Binance and Bybit are two of the largest venues for USDT perpetual futures, and their fee pages look almost the same: 0.02% for makers, about 0.05% for takers, 0.10% on spot. That is why “Binance vs Bybit fees” comparisons usually end in a draw. But a market order pays more than the fee. It also pays the spread and walks the order book, and a futures position pays funding while it is open. We measured all of it on the same orders, hour by hour, for 100 hours.
The fees, side by side
| Level | Binance futures | Bybit futures | Binance spot | Bybit spot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VIP 0 | 0.02% / 0.05% | 0.02% / 0.055% | 0.1% / 0.1% | 0.1% / 0.1% |
| VIP 1 | 0.018% / 0.05% | 0.018% / 0.04% | 0.09% / 0.1% | 0.068% / 0.08% |
| VIP 2 | 0.016% / 0.04% | 0.016% / 0.037% | 0.08% / 0.1% | 0.065% / 0.077% |
| VIP 3 | 0.012% / 0.032% | 0.014% / 0.035% | 0.04% / 0.06% | 0.063% / 0.075% |
At VIP 0, a $100,000 futures market order pays $50.00 on Binance and $55.00 on Bybit. Makers pay the same 0.02% on both. On spot, both charge 0.1% either way, so a $100,000 spot order pays $100 in fees on each.
The levels above VIP 0 are where they really differ. Binance VIP 1 only lowers the futures maker fee (to 0.018%); takers still pay 0.05% until VIP 2, which needs $10M of 30-day futures volume and 25 BNB. Bybit VIP 1 drops the futures taker fee straight to 0.04%. On spot, Bybit's VIP 1 taker (0.08%) also beats Binance's VIP 1 (0.1%); Binance only pulls ahead at VIP 3 (0.06% against 0.075%). Bybit's VIP requirements page did not load for us, so we cannot say how much volume each level needs; Binance lists its own on the fee page. BNB (Binance) and MNT (Bybit) discounts can lower both further.
Spread and slippage: Binance's books were deeper
Fees are known in advance. The order book is not. The chart shows the median spread and slippage for BTC futures market orders, averaged over buy and sell, in basis points (0.01%).
Median hourly cost versus the mid price, BTCUSDT perpetual, 6 Nov 2026, 00:00 UTC to 10 Nov 2026, 03:00 UTC. Fees not included.
Show the numbers
| Size | Binance | Bybit |
|---|---|---|
| $1k | 0.01 bps | 0.01 bps |
| $10k | 0.01 bps | 0.01 bps |
| $100k | 0.02 bps | 0.07 bps |
| $500k | 0.17 bps | 0.33 bps |
| $1M | 0.42 bps | 0.62 bps |
Up to $10,000 the two are the same: both BTC books are one tick wide and deep enough at the best price, so the cost is a fraction of a cent per $1,000. From $100,000 the difference shows. Binance's median was 0.02 bps ($0.24) and Bybit's 0.07 bps ($0.74). At $1M it was $42.30 against $62.10. Binance's BTC futures book was the cheaper one to cross in 94 of the 100 hours, before any fee.
ETH futures followed the same pattern: $0.84 on Binance and $2.40 on Bybit at $100,000. XRP was the closest race: Binance's XRP book was cheaper in 50 hours and Bybit's in 33, but the fee gap still made Binance cheaper overall in 82 of 83.
Spot: same fee, very different books
On spot both exchanges charge 0.10%, so the whole difference is the book, and here it was large. A $100,000 BTC spot market order cost $1.06 in spread and slippage on Binance and $4.57 on Bybit. For ETH it was $3.74 against $16.11. For SOL and XRP, Bybit's spot book cost 3.6 and 3.6 times as much to cross at $100,000. Binance's spot book was cheaper in every one of the 100 hours for BTC.
A snapshot of resting orders tells the same story: within 0.1% of the mid price, Binance's BTCUSDT spot book held about $13.7M on both sides together, and Bybit's about $2.5M.
