GMX fees explained

The position fee is the most significant and predictable cost most traders will pay on GMX. On v2, it applies twice per round trip: once when you open a position and once when you close it. The rate sits in the range of approximately 0.05% to 0.07% of the notional position size per side. A completed trade — open plus close — therefore incurs somewhere between roughly 0.10% and 0.14% in total position fees.

The exact rate depends on whether your trade improves or worsens the open-interest balance in that market's pool. Trades that push the ratio of longs to shorts closer to equilibrium benefit from the lower end of the range, around 0.05%. Trades that worsen the imbalance are charged the higher rate, around 0.07%. This asymmetry is a deliberate mechanism to incentivise traders to take the less crowded side of the market at any given time.

Position fees are charged against your collateral at execution. They are a fixed, one-time cost per open or close, not a charge that compounds over time. Keeping this cost mentally separate from the ongoing cost of holding a position — borrow fees and funding fees — makes it easier to model the full expense of any trade before you enter it.

Borrow fees are charged continuously while a leveraged position remains open. Any leveraged trade on GMX borrows capacity from the liquidity pool to support the exposure, and that borrowing has a time-based cost. The rate varies with pool utilisation: when open interest is high relative to available liquidity in a given market, the borrow rate rises. Traders holding positions over several days or weeks should treat borrow fees as a meaningful share of total cost, not a rounding error.

Funding fees operate on a different logic. They flow directly between the long and short side of a market based on the imbalance of open interest. When longs significantly outweigh shorts, longs pay a funding fee and shorts receive it; when the situation reverses, the direction flips. This mechanism keeps the perpetual price anchored close to the underlying oracle price over time, mirroring the funding rate system used by centralised perpetual exchanges.

Neither borrow fees nor funding fees are affected by a referral code. The 10% position-fee discount covered later in this guide applies only to open and close charges. Borrow and funding costs accrue at exactly the same rate whether or not a referral code is active. Understanding this distinction prevents traders from over-estimating what a code actually saves, particularly on long-duration positions.

GMX supports direct spot swaps — exchanging one asset for another through the protocol's liquidity pools without going through a centralised order book. Spot swaps carry a small fee that varies by pool composition and swap direction.

A related concept worth understanding is price impact. Because GMX uses pooled liquidity rather than an order book, large trades can shift the pool's asset balance. A trade that rebalances the pool — buying an underweight asset or selling an overweight one — may attract low or even negative price impact, meaning slightly improved execution as a reward for helping pool health. A trade that pushes the pool further out of balance pays positive price impact on top of the base swap fee. For most standard-sized trades, price impact is small, but it becomes meaningful for large orders relative to pool depth.

GMX's referral programme provides a direct discount on position fees — the open and close charges described above. The programme operates in tiers: Tier 1 codes give 5%, while higher tiers reach a maximum of 10%. Code PRO sits at the maximum protocol-allowed discount of 10%, giving traders who apply it the highest reduction the protocol permits. No valid referral code offers a larger discount than this.

The discount applies automatically at execution when the code is entered in the referral section before opening a position. There is no separate claim process, no wallet verification step, and no ongoing action required after entering the code. The 10% reduction applies to both the open fee and the close fee, so the saving is realised across the full round trip.

This discount does not extend to borrow fees or funding fees. For long-duration positions where borrow costs accumulate over days or weeks, the referral saving on position fees is only one part of the total cost picture. To estimate the saving in dollar terms for your typical trade size and leverage, the savings calculator at /savings lets you model the referral discount before you commit to a trade.

The following uses an approximate mid-range position fee of 0.06% per side. This figure is illustrative: the actual rate at execution depends on the market's open-interest balance at that moment and will fall somewhere in the 0.05%–0.07% range described above. Position size: $10,000 notional.

Applying code PRO reduces each position fee charge by 10%, saving $1.20 on this round trip. At higher notional sizes the saving scales proportionally: a $50,000 position saves roughly $6.00 per round trip in position fees; a $100,000 position saves roughly $12.00. This example excludes borrow fees and funding fees, which depend on hold duration and the prevailing rates in the market at the time.

Traders coming from centralised perpetual platforms often look for a maker/taker rate comparison. GMX does not have that structure. Because there is no order book, there is no maker posting liquidity at a rebate and no taker crossing the spread. The position fee is a flat charge applied to every trade regardless of order type or execution speed — because traditional order types in that sense do not exist in this model.

The practical comparison is: a centralised exchange's effective trading cost plus its funding rate on one side, versus GMX's position fee plus its borrow fee on the other. Neither model is universally cheaper. Short-duration trades in balanced GMX markets can be cost-competitive with centralised equivalents. Long-duration trades accumulate borrow fees that can exceed what a centralised platform charges in funding over the same period. The right choice depends on trade duration, position size, and the open-interest conditions in the market at the time.

One structural distinction GMX offers is oracle-based pricing. Execution prices are derived from decentralized oracles rather than the exchange's own last-traded price. This reduces exposure to temporary price wicks that can trigger unfair liquidations on centralised platforms — an advantage that sits alongside, but is separate from, the fee structure itself.