I Pulled Funding Rates on 1,520 Perpetuals This Morning. One Pair Costs 1,415%/Year to Hold.

Everyone who argues about leverage argues about liquidation. Nobody argues about funding, because it doesn't liquidate you in one candle. It just quietly takes a cut every eight hours for as long as you hold. So this morning I pulled every funding rate I could get: 1,520 perpetual pairs across 7 exchanges — Bybit, Binance, Bitget, Gate, MEXC, Hyperliquid, OKX — the same feed that runs RektCalc's live funding rates page. Then I annualized every single one.

The math is simple: funding gets charged three times a day, roughly every 8 hours, as a percentage of your notional position. Multiply the 8-hour rate by 3, then by 365, and you get the rate you'd pay (or get paid) over a year if nothing changed. Nothing ever stays this constant for a year. But it's the honest way to compare a cost that most leverage calculators simply don't show.

The headline numbers

Across all 1,520 pairs, the median annualized funding rate was 5.7%. The mean was 18.5% — dragged up hard by a long tail of thin pairs where funding sits pinned at its exchange cap. Restricting to the 705 pairs listed on 3 or more exchanges, so a single thin order book can't fake the number:

So about two-thirds of liquid pairs sit under 20%/year — annoying but survivable if you're actually trading, not just parking. And a genuine 6% of them, 43 pairs out of 705, cost more than half your position's value per year in funding alone, before a single tick of price movement.

The worst of it

These are all listed on 3+ exchanges, so it's not one broken order book. It's a real, tradeable, funding rate that someone is paying right now:

Negative means shorts are getting paid and longs are paying. HOME's number reads as fiction — minus 1,415% a year — until you remember it's not a forecast, it's just this morning's 8-hour rate multiplied out. Whoever is long HOME right now is paying roughly 0.39% of their notional every 8 hours. Held for a month at 1x, that's a third of the position gone to funding alone, with the price allowed to do absolutely nothing.

Majors are a completely different world

This is the part that actually matters if you're not trading illiquid alts. The coins most people actually hold:

Every major on this list is under 6%/year, all confirmed across all 7 exchanges at once. That's the arbitrage doing its job — enough capital watches BTC and ETH funding that it can't drift far from zero before someone trades it back. The cheapest pairs in the entire dataset among coins listed on 5+ exchanges were ARB at 0.24%/year and XRP at 0.52%/year. Deep, boring, liquid markets are exactly where funding stops being a factor.

Where leverage turns this into a real number

Funding is charged on your notional, not your margin. That's the detail people miss. A 10%/year funding rate at 1x costs you 10%/year of your capital. At 10x leverage, your notional is ten times your margin while the rate on that notional is unchanged — so the cost relative to your margin becomes roughly 100%/year. Leverage multiplies funding exactly the way it multiplies price risk, and almost nobody's mental model includes it.

Even BTC, the cheapest asset to fund on this whole list, costs a quarter of your margin per year at 10x if you just sit in it. That's not a hidden fee, it's public data on every exchange, but it's not in the number anyone quotes when they say "10x on Bitcoin is basically safe." Safe from liquidation, maybe. Not free.

What I actually do with this

I stopped treating funding as background noise a while back. Before I hold anything longer than a session, I check three things now: the pair's annualized rate on live funding rates, what that becomes at my leverage, and whether the sign is working for me or against me. A -20%/year rate on a short is a rate I'm getting paid, not one I'm fighting. The same number on a long is a cost that compounds every 8 hours whether the trade is winning or not.

The thin, extreme pairs at the top of that worst-of table aren't opportunities either, despite how large the numbers look. A -1,415%/year rate on HOME means the order book is badly one-sided, which is exactly the kind of market where slippage and sudden rate flips eat anyone trying to farm it. I don't trade the tail. I just don't want the tail's cost showing up in my position by accident, on some alt I picked for the chart and never checked the funding on.

Run your own pair through the funding calculator before you size the leverage, not after. And if the trade is only good with funding tailwind included, know that going in — funding flips faster than most theses play out.

The three numbers I check before holding anything

1. Annualized funding rate for my pair, right now. Median across 705 liquid pairs was 5.7%/yr this morning — that's the baseline, not the exception. Live funding rates.
2. What it becomes at my leverage. Funding scales with notional, so a 6%/year rate is 60%/year of margin at 10x. Funding calculator.
3. Whether the sign is for or against me. Negative funding pays longs the same magnitude it charges shorts. Check direction, not just size.

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