Who was cheaper, hour by hour
| Market | Binance | Bybit | Hours cheaper (Binance / Bybit) |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC futures | $0.24 | $0.74 | 100 / 0 |
| ETH futures | $0.84 | $2.40 | 99 / 1 |
| SOL futures | $7.80 | $11.23 | 82 / 1 |
| XRP futures | $12.36 | $12.77 | 82 / 1 |
| BTC spot | $1.06 | $4.57 | 100 / 0 |
| ETH spot | $3.74 | $16.11 | 100 / 0 |
| SOL spot | $10.79 | $38.50 | 83 / 0 |
| XRP spot | $16.14 | $58.54 | 83 / 0 |
With the VIP 0 fee added, Binance was cheaper in almost every hour on every market we sample. On futures, its 0.005-point fee advantage ($5 per $100,000) was larger than the book gap in almost every hour. On spot, where the fees are equal, the book alone decided it.
Funding: the cost of holding
Both exchanges settle BTCUSDT funding every 8 hours. A positive rate means longs pay shorts. In our reading window Binance's BTC rate was 0.01% per period and Bybit's 0.0019%. Over a day that is 0.03% against 0.006%, or $30.00 and $5.67 a day on a $100,000 long. For ETH the readings were 0.0015% (Binance) and 0.0032% (Bybit).
Funding moves every period, so a few hours of readings cannot tell you which one is cheaper to hold on. What they do show is the size: on a position held for weeks, funding easily costs more than the fee and the slippage together. Our funding history study covers Binance back to 2020, and the live funding board shows today's rate on every exchange.
So which is cheaper?
At VIP 0, Binance was cheaper on every market we measured, by about $5 per $100,000 on futures and by the size of the book gap on spot. Bybit closes the futures gap from VIP 1, where its taker fee drops to 0.04% while Binance stays at 0.05%. For a trader at that level, Bybit's lower fee is worth $10.00 per $100,000, more than the median book gap of $0.50 at that size.
These numbers come from 100 hours in early November 2026. Books get thinner in fast markets, and fees change with promotions. The Binance vs Bybit page runs the same comparison live, for the size and fee level you choose.
Method
Order-book cost comes from CostDepth's stored hourly averages (6 Nov 2026, 00:00 UTC to 10 Nov 2026, 03:00 UTC): every 5 minutes the sampler reads Binance's and Bybit's public order books (spot and USDT perpetual, BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP), walks them for market orders from $1k to $1M from the mid price, and keeps hourly averages. We used the median hour, averaging buy and sell. SOL and XRP were added later, so they have 83 hours.
Fees are VIP 0 rates and VIP 1–3 rates from CostDepth's fee files, read on binance.com/en/fee and bybit.com/en/fee on 5–6 November 2026. Token discounts (BNB, MNT) and referral discounts are left out. The hour-by-hour count adds the VIP 0 taker fee to each hour's spread and slippage for a $100k order.
Funding readings come from CostDepth's live funding API (which reads each exchange's public endpoint), taken every 5 minutes from 10 Nov 2026, 03:42 UTC to 10 Nov 2026, 04:33 UTC (12 readings). That is a short window: funding changes every period, so treat it as an example, not an average.
Order-book depth figures for Binance futures, Bybit futures and Bybit spot come from CostDepth's own live book endpoint, which keeps about $2.5M per side; depth beyond that is not counted, so those figures are a lower limit.
The numbers behind every chart and table are in data.json (free to reuse with a credit to CostDepth). This is fee and cost data, not financial advice.
Sources
- CostDepth hourly spread and slippage (CSV) – hours 6 Nov 2026, 00:00 UTC to 10 Nov 2026, 03:00 UTC
- Binance spot fee page
- Binance USDⓈ-M futures fee page
- Bybit spot fee page
- Bybit futures fee page
- CostDepth funding API