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Lighter Fees (2026): Zero Fees, Premium Accounts & LIT
Every figure on this page was re-read from Lighter's official docs on 2026-09-16. Two things changed since the July version of this page: Premium taker latency is now 140 ms at every staking level (it was a 200 ms to 140 ms ladder), and Standard-account cancels are listed at 300 ms rather than 200 ms. The funding formula is now published too, and a referral programme with a Premium trial week started on 28 July 2026.
Lighter's default account tier charges nothing to trade. That is not a promotional rate; the docs state that "for both perpetual futures and spot markets, Lighter currently charges no maker or taker fees for Standard Accounts". The catch, TWAP orders aside, is latency and rate limits rather than a fee: Lighter monetises execution speed and throughput rather than volume, which is why a Premium tier, a Plus tier and LIT staking exist at all.
Standard accounts: 0 maker, 0 taker, with one TWAP exception
Every account starts on Standard, and Standard trading is free: 0% maker and 0% taker across all perp and spot markets, with no minimum volume and no opt-in. The one exception sits in the API docs (read 2026-10-07): "For standard accounts only, TWAP orders charge a 1bps fee." What Standard does not get is the fastest path. Per the docs (re-read 2026-10-07): taker latency 300 ms, maker latency 0 ms, cancel latency 300 ms, and up to 4 sub-accounts, which "cannot be deleted". For manual trading, swing positions and anything that does not depend on beating other participants by milliseconds, that latency is invisible; you are filled at the price you clicked, for free.
Premium accounts: base rates and the LIT staking grid
Premium is the opt-in paid tier. It replaces 0/0 with 0.0040% maker and 0.0280% taker, and in exchange cuts taker latency to 140 ms. As of 2026-09-16 the docs list 140 ms at every staking level, unstaked included, so staking now buys only the fee discount, not extra speed. Premium also gets an execution guarantee on passive flow: "all order cancelations & Post Only order placements not subject to any additional latency". Staking LIT reduces the fees on this grid:
| LIT staked | Discount | Maker fee | Taker fee | Taker latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | — | 0.0040% | 0.0280% | 140 ms |
| 1,000 | 2.5% | 0.0039% | 0.0273% | 140 ms |
| 3,000 | 5% | 0.0038% | 0.0266% | 140 ms |
| 10,000 | 10% | 0.0036% | 0.0252% | 140 ms |
| 30,000 | 15% | 0.0034% | 0.0238% | 140 ms |
| 100,000 | 20% | 0.0032% | 0.0224% | 140 ms |
| 300,000 | 25% | 0.0030% | 0.0210% | 140 ms |
| 500,000 | 30% | 0.0028% | 0.0196% | 140 ms |
The discount is measured at the L1 address: "the total staked LIT is calculated as the combined stake across the main account and all associated sub-accounts", so a main account and its sub-accounts share one tier. Linking several addresses into one tier is possible "through contacting the Lighter team"; the docs say in-app wallet linking is "coming soon".
Premium accounts are also pointed at the volume quota programme for order-throughput limits: per the API docs, "for every 2 USD of trading volume, traders receive an additional transaction limit", new accounts start with 1,000 quota, the quota caps at 15,000,000 and does not expire, cancels consume none, and Premium accounts are separately rate-limited at 40,000 transactions per minute. That is the mechanism a market maker cares about; a manual trader will never touch it.
What staking LIT gives you
LIT is live and staking is active. The docs list three things staking does: the Premium fee discount above, "a fixed 6% APR through staking rewards", and access to the Lighter Liquidity Pool, which "is now exclusively accessible to LIT stakers" at "up to 10 USDC" of LLP deposit per 1 LIT staked. "Unstaking is subject to a 3-day lockup period." Separately, the protocol says it buys LIT back "using trading fee revenue", executed "via daily 24-hour TWAPs", which is the clearest statement in the docs of where Premium and Plus fees end up. One staking perk shows up in the app but not in the docs: the staking page's benefits panel listed waived withdrawal and transfer fees for stakers (seen in-app on 2026-08-03); the docs' LIT page still does not mention it, so treat it as an app-surface fact whose terms live 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 "which will count toward a desired fee and latency tier" for a fixed duration. The docs' own example is a participant with 100,000 LIT staked who "may use an additional 200,000 staked LIT via LIT Fee Credits to qualify for the next staking tier", the 300,000 row and its 25% discount, without acquiring and locking the extra 200,000.
