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Liquidation Price Calculator

Find the price at which a leveraged position is liquidated, and the exact adverse move that gets you there. Isolated margin, with maintenance margin and fees.

Exchange-specific; often 0.4–1% at low tiers.
Optional — for margin & fee-adjusted result
Open + close taker fees, e.g. 0.10.
Liquidation price
$0
The workingyour numbers, substituted

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How the liquidation price works

With leverage, you post only a fraction of the position as margin — 10× leverage means 10% margin. Your position is liquidated when losses eat that margin down to the exchange’s maintenance margin, the minimum it insists you keep. So the distance to liquidation is set by how thin your margin is (your leverage) minus the small maintenance buffer.

Long  liq = Entry × (1 − 1/Leverage + fee) ÷ (1 − MMR)
Short liq = Entry × (1 + 1/Leverage − fee) ÷ (1 + MMR)

Maintenance margin is charged on the current notional, not the notional at entry — that is how exchanges compute it, and it is why the formula divides rather than simply subtracting MMR. At 10× with 0.5% maintenance, liquidation sits about 9.55% away.

Isolated vs cross margin

This calculator models isolated margin, where only the margin assigned to this trade is at risk. In cross margin, your entire wallet balance backs the position, so liquidation sits much further away and depends on your total balance and any other open positions — a single-position formula can’t capture it. Treat the isolated result as the conservative, per-trade case.

What this excludes

Funding is not included, because it is paid or received repeatedly over time and isn’t a single figure. On the side that pays funding, it slowly drains margin and moves real liquidation slightly closer than the estimate. Exchanges also use tiered maintenance margin that rises with position size, so very large positions liquidate a little sooner than a flat rate implies.

Questions

How is a liquidation price calculated?

For an isolated-margin position, liquidation happens when losses reduce your equity to the maintenance requirement, which the exchange charges on the position's current value. Solving that condition gives a long's liquidation price as entry times one minus one over leverage, divided by one minus the maintenance rate.

Does cross margin change the liquidation price?

Yes. This calculator models isolated margin. In cross margin your whole wallet balance backs the position, so liquidation is usually much further away and depends on your total balance, not just this trade.

Are funding fees included?

No. Funding is paid or received over time and cannot be a single number. Funding paid on a losing side slowly erodes margin, moving real liquidation slightly closer than this estimate.

Risk note. Leveraged trading can lose your entire margin — and liquidation often happens faster than expected during volatile moves. These figures are estimates for education and risk-planning, not trading or financial advice. Your exchange’s own liquidation engine is the authority for your account.

How this was verified

The formula above is not taken on trust. A script simulates a margin account directly — marking the position to market, deducting fees, and stepping the price until equity falls to the maintenance requirement — and checks that the closed form lands on the same price across 126 combinations of leverage, maintenance rate, fee and direction. It also checks the obvious invariants: more leverage liquidates sooner, fees move liquidation closer, and a position whose margin covers a total loss reports no liquidation rather than a wrong number.

You can run it yourself: verification/liquidation_price.py.

Open method: the formula is shown above, the checks are public, and the full source is on GitHub — verify it at github.com/yjquant/calc-tools. Corrections welcome via hello@quantcalcs.com.