Binance Liquidation Price Calculator

How the liquidation price is calculated

A futures position is liquidated when the remaining margin in your account falls below the maintenance margin the exchange requires to keep the position open. The maintenance margin is a percentage of the position's notional value, and Binance calls that percentage the maintenance margin rate — 0.5% for most major pairs at small sizes, rising as position size increases.

On an isolated-margin position, the arithmetic reduces to three numbers: your entry price, your leverage, and the maintenance margin rate. For a long position, the liquidation price sits roughly 1/leverage − maintenance margin rate below entry. For a short position it sits the same distance above entry. At 10x with a 0.5% rate, that is 9.5% on either side.

Worked example. You open a 10x long on a pair at 50,000 with 1,000 USDT of notional. Your initial margin is 100 USDT, and the maintenance margin you must keep is 0.5% of 1,000, or 5 USDT. You get liquidated when your losses eat through 95 USDT of that margin, which happens at a price of roughly 4,750 below entry — 45,250.

Two details make the real number differ from this clean version. First, if you use cross margin, the whole wallet balance backs the position, so the liquidation price moves further away — but a liquidation then wipes out the entire account rather than just the position's margin. Second, funding fees are deducted from your margin balance every eight hours, so a position held for a long time can drift toward liquidation even when the price has not moved. Both effects are why the number here should be treated as the boundary of your risk, not as a target.

Reading the distance to liquidation

The most useful output is not the liquidation price itself but the distance between your entry and that price, because that is the room your trade has to move against you before the exchange takes over.

This is the practical argument for modest leverage. A pair that moves 10% in a day is not unusual, and at 10x that single day is enough to reach the liquidation boundary — even if your thesis was right and the move happened against you on day one. The lower the leverage, the more days you have to be right.

There is a second, subtler cost to high leverage that has nothing to do with the liquidation price: the notional is what fees are charged on. At 50x, a 1,000 USDT margin commitment controls 50,000 USDT of notional, and every entry and exit is charged on the full 50,000. The fee calculator will price that directly; the point is that leverage multiplies fee cost as well as P&L.

Finally, remember that the liquidation price is not a target you should trade toward. It is the exchange's forced exit. If you want to know how much room a stop-loss needs, use the position size calculator — it sizes a position from your stop distance and shows the margin required at each leverage, so you can check that the stop sits comfortably inside the liquidation boundary rather than outside it.

Isolated versus cross margin

Margin mode changes who gets hurt, not just when. Under isolated margin, only the margin assigned to that position is at risk. If it gets liquidated, the loss is capped at that margin and the rest of the account is untouched. Under cross margin, the entire futures wallet backs every open position, so a liquidation closes the position and takes the whole wallet balance with it.

For a beginner running one position at a time, isolated margin with a stop-loss is the safer default because the damage is bounded by a number you chose in advance. Cross margin makes sense when you are deliberately hedging — holding a spot position and a futures short against it — and you understand that a mistake on one leg affects the whole wallet.

Whichever mode you use, the maintenance margin rate is not a constant. Binance publishes a tier table per pair, and larger positions are charged a higher rate. The default of 0.5% used here is accurate for most major pairs at retail sizes; open your pair's futures info panel and read the tier table if your position is large.

What this calculator does not include

• It does not include funding fees already deducted. If the position has been open for several funding windows, part of your margin has already been paid away, so the effective liquidation price is slightly closer than shown.
• It does not model the exact tier table. Binance's maintenance margin tiers step up with position size, and the rate used for the last bracket is what finally triggers the liquidation.
• It does not include liquidation fees or insurance fund mechanics. A liquidation itself carries a fee, and the insurance fund absorbs some losses in extreme cases, which changes the outcome in ways that are not deterministic.
• It does not model cross-margin offsets. With cross margin, other open positions change the margin available to absorb a loss, so the price shown applies only to a single position in an otherwise empty wallet.

For the cost side of a futures position, the futures fees guide covers maker, taker and funding rates in detail, and the fee comparison table shows what the same position would cost on other exchanges.