Affiliate disclosure: links to exchanges on this page are referral links. They never worsen your trading terms; in some cases they add a fee discount. Risk: leveraged futures trading can result in the loss of your entire deposit.
TL;DR
MEXC's 500x on BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT is the highest cap among the eight venues we track. BingX and Gate.io sit at 200x, Bitget at 150x, Binance at 125x on BTC, Bybit and OKX at 100x, Hyperliquid at 40x. The headline number is only half the story: every exchange cuts your max leverage as position size grows, and the cut points live in risk-limit tables the marketing pages don't show.
| Venue | Max leverage (BTC) | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| MEXC | 500x | Highest cap of the eight, with 0% maker / 0.020% taker on top |
| BingX | 200x | 200x, but its risk-limit tiers aren't publicly queryable |
| Gate.io | 200x | 200x with the lowest confirmed tier-1 maintenance rate (0.3%) |
| Bitget | 150x | 150x confirmed at tier 1 through the public API |
| Bybit | 100x | Lower cap, deeper book; the full 100x holds through tier 1 |
Leverage and fee figures on this page were verified against exchange APIs and official pages on 2026-07-01.
The marketing number vs. the number you trade
"Max leverage" means max leverage on the smallest position tier. Every venue runs a risk-limit ladder: as notional grows, you move up tiers, maintenance margin rises, and the leverage cap steps down. A 500x badge on the homepage says nothing about what a $500,000 position gets.
Where a public endpoint exists, we pulled tier-1 figures straight from it instead of the marketing page:
- Bybit — tier-1 maintenance margin 0.5% at max leverage 100x. The full headline cap holds through the first tier.
- OKX — tier-1 MMR 0.4% at 100x, from the public position-tiers endpoint.
- Bitget — level-1 maintenance rate 0.4% at 150x.
- Gate.io — 0.3% maintenance rate on BTC/USDT, the lowest confirmed figure here. A fixed 0.075% liquidation fee stacks on top, and cross positions use a separate bankruptcy-price formula.
- MEXC — applies a fixed "maintenance amount" deduction rather than a flat percentage, so the effective rate shifts with position size. The tier-1 equivalent is 0.5%.
- Hyperliquid — maintenance margin is half the initial margin at an asset's max leverage: 2.5% initial at 40x BTC, so 1.25% maintenance. Not a flat rate across assets.
- BingX — the risk-limit endpoint requires an authorized API key; the 200x figure comes from the official page.
- Binance — the leverage-bracket endpoint requires a signed key too, so its 0.4% tier-1 figure is an industry estimate, not a verified number.
Notice the split: the venues advertising the biggest caps are also the ones where the ladder is hardest to verify from outside. The 100x venues publish everything.
Max leverage across eight venues
| Venue | Max BTC | Max ETH | Taker fee | Tier-1 MMR | Where the headline holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MEXC | 500x | 500x | 0.020% | 0.5%* | USDT-M BTC/ETH perps; alt pairs cap lower |
| BingX | 200x | 200x | 0.050% | not public | Official-page figure; tiers behind an API key |
| Gate.io | 200x | 200x | 0.050% | 0.3% | Tier 1 confirmed via API; +0.075% liquidation fee |
| Bitget | 150x | 150x | 0.060% | 0.4% | Level 1 confirmed via API |
| Binance | 125x | 100x | 0.050% | ~0.4% (est.) | Bracket data needs a signed key |
| Bybit | 100x | 100x | 0.055% | 0.5% | Full 100x through tier 1, confirmed |
| OKX | 100x | 100x | 0.050% | 0.4% | Tier 1 confirmed via API |
| Hyperliquid | 40x | 25x | 0.045% | 1.25% (BTC) | MMR = half the initial margin at max leverage |
* MEXC applies a fixed maintenance-amount deduction, not a flat percentage; 0.5% is the tier-1 equivalent.
Fees shown are base-tier futures taker rates. If fees matter more to you than the cap, the ranking changes completely — see the lowest-fee futures exchanges.
MEXC, BingX, Gate.io: the 200x-and-up group
MEXC — 500x. At full leverage, $20 of margin controls a $10,000 position and liquidation sits roughly 0.2% from entry before fees and funding. The cap applies to BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT USDT-M perpetuals; most alt pairs run lower, as of mid-2026. The fee schedule is the cheapest of the eight — 0% maker, 0.020% taker — which matters at this leverage because fees come out of a margin buffer that is already thin.
BingX — 200x on both majors at standard 0.020% / 0.050% maker/taker. The venue's actual pitch is copy trading, as of mid-2026; the cap applies in both manual and copied positions. Book depth is thinner than Bybit or OKX, so a market order at size can fill noticeably away from mid — and at 200x, slippage on entry eats directly into your liquidation buffer.
Gate.io — 200x with the lowest confirmed tier-1 maintenance rate in the table, 0.3%. Getting liquidated still costs more than the MMR suggests, because the fixed 0.075% liquidation fee is charged on top. Its real edge is altcoin futures breadth — the widest listing of this group, as of mid-2026 — which makes it the default when the pair you want to leverage isn't on the others.
Open an account: MEXC · BingX · Gate.io
Bitget, Binance, Bybit, OKX: lower caps, published ladders
Bitget — 150x, confirmed at level 1 with a 0.4% maintenance rate. Base taker is 0.060%, the highest of the eight, so frequent entries and exits cost more here than the leverage cap alone suggests.
Binance — 125x on BTC, 100x on ETH — the only centralized venue in the table with a split cap between the two majors. Its bracket data sits behind a signed API key, so verify the tier structure inside your account before sizing up.
Bybit — 100x with a confirmed 0.5% tier-1 MMR. Funding settles every 8 hours in normal conditions, but the interval tightens under extreme rates, as of mid-2026 — relevant at high leverage, where each funding debit comes straight out of margin.
OKX — 100x with a 0.4% tier-1 MMR from a public endpoint. Base fees are 0.020% / 0.050% maker/taker, slightly under Bybit's taker rate.
Open an account: Bitget · Bybit · OKX · Binance
Hyperliquid: the low-leverage outlier
40x on BTC and 25x on ETH — the most conservative caps in the table, and deliberately so. The venue is an onchain order book with no KYC as of mid-2026; if that is the draw rather than the cap, the no-KYC futures comparison is the better page. Two mechanics matter here at leverage. Funding settles hourly instead of every 8 hours, capped at 4% per interval, so an adverse funding run drains margin much faster than on the CEXs. And the 1.25% BTC maintenance rate is the highest in the table, which pulls liquidation closer to entry than the 40x figure alone implies. Check what your pair costs per interval in the funding-rate tracker.
The liquidation math
Approximate distance from entry to liquidation on isolated margin, before fees, funding, and maintenance margin (distance ≈ 1 / leverage):
| Leverage | Distance to liquidation |
|---|---|
| 25x | ~4% |
| 100x | ~1% |
| 150x | ~0.67% |
| 200x | ~0.5% |
| 500x | ~0.2% |
BTC covers 0.2–0.5% in seconds during a volatile stretch. At 500x, liquidation is not a tail risk — it is the expected outcome of holding through ordinary noise.
The one defensible use of a 500x cap is capital efficiency: post less margin per position, keep the rest of the deposit free, and size every trade from risk, not from available leverage. A trader risking a fixed dollar amount takes the same loss at 10x or 500x — the leverage setting only changes how much margin is parked. Used the other way, to inflate position size on a small deposit, the table above is the whole story.
If you are choosing a venue on more than the leverage cap — fees, liquidity, funding — start from the futures exchange comparison.
