Lighter Fees (2026): Zero Fees, Premium Accounts & LIT
Rates verified against official Lighter docs on 2026-07-17; Fee Credits and Plus-account details verified 2026-07-31.
Lighter's default account tier charges nothing to trade. That's not a promotional rate — it's the standing fee schedule for every Standard account, on every market the exchange lists. The catch isn't a hidden fee; it's latency. Lighter monetizes execution speed rather than size or volume, and that trade-off shapes the entire fee model, including why a Premium tier and LIT staking exist at all.
Standard accounts: 0 maker, 0 taker, on everything
Every account on Lighter starts on the Standard tier by default, and Standard trading is free: 0% maker fees and 0% taker fees across all markets, with no minimum volume and no opt-in required. Open an account, deposit, and trade — you pay 0% in exchange fees on both sides of every fill.
What Standard accounts don't get is Lighter's fastest execution path. Per the official docs, Standard-tier latency runs 300ms on taker orders, 200ms on maker orders, and 200ms on cancels. For most retail trading — manual entries, swing positions, anything that doesn't depend on beating other participants by single-digit milliseconds — that latency is irrelevant. You still get filled at the price you clicked, for free.
This is the real shape of Lighter's business model: latency tiering, not fee tiering, is what separates account types. Retail flow trades for free at 300ms. Flow that needs to react faster — market makers, arbitrageurs, latency-sensitive strategies — pays for the difference, either through Premium fees or through LIT staked against an L1 address. The zero-fee headline is real; it's paired with a latency floor most traders never notice and a small set of traders pay to remove.
Premium accounts: base rates and the LIT staking grid
Premium is Lighter's paid tier. It replaces the 0/0 Standard schedule with a small base fee — 0.0040% maker and 0.0280% taker — and in exchange cuts taker latency from 300ms to 200ms. Premium accounts also get an execution guarantee on resting orders: Post-Only order placements are not subject to any additional latency, so passive quoting isn't penalized the way a flat latency tier might penalize it.
On top of the Premium base rate, staking LIT reduces both fees and latency further. The discount applies at the L1 address level, aggregating a main account with its linked sub-accounts rather than requiring separate stakes per account. Multi-address linking beyond that is available, but only through direct coordination with the Lighter team, not as a self-serve setting.
The documented staking tiers, from Lighter's official schedule, are below.
| LIT staked | Discount | Maker fee | Taker fee | Taker latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 2.5% | 0.0039% | 0.0273% | 195ms |
| 3,000 | 5% | 0.0038% | 0.0266% | 190ms |
| 10,000 | 10% | 0.0036% | 0.0252% | 180ms |
| 30,000 | 15% | 0.0034% | 0.0238% | 170ms |
| 100,000 | 20% | 0.0032% | 0.0224% | 160ms |
| 300,000 | 25% | 0.0030% | 0.0210% | 150ms |
| 500,000 | 30% | 0.0028% | 0.0196% | 140ms |
One update worth being plain about: LIT is now live (verified 2026-07-23). The token has launched and trades as a market on Lighter, staking is active at a documented 6% APR with a 3-day unstake lockup, and the discount grid above is a usable benefit rather than a future one — stake LIT against your L1 address and the Premium fee reductions apply. Earlier versions of this page described LIT as pre-TGE; that is no longer accurate. One more staking perk shows up in the app but not yet in the docs: the staking page's benefits panel lists waived withdrawal and transfer fees for stakers (observed in-app 2026-08-03) — an app-surface fact we note as such, with its terms living wherever the app defines them.
LIT Fee Credits: reaching a tier without staking it
The grid above ties your tier to LIT you have staked. Fee Credits are the alternative route: rather than committing the full stake, you buy credits that count toward a chosen fee-and-latency tier for a fixed duration. Lighter's own example is a participant holding 100,000 LIT staked who applies credits worth another 200,000 — reaching the 300,000 tier, and so the 25% discount, without acquiring and locking the additional 200,000 outright.
Mechanically, per the official docs (verified 2026-07-31): you acquire LIT, open the LIT Fee Credits section on the Staking page, choose a credit amount and duration — those two together determine the tier — then confirm an L1 signature and pay the LIT upfront, at which point the tier activates. The program was announced live on Lighter's own announcement feed on 2026-02-26.
