How Lighter fees work: Standard, Premium and Plus accounts

Lighter charges no trading fees on Standard accounts: 0% maker and 0% taker on both perps and spot. Premium accounts pay 0.0040% maker and 0.0280% taker, which LIT staking can cut by up to 30%, in exchange for much lower latency. There’s also a Plus account at 0.005% per side for API users who need higher rate limits.

All numbers below come from Lighter’s trading fees page and API account types page, as of September 2026.

Lighter’s three account types

	Standard (default)	Premium (opt-in)	Plus (opt-in)
Maker fee	0%	0.0040%	0.005%
Taker fee	0%	0.0280%	0.005%
Taker latency	300 ms	140 ms	300 ms
Maker latency	200 ms	No added delay on post-only	200 ms
Cancel latency	300 ms	No added delay	200 ms
Sub-accounts	4	64 (API docs)	16 (API docs)
Staking discounts	n/a	Yes, up to 30%	No

Standard is what you get by default. You opt into Premium or Plus in the app’s account settings or through the API. According to the API docs, upgrades take effect immediately, but you can only switch down once every 24 hours.

One detail that trips people up: the Premium maker fee is 0.0040% and the taker fee 0.0280%. Those are percentages, not basis points. In basis points that’s 0.4 bps maker and 2.8 bps taker.

Why Standard accounts pay nothing

Lighter’s business model doesn’t rely on retail trading fees. The exchange earns from Premium and Plus fees paid by professional traders, liquidation fees, and its LLP pool. Standard traders effectively “pay” with speed: their orders sit in a queue for a few hundred milliseconds that Premium orders skip.

For someone clicking buttons on a 15-minute chart, 300 ms is invisible. For a market maker who needs to pull quotes the instant price moves, it’s the difference between profit and getting picked off. That’s the trade Lighter offers.

What you still pay on a Standard account

“Zero fees” covers maker and taker fees. These costs remain:

• Spread and slippage. Market orders cross the bid-ask spread and can eat through several price levels if you trade size in thin markets. Lighter doesn’t publish spread averages, so check the order book depth before large orders.
• Funding. Paid hourly between longs and shorts. Lighter takes no cut, but a crowded long can cost you meaningfully over a few days.
• Advanced order fees. Lighter’s referral page confirms Standard users pay fees for some advanced order types. The perpRFQ page lists 1 basis point (0.01%) for RFQ orders on Standard accounts, and third-party integrations report the same 0.01% for TWAP, Chase and similar types. Plain market and limit orders stay free.
• Liquidation fee. If the liquidation engine closes your position at a better price than your zero price, it can take up to 1%, which goes to the LLP insurance fund.
• Network costs on deposits and withdrawals.

Premium fee tiers with LIT staking

Staking LIT reduces Premium fees. The stake is counted across your main account and all sub-accounts under the same wallet address.

Staked LIT	Discount	Maker fee	Taker fee
0	none	0.0040%	0.0280%
1,000	2.5%	0.0039%	0.0273%
3,000	5%	0.0038%	0.0266%
10,000	10%	0.0036%	0.0252%
30,000	15%	0.0034%	0.0238%
100,000	20%	0.0032%	0.0224%
300,000	25%	0.0030%	0.0210%
500,000	30%	0.0028%	0.0196%

Taker latency is 140 ms at every tier, so staking only changes the price, not the speed. On the API side, higher tiers also raise your transaction rate limits.

If you don’t want to lock up LIT, LIT Fee Credits let you pay LIT upfront for a set duration to count as if you had staked more. The proceeds go to LIT stakers. Unstaking normally has a 3-day lockup.

Worked examples

Manual swing trader. You open and close a $20,000 BTC position twice a week with market orders, so $80,000 of taker volume a week.

• Standard: $0 in trading fees.
• Premium, no stake: $80,000 × 0.028% = $22.40 a week, or about $1,165 a year.

Unless the 160 ms faster fills save you more than that, Standard wins.

Active scalper using the API. $5M taker and $5M maker volume a week.

• Premium, no stake: $1,400 taker + $200 maker = $1,600 a week.
• Premium with 100,000 LIT staked: $1,120 + $160 = $1,280 a week, saving $320.
• Plus: $10M × 0.005% = $500 a week, but with Standard-level latency.

Plus is cheaper than Premium here, but only makes sense if the strategy doesn’t need speed.

How Lighter compares with Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid’s base tier charges 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker per its fee docs. A $100,000 taker trade costs $45 there, $28 on Lighter Premium and $0 on Lighter Standard. For the full breakdown on the other side, see our Hyperliquid fees guide, and for a wider comparison, Hyperliquid vs Lighter.

Deposit and withdrawal fees

Lighter doesn’t charge protocol fees to move money in or out. You pay network costs:

• Deposits can come from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana and several other chains. The minimum for a new account is $5 per the API docs. Bridged deposits may lose a little to slippage.
• Secure withdrawals go through Ethereum, so you pay Ethereum gas to claim.
• Fast withdrawals are USDC-only with a 4 USDC minimum and pay out via Arbitrum.

Try Premium without paying for it

New users who sign up through a referral link get one week of Premium with fees rebated on the first $10M of volume. That’s up to $2,800 in taker fees refunded, and a free way to find out whether the lower latency matters for you. Details are on our Lighter referral code page, or you can open a Lighter account directly.

New to the exchange itself? Start with what Lighter is and how it works.