Mechanically: acquire LIT, open the LIT Fee Credits section on the Staking page, choose a credit amount and duration (which together determine the tier), confirm an L1 signature and pay the LIT upfront, at which point the tier activates. Two things to understand 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; staking locks capital you still hold, credits are spent. And the proceeds do not return to you: "all proceeds from the LIT Fee Credits program are distributed to LIT stakers", streamed "as daily rewards over the full duration of the access period". Lighter publishes no price table for credits; the cost is shown in the app at purchase time, so this page quotes none.
Plus accounts: the third tier
Lighter documents a third account type. Plus is "suitable for latency-insensitive users, looking to get increased rate limits": a flat 0.5 bps maker and taker fee, 300 ms taker latency and 200 ms maker/cancel latency, with 4,000 sendTx/sendTxBatch calls per minute and 24,000 weighted read-only requests per minute (re-read 2026-10-07). It "can be enabled using the changeAccountTier endpoint via API or switched to via account type on the app".
The trade cuts differently by side. 0.5 bps 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. On the maker side it is slightly worse: 0.0050% against Premium's 0.0040% base, and nearly double the 0.0028% top-tier maker rate. What you pay for that taker rate is speed: 300 ms taker execution, matching Standard and more than twice Premium's 140 ms. So Plus suits a taker-heavy strategy that is indifferent to a few hundred milliseconds and wants throughput; a maker-heavy or latency-sensitive one is better served by Premium.
The referral trial week
Since 28 July 2026 Lighter documents a referral programme. For a new user who signs up through a referral link, the relevant fee fact is a free week of Premium: "the trading fees you pay during your trial week are rebated back to you every Monday", with the rebate capped at "the first $10M in trading volume during the trial", paid weekly as L2 transfers with a $1 minimum. The docs call every rebate "discretionary" and say the programme "may be modified, suspended, or terminated at any time". On a Standard account there is nothing to rebate. What the referrer earns, and this site's own code, are on the referral page.
How the model sustains itself
A venue that charges 0% on its default tier needs revenue from somewhere else, and the docs now name the pieces: Premium and Plus fees, Fee Credits (which flow to stakers), the LLP, and LIT buybacks funded by "trading fee revenue". The docs do not publish a revenue breakdown, and this page does not speculate past what they state.
Funding payments
Funding is peer-to-peer and hourly: "funding payments occur at each hour mark" and "these payments are fully peer-to-peer with no fees taken by the exchange". The contract specifications add that "currently each deployed market has a funding period of 1 hour", with the caveat that the period is a per-market configuration. The formula, which the July version of this page said was unpublished, is now on the docs' funding page: each minute, at a random moment, Lighter samples the premium of mark over index; at the hour it takes the time-weighted average of those 60 samples, adds a fixed interest component (InterestRate 0.01%), pulls small premiums toward that rate with a 0.05% "SmallClamp", and caps the result with a "BigClamp" of 4% per 8 hours, "or 0.5% per hour". A per-market FundingPremiumMultiplier scales the premium: 1 for crypto, ½ for RWA markets, 1/100 for pre-IPO and pre-markets, so a stock or pre-IPO perp funds far less aggressively than a crypto perp at the same premium. There is no funding-rebate programme in the docs (re-checked 2026-09-16). For what funding is and how to read a rate, see the funding rates guide; for the live figures, the funding screener.
Zero fees plus a latency-and-throughput paid tier is a different model from most perp DEXs, which charge a maker/taker spread to everyone. If you are weighing Lighter against a fee-charging venue, see Hyperliquid vs Lighter; for where zero-fee sits against every venue we cover, the fee comparison; for the exchange overview, the Lighter guide; for the separate points programme, Lighter points.
FAQ
Is Standard trading on Lighter really free?
Yes, per the docs: 0% maker and 0% taker on all perp and spot markets, with no minimum to qualify. The one fee on Standard is on TWAP orders, which the API docs put at 1 bp. Otherwise the trade-off is execution latency (300 ms on taker orders and cancels) and lower rate limits, not a hidden fee.
Why would anyone pay for a Premium account?
Speed and throughput. Premium taker latency is 140 ms against 300 ms on Standard, cancels and post-only placements carry no additional latency, and Premium accounts get the volume-quota programme for order throughput. For market makers and latency-sensitive strategies that gap is worth a small base fee.
Does staking LIT make Premium faster?
Not any more, per the schedule read on 2026-09-16: every Premium row lists 140 ms. Staking lowers the fee, from 0.0280% taker at zero staked to 0.0196% at 500,000 LIT.
Does a referral code lower my fees?
Only if you use Premium: the documented benefit is one week of Premium fees rebated, capped at $10M of volume. On Standard there is no fee to rebate.
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The link above is a referral link; Lighter's documented programme pays the referrer a share of fees a referred user pays on Premium, at no added cost to you. See our methodology for how we research and verify pages like this.