots on-chain so its reported off-chain state can be verified.

What is the difference between Polymarket Perps and Polymarket's prediction markets?

A prediction market resolves: you buy Yes or No shares and they settle at $1 or $0 when the event happens. A perp never resolves. You hold long or short exposure whose value tracks a price continuously, you pay or receive funding every hour while you hold it, and you can be liquidated. They are separate products with separate referral programs.

Sources · checked 11 August 2026