One question, one answer
Is funding positive or negative right now?
Who is paying whom to hold a perpetual position, right now, read from the exchanges' own funding endpoints.
Reading the live figure…
The full funding scannerOpen interestLong/short ratiosPractise with funding charged
What the sign means, in one line each
Positive funding means longs pay shorts. More money wants leveraged exposure to the upside than to the downside, so the perpetual trades above spot and the funding payment drags it back. Negative funding means shorts pay longs: the crowd is positioned for a fall, the perpetual trades below spot, and holding a long is being subsidised.
The rate is charged periodically - every eight hours on most venues, hourly on Hyperliquid - on the full notional of the position, not on the margin. That is the part people miss. A 0.05% rate on a position opened with ten times leverage costs 0.5% of the money actually posted, every funding period. Carry a crowded long for a week at an elevated rate and funding alone can eat a double-digit percentage of the stake before price does anything at all.
How traders read it
Mild positive funding is the resting state of a healthy market and says nothing. What is worth noticing is the extreme: a rate several times its own normal level means leverage is crowded on one side and is paying dearly to stay there, which is the condition a squeeze needs. It is a positioning gauge, not a timing signal - funding can sit extended for days while price keeps going the way the crowd wanted.
The other use is arithmetic rather than sentiment. If you are holding a leveraged position for more than a day, funding is a real cost that belongs in the trade, next to the fees. Our profit and loss calculator and paper trading both charge it the way an exchange does, so a carried position shows the drag instead of hiding it.
Method
Rates come from each venue's own public funding endpoint, refreshed continuously, alongside the mark price and open interest for the same contract. Where several venues list the same coin the page shows the aggregated view; where only one does, it is that one. Nothing here is a prediction of the next rate - it is the rate currently in force.
Take the data
Free as JSON, no key: GET https://marginpad.io/api/v1/funding returns every listed perpetual with its funding rate, price, 24-hour change and open interest, and ts as the measurement time. Open interest on its own is at /api/v1/open-interest and the share of accounts long versus short at /api/v1/long-short.
Questions
What does positive funding mean?
Longs pay shorts. It is the market's way of pulling a perpetual contract back to the spot price: when more leverage wants the upside, the perpetual trades above spot and the holders of that upside pay a periodic fee to the other side until the gap closes. Persistent positive funding means the crowd is long and paying for it.
Is negative funding bullish?
It is a positioning fact rather than a direction. Negative funding means shorts are crowded and paying longs to stay short, which does make a squeeze cheaper to sit through if you are on the other side. But funding has stayed negative through long declines, so treat it as a description of who is paying, not a forecast.
How much does funding actually cost?
The rate is applied to the notional of the position, so leverage multiplies its effect on your margin. At 0.01% every eight hours - a very ordinary rate - a position opened at twenty times leverage pays about 0.6% of the posted margin per day. Over a week that is meaningful. Our calculators and paper trading charge it on the same schedule, which is the simplest way to see it on a real position.
How often is funding paid?
Every eight hours on most centralised venues (typically 00:00, 08:00 and 16:00 UTC), and hourly on Hyperliquid. You pay or receive it only if you hold the position across the timestamp; opening and closing between two funding times costs nothing in funding.
Where do these rates come from?
Each exchange's own public funding endpoint, read directly rather than through a data vendor, refreshed continuously and served free through /api/v1/funding.
Other questions we answer with a live number
Related: the full funding scanner · open interest · long/short ratios · practise with funding charged