Polymarket Perps 2026: 88 Markets, 50x
Polymarket Perps measured on 11 October 2026: 88 live markets, 50x leverage where every guide still says 20x, and what hourly funding really costs.
Affiliate disclosure: contains affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. 18+ only — see BeGambleAware.org. Last updated 11 October 2026.
Key takeaways
- The maximum is 50x, not 20x. Every guide says 20x because Polymarket's docs FAQ still does. The live feed returns 50x on BTC, ETH, USA500 and US100.
- 88 markets are listed and 38 are single stocks — 40 crypto, 38 equity, 6 index, 4 commodity, holding $97.7m of open interest on 11 October 2026.
- At a market's cap you lose half your margin before liquidation: 1% against 50x, 5% against 10x. Maintenance margin is a flat 0.5 divided by the cap.
- Funding has a floor and longs pay it — 10.95% a year on crypto, 5.48% elsewhere, even at fair value. 51 of 88 markets sat exactly there; over 100 hours NVDA longs paid 18.17% annualised, DOGE shorts 31.37%.
- A taker round trip costs 4% of your margin at 50x, and the liquidation fee is 0.5% on all 88 markets, though the docs say it varies.
On this page
Polymarket Perps is the part of Polymarket that is not a prediction market: leveraged contracts with no expiry on crypto, stocks, indices and commodities, where you get liquidated instead of waiting for a market to resolve. It is also the part the guides describe from one page of documentation rather than from the exchange, and the two disagree.
That gap costs money: the difference between the published 20x and the exchange's real 50x is the difference between a 2.5% move ending your position and a 1% move doing it.
So we skipped the guides. Every figure below was measured on 11 October 2026 at 18:47 UTC against Polymarket's public Perps API — instruments, tickers, order books and 100 hourly funding settlements — then checked against Polymarket's own docs.
The 50x leverage nobody wrote down
Ask Polymarket's documentation what the maximum leverage is and it answers: "For crypto, SP500, Oil, Gold and Silver we offer up to 20x leverage, RWA in general up to 10x leverage." That is the Perps FAQ, and it is where every third-party guide got its figure.
Ask the exchange and the answer differs. The instrument feed returns max_leverage: 50 on four markets — BTC, ETH, USA500 and US100 — and polymarket.com/perps advertises "up to 50x leverage" on its face. The 20x line is stale, and it has been copied into every guide on page one. It is wrong the other way too: "crypto up to 20x" implies a 20x floor across crypto, when 22 crypto markets are capped at 10x, nine at 5x and four at 3x. Size a position on the docs' promise and the order is rejected with invalid_leverage.
The number that governs your risk is not the cap but the maintenance margin rate, and that is a formula: MMR = 0.5 / max_leverage, flat per market, independent of position size, risk tier and the leverage you choose.
Live instrument feed, 11 October 2026 18:47 UTC. Maintenance margin is derived: 0.5 / max_leverage.
Leverage tiers then cut the cap as a position grows: on BTC the 50x band ends at $250,000 of notional, stepping down through 25x, 20x, 15x and 10x, and on USA500 to 1x above $100m. The reduction applies to your whole position rather than bracket by bracket, so growing into a lower tier raises the margin on everything you already hold.
What is actually listed: 88 markets, 38 of them stocks
No competitor publishes the instrument list, and Polymarket's own Markets page renders it client-side from the endpoint we called. Here is the shape of the book.
Open interest is contracts times mark price, summed per category. One snapshot.
Two things stand out. The six index markets carry more open interest than all 40 crypto markets put together — USA500 alone held $25.7m against $11.9m on BTC. A venue that grew up on political odds is now, by exposure, mostly an index desk.
The second is the tail. Every market has a $10 minimum order, but the largest single market order runs from $1m on the majors down to $50,000 on the 5x and 3x markets, and a DRAM index perp sits next to the memecoins. Three figures are uniform across all 88: the liquidation fee is 0.5%, funding settles hourly, and not one market is isolated-only, although the FAQ says some are.
How far the price moves before you are liquidated
This is the calculation the guides describe and never run. Liquidation triggers on equity, not price: the system closes you when equity falls below maintenance margin, equity being collateral plus unrealised profit at mark price, minus fees and funding owed. Initial margin is notional divided by your chosen leverage, maintenance margin is the flat rate above, and the move you can survive is the gap between them.
On a 50x market (maintenance margin 1%), before fees and funding. A 10x market gives 5.00% at 10x, 15.00% at 5x, 45.00% at 2x.