Two things worth understanding before treating this as a discount. The payment is upfront and for a fixed access period, so it is a cost you incur whether or not your volume ends up justifying the tier — the staking route locks capital you still hold, whereas credits are spent. And the proceeds do not return to you: Lighter documents that all Fee Credits revenue is distributed to LIT stakers, streamed as daily rewards across the access period. That makes credits a transfer from traders buying tier access to holders staking the token, which is a coherent design, just not a free upgrade.
Lighter does not publish a price table for credits — the cost of a given amount-and-duration combination is shown in the app at purchase time, not in the docs — so this page quotes no figures for it.
Plus accounts: the third tier
Standard and Premium are the two account types most coverage stops at, but Lighter documents a third. Plus is aimed at traders who are insensitive to latency but want higher rate limits: a flat 0.5bps maker/taker fee, 300ms taker latency and 200ms maker/cancel latency, with 8,000 sendTx/sendTxBatch calls per minute and 120,000 weighted read-only requests per minute (verified 2026-07-31).
The trade cuts differently depending on which side you trade. 0.5bps is 0.0050%, so on the taker side Plus is cheaper than Premium ever gets: 0.0050% against a 0.0280% Premium base, and still below the 0.0196% that 500,000 staked LIT buys at the top of the grid. On the maker side it is slightly worse — 0.0050% against Premium's 0.0040% base, and roughly double the 0.0028% top-tier maker rate. What you actually pay for that taker rate is latency: 300ms taker execution, matching Standard and a third slower than Premium's 200ms, before any staking improvement.
So Plus suits a taker-heavy strategy that is genuinely indifferent to a few hundred milliseconds and wants the higher throughput; a maker-heavy or latency-sensitive one is better served by Premium and the staking grid. It can be switched on from the account-type control in the app, or through the changeAccountTier endpoint for API users.
How the model sustains itself
A venue that charges 0% on its default tier and low-basis-point fees on its paid tier needs revenue and liquidity from somewhere else. Lighter's documentation points to a few pieces: Premium account fees, the LLP (Lighter Liquidity Pool), and staking rewards that back the live 6% LIT staking APR. The published docs don't spell out a full revenue breakdown, and this page won't speculate past what's stated.
Funding payments
Funding on Lighter is peer-to-peer: longs and shorts pay each other directly to keep perpetual prices tethered to the underlying index, and the platform does not take a cut of funding payments. The cadence is documented in Lighter's contract specifications rather than the fee schedule: per the official docs (verified 2026-07-22), "currently each deployed market has a funding period of 1 hour" — with the stated caveat that the period is a per-market configuration, so newer market deployments could differ. The funding formula itself isn't published as part of the fee schedule, so we're not quoting one. One stale-claim inoculation: if you read elsewhere that Lighter rebates funding payments, know that its docs no longer describe any funding-rebate program — the program's documentation page carried a sunset notice dated 2026-05-15 and has since been removed from the docs entirely (checked 2026-08-31; no rebate mention remains anywhere in the docs index or the funding page). For how perp funding works generally — why it exists, how it's typically calculated, and what a positive or negative rate means for your position — see our funding rates guide.
Zero fees plus a latency-based paid tier is a different model from most perp DEXs, which charge a maker/taker spread to everyone regardless of speed. If you're weighing Lighter against a fee-charging venue with different liquidity and depth, see our Hyperliquid vs. Lighter comparison for how the two approaches play out in practice. For where zero-fee sits against every other venue we cover, see every venue's fee schedule side by side. For the exchange overview, start with our Lighter guide; for the separate points program, see Lighter points.
FAQ
Is Standard trading on Lighter really free?
Yes, per the official docs: Standard accounts pay 0% maker and 0% taker fees on all markets, with no minimum to qualify. The only trade-off is execution latency — 300ms on taker orders — not a hidden fee.
Why would anyone pay for a Premium account?
Speed. Premium taker latency is 200ms versus 300ms on Standard, and Premium accounts get Post-Only order placements that aren't subject to any additional latency on top of that. For market makers and latency-sensitive strategies, that gap is worth a small base fee.
Can I use the LIT staking discounts right now?
Yes. LIT is live (verified 2026-07-23) and staking is active at a documented 6% APR, so the grid above is a usable benefit: stake LIT against your L1 address and the Premium fee reductions apply. Unstaking carries a 3-day lockup. (An earlier version of this page said LIT was pre-TGE — that's no longer accurate.)
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