What is a liquidation price?
Your liquidation price is the market price at which your losses on a leveraged position grow equal to the margin you posted. At that moment the exchange steps in and force-closes the trade so your balance can't go negative — and the collateral you put up is gone. It is the single most important number to know before you open a futures position, because it tells you exactly how much room you have to be wrong.
For a long (you profit when price rises), the liquidation price sits below your entry. For a short (you profit when price falls), it sits above. The higher your leverage, the closer that price creeps to your entry — which is why a 100× position can be wiped out by a move most traders wouldn't even notice.
How to use this calculator
- Pick your coin. The entry price auto-fills with the live market price from the ticker, so your numbers match what you'd actually trade right now.
- Choose Long or Short. The formula flips depending on your direction.
- Set your leverage with the slider or by typing it (1×–125×).
- Adjust the maintenance margin rate if you know your exchange's tier — otherwise the 0.5% default is close for major pairs.
- Read your liquidation price and the % move to liquidation — both update as you type.
How liquidation price is calculated
For an isolated-margin position, this calculator uses the standard exchange model:
The 1/Leverage term is your initial margin rate — the share of the position your own collateral covers. At 10× that's 10%; at 50× it's just 2%. As leverage rises, that buffer shrinks and the liquidation price moves toward your entry. The maintenance margin rate (MMR) is the minimum equity the exchange requires you to keep; it pulls liquidation slightly earlier than the raw margin would suggest.
Worked example
You go long BTC at $60,000 with 10× leverage and a 0.5% maintenance margin rate. Plugging in: liquidation = 60,000 × (1 − 0.10 + 0.005) = $54,300. That's a 9.5% drop from entry. Raise leverage to 25× and your liquidation jumps to about $57,900 — only a 3.5% move away. Same trade, very different survival odds.
Leverage vs. distance to liquidation
A fast way to sanity-check risk before you even open the calculator:
- 2× → liquidation roughly 50% away
- 5× → roughly 20% away
- 10× → roughly 10% away
- 25× → roughly 4% away
- 50× → roughly 2% away
- 100× → roughly 1% away
These ignore the maintenance margin rate and fees, so they're slightly optimistic — the calculator above gives the exact, tier-aware figure.
Isolated vs. cross margin
Isolated margin assigns a fixed amount of collateral to one position. Your liquidation price is fixed and predictable, and the most you can lose is that margin — ideal for sizing a single high-conviction trade. Cross margin uses your entire account balance as backing. That pushes the liquidation price further away (more collateral behind it), but a single bad trade can drag your whole balance down, and the liquidation price shifts as your other positions move. This calculator models the isolated case because it gives a clean, fixed number; if you trade cross, treat the result as a conservative worst-case for that position alone.
Why the maintenance margin rate matters
Exchanges don't use one flat MMR — they use margin tiers. The bigger your position, the higher the maintenance margin the exchange demands, and the earlier you get liquidated. A $5,000 BTC position might sit at 0.5%, while a $2M position could face 2–3%. This is why the same trade can have a different liquidation price on Bybit, OKX and Binance, and why it pays to use an exchange that publishes its tiers clearly and runs deep liquidity so your position isn't closed early on a thin wick.
How to avoid getting liquidated
- Use less leverage than you think you need. Most blow-ups come from leverage, not direction.
- Set a stop-loss above your liquidation price so you exit on your own terms, keeping some margin back.
- Size the trade first. Our position size calculator turns a fixed risk-% into the exact size and leverage to use.
- Add margin or trim the position if price drifts toward your liquidation level — don't hope.
- Account for funding and fees — they eat into margin over time and pull real liquidation slightly closer than the textbook figure.