At a market's maximum leverage you always lose exactly half your margin before the system acts — that is what a maintenance rate of half the cap means, and it holds at 50x, 20x, 10x, 5x and 3x alike. Trade BTC at 50x and a 1% tick against you ends it; the same trade on a 10x stock needs 5%.
Cutting your leverage buys room in absolute terms and loses it in proportional terms: at 2x on a 50x market you can sit through a 49% drawdown, but 98% of what you posted is gone by then, because maintenance margin stays pinned at 1% of notional however much you put up.
Three details will cost you if you model this from price alone. Liquidation runs off mark price — a median of three candidates including a 150-second smoothed book mid, not the last trade. Fees and funding come out of equity, so a losing position drifts toward its own liquidation while you hold it. And on a cross account, every position's liquidation price moves when any other one does. For the same arithmetic on the prediction-market side, see our guide to Polymarket's trading fees.
What funding actually cost over 100 hours
Funding is the rent on a leveraged position, it settles hourly, and it is the number the guides handle worst. Both print the formula and neither measures it. One publishes a funding table in which dozens of rows read exactly +10.9% or +5.5% annualised and tells readers this "may reflect a cap or default". It is the floor, and the formula is on the page they cite: an averaged premium index pushed through an eight-hour formula carrying a fixed interest leg of 0.01% per 8 hours, divided by eight, then scaled by 1.0 for crypto and 0.5 otherwise. Feed in a premium of zero — a perp at fair value — and the rate does not vanish:
Derived from the published parameters, then confirmed live: ETH, SOL and HYPE sat at exactly 0.00125%, and USA500, US100, Silver, both oils, AAPL and TSLA at exactly 0.000625%.
51 of the 88 markets sat at exactly that floor when we sampled, 32 below it and 5 above. The default for a long is therefore roughly 11% a year on crypto and 5.5% elsewhere before the market moves — charged on notional, so at 10x it is 110% and 55% a year of posted margin. Then we pulled the last 100 hourly settlements, to see what holders paid.
Seven of the 18 markets we sampled, over 100 consecutive hourly settlements to 18:00 UTC, 11 October 2026, from the public funding endpoint. A negative total means shorts paid longs; the last column is what a $1,000 long would pay or collect over seven days at the measured mean.
Across the 18 markets we sampled, the spread between best and worst was 49.5 percentage points annualised: DOGE shorts paid 31.37% to hold while NVDA longs paid 18.17%. None of it is permanent — XRP longs collected in 85 of 100 hours, ETH longs paid in all 100.
The 4%-per-hour cap is nowhere near live: the largest single hour we recorded was +0.02368% on MSTR, about 169 times inside it.
Fees are small on notional and large on margin
The fee schedule is published and correctly reproduced by both competitors: tiered on trailing 30-day volume, re-evaluated every UTC day, charged per fill on notional.
In the only unit that matters to a leveraged trader — your own money — they stop looking small. A taker round trip at the entry tier costs 0.08% of notional: 4.00% of your margin at 50x, 1.60% at 20x, 0.80% at 10x. At 50x that is 8% of the entire 1.00% move you have, and the crypto funding floor takes another 1.5% of margin a day.
One fee the docs get wrong is the liquidation fee, charged on top of the maker or taker rate on every fill while you are flagged. The documentation says the rate "varies by market" and tells integrators to read it live. We read it live on all 88 and it is 0.005 — a flat 0.5% everywhere. At 10x that is 5% of your margin on the way out, on top of a loss that has already taken half of it.
Deposits are separate and cheaper: the Perps account is funded in pUSD from your Polymarket wallet, 10 pUSD minimum. We priced the route into Polymarket itself in our guide to Polymarket deposit fees, where the chain you pick is worth up to 135x.
When it goes badly: the insurance fund and auto-deleveraging
Normal liquidation is unglamorous: resting orders in scope are cancelled, new ones rejected, and reduce-only immediate-or-cancel orders go into the book until equity recovers or the position is gone. There is no protective spread off mark — they sweep whatever is resting, which is why the weekend liquidity question below is not academic.
Beyond that, two mechanisms take over and neither is covered by the guides. The insurance fund backstop fires when equity falls below two-thirds of maintenance margin: the exchange stops selling and absorbs the position and your quote balance instead — on a cross account, every cross position plus your cash, recorded as a cash transfer rather than a fill. Auto-deleveraging takes over when the fund cannot absorb it and stay healthy: the exchange force-closes you against the other side, ranked by ProfitRatio × Notional / Equity, most profitable and most leveraged first. If that is you, your winning position is cut without consent at the bankruptcy price or the frozen mark, with no fee either side.
No insurance-fund size is published and no public endpoint reports one. That is the biggest unmeasurable here: what stands between a cascade and your profitable position is a balance nobody outside Polymarket can see.
Stock perps on a Sunday night
We sampled at 18:47 UTC on a Sunday, with every stock market behind those 38 equity perps closed for two days. The perps traded anyway — and so did the machinery that liquidates them.
Polymarket's session model is the most underrated paragraph in its documentation. Sessions — Regular, Overnight, Weekend, Disrupted, Halted — change exactly one thing: which external feeds price the index. They do not change funding, margin, leverage tiers, matching or liquidation triggers, which "run identically around the clock". A Weekend session is defined as a period with "thin or absent external data", so your liquidation level is live on a feed set the exchange itself describes that way. We measured the books.
Order books to 500 levels, 18:47-18:52 UTC Sunday 11 October 2026. Depth is the thinner side within that distance of the mid, in notional.
The weekend book is better than we expected. NVDA quoted inside 5 basis points with $2.5m resting within 20 bps of the mid, two days after the Nasdaq closed, and USA500 and US100 were the deepest markets on the venue. The worry going in was that a weekend liquidation on a stock perp would sweep an empty book; on these eleven markets it would not.
The bottom of the crypto list is thin: USELESS showed $59,000 within 20 bps against a $50,000 single-order ceiling, so one permitted order is most of the visible depth. A liquidation there has little to sweep, which is presumably why the maintenance margin is 16.67%.
Who is allowed to trade it: two different lists
No guide puts the two lists side by side. Polymarket publishes separate geographic restrictions for Perps and for its prediction markets, and they are not the same length.
Polymarket's two restriction pages, read 11 October 2026: nine jurisdictions on the Perps page, 48 on the prediction-market geoblock. Both can change.
So the Perps list names nine jurisdictions against the prediction markets' 48, and it is not a subset: Canada is blocked country-wide for Perps while only four provinces are restricted on prediction markets, and the United Kingdom appears on one list and not the other.
Treat that as information, not advice: a venue's terms of service can restrict more than its geoblock does, and neither page speaks to your tax position. Check where you stand before funding anything — our Polymarket UK guide covers the prediction-market side. Both pages agree that read-only market data is unrestricted, which is how every figure here was gathered.
Getting paid instead: 20% of fees and $75,000 a day
Two ways to earn here do not involve taking a position. The referral programme pays 20% of the trading fees of everyone you refer, weekly, with no per-trader cap — against 10% of net fees on the prediction-market programme, which also expires. It is a separate code, one per account, unchangeable once applied, and invites are rationed: 10 to start, 25 once those are used by active traders, then 100 at $100,000 of eligible volume, 250 at $500,000 and 500 at $1m. All four code programmes are in our Polymarket referral code guide.
The maker programme is the interesting one. Polymarket pays $75,000 a day in pUSD liquidity rewards, split evenly across active Perps markets — not weighted by volume or open interest.
Divide the pool by the 88 markets we counted and each is worth about $852 a day, or $311,000 a year, whatever its size: CASHCAT's pool equals BTC's. Against $97.7m of open interest, that is roughly 0.077% of total exposure daily.
The catch is the 1% maker-share gate and the harmonic mean: a snapshot scores zero unless both sides quote inside 20 bps, so one-sided quoting earns nothing. We found no independent reporting of actual payouts, so treat the per-market figure as the published mechanism, not a measured return.
Check the live numbers before you size anything
Leverage caps, risk tiers, the liquidation fee and the current funding rate are all on the market page, and they move. This is our affiliate link to polymarket.com.
Visit Polymarket.com →Affiliate link. 18+ only. Perps order placement is not permitted from the United States, Canada or the other jurisdictions on Polymarket's Perps restriction list, and its prediction markets restrict a longer list. Leveraged trading carries a substantial risk of loss; your whole margin can go in a single-figure percentage move.
My verdict
Mechanically this is a more serious exchange than the guides suggest: mark price is a median of three independent candidates rather than a book mid, the funding formula is conventional and fully specified, the liquidation path is documented down to the counterparty ranking, and the weekend books were tighter than we expected.
The documentation around the edges is not serious. The headline leverage figure is wrong by a factor of 2.5, the liquidation fee is called variable when it is flat across all 88 markets, the FAQ names isolated-only markets that do not exist, and the funding endpoint's default hides three-quarters of its history. Each of those errors has been copied by a guide that ranks for this topic.
Three numbers decide whether a position is viable, long before your view on the asset does: your market's maintenance margin rate (0.5 divided by its cap), the funding floor on your side (10.95% a year on crypto, 5.48% elsewhere), and the 0.5% liquidation fee. At 50x, a 1% tick is the whole of your room.
Related guides
- Polymarket Fees 2026: What You Actually Pay — the prediction-market fee schedule, which Perps does not share.
- Polymarket Deposit Fees 2026: The Real Cost — funding the wallet your Perps collateral comes from, priced across 13 chains.
- How Does Polymarket Work? Explained for 2026 — the YES/NO side of the platform, from scratch.
- Polymarket Referral Code 2026: What You Actually Get — all four programmes, and which codes are typeable.
- Polymarket UK 2026: Is It Legal? Honest Guide — the restricted-country picture in practice.
Polymarket Perps FAQ
What is the maximum leverage on Polymarket Perps?
50x, on four markets: BTC, ETH, USA500 and US100. We read it from the live instrument feed on 11 October 2026 and polymarket.com/perps advertises the same figure, but Polymarket's docs FAQ still says 20x, which is where the guides got it. Below the top four, 8 markets are capped at 20x, 63 at 10x, 9 at 5x and 4 at 3x.
How many markets does Polymarket Perps have?
88 on 11 October 2026: 40 crypto, 38 single stocks, 6 indices and 4 commodities, carrying $97.7m of open interest. The six index markets alone held more than all 40 crypto markets combined. Polymarket publishes no static list; its own Markets page loads it from the public instrument endpoint.
When does Polymarket Perps liquidate a position?
When equity falls below maintenance margin, a flat 0.5 divided by the market's maximum leverage: 1% on a 50x market, 5% on a 10x one. At the cap that means losing exactly half your posted margin. It is measured against mark price, a median of three candidates rather than the last trade.
How much is funding on Polymarket Perps?
It settles hourly and has a floor longs pay even at fair value: 10.95% a year on crypto, 5.48% on everything else, from a fixed 0.01%-per-8-hours interest leg scaled by 1.0 for crypto and 0.5 otherwise. 51 of 88 markets sat exactly there when we sampled. Over the 100 hourly settlements to 18:00 UTC on 11 October 2026, NVDA longs paid 18.17% annualised and DOGE shorts 31.37%.
What are the fees on Polymarket Perps?
New accounts pay 0.0400% taker and 0.0125% maker on notional, falling to 0.0200% and a 0.0050% maker rebate above $1bn of trailing 30-day volume. A taker round trip at the entry tier is 0.08% of notional, or 4% of your margin at 50x. Liquidation fills pay an extra 0.5%: the docs say that rate varies by market, but all 88 returned 0.005.
Can you trade Polymarket Perps in the UK?
Polymarket's Perps restriction page lists nine jurisdictions — the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk — and the United Kingdom is not among them, although the UK is close-only on Polymarket's prediction markets. An order-placement list is not the whole picture, since terms of service can restrict more than a geoblock does, so check your own position first.
Is Polymarket Perps the same as prediction markets?
No. Prediction markets settle YES/NO shares at $1 or $0 on an event outcome. Perps never resolve: you hold a long or short that tracks the underlying, post margin, pay or receive hourly funding, and can be liquidated. They have separate fees, referral codes and geographic restrictions, and collateral must be deposited into the Perps account first — 10 pUSD minimum, $10 minimum order.
Do stock perps trade when the stock market is closed?
Yes, and so does everything that can close your position. Sessions change only which external feeds compute index and mark price; funding, margin, matching and liquidation triggers run identically around the clock, including through a Weekend session the docs define as having thin or absent external data. At 18:47 UTC on Sunday 11 October 2026 NVDA quoted a 4.75 basis-point spread with $2.5m of depth within 20 bps.
Sources
Instruments, tickers, order books and funding history read from Polymarket's public Perps API at 18:47-18:52 UTC on 11 October 2026; funding covers the 100 hourly settlements to 18:00 UTC. Market data is a snapshot. Nothing here is financial advice.
- Perps API: /v1/info/instruments — 88 markets, leverage caps, risk tiers, liquidation fees, minimum notional.
- Polymarket docs: margin — equity, margin states, the 10% withdrawal floor.
- Polymarket docs: liquidation mechanics — triggers, backstop, auto-deleveraging.
- Polymarket docs: funding — the premium index, the interest leg, the 4%-per-hour cap.
- Polymarket docs: Perps FAQ — the "up to 20x" answer and the two-thirds backstop trigger.
- Polymarket docs: liquidity rewards — the $75,000 pool, the even split, the bands.
- Polymarket docs: geoblock — the prediction-market restriction lists.
- polymarket.com/perps — the product page advertising "up to 50x leverage".
- Pyth and Chainlink Data Streams — two feeds Polymarket names as index sources.