PerpAtlas

Max Leverage Is a Marketing Number: Maintenance Margin Tiers Compared

PerpAtlas Research · July 18, 2026 · Tier data pulled live from Bybit, OKX and Bitget public risk-limit APIs

"Up to 150x" is the headline. What actually governs your liquidation price is the maintenance margin rate (MMR) — the minimum equity you must keep as a fraction of position value — and it is not one number. It rises in steps as your position grows, which means the advertised max leverage only exists for small positions. We pulled the real tier tables from each venue's own public API.

Bitget advertises 150x on BTC — but only up to a $200k position. OKX and Bybit advertise 100x — Bybit's applies only to the first $2M of BTC notional, and on SOL only to the first $50k. Past those caps the maintenance requirement rises and your effective max leverage falls, tier by tier.

Tier 1 (smallest positions): the numbers that back the headline

BTC-USDT perpTier-1 maint. marginTier-1 size capHeadline max leverage
Bitget0.40%$200k150x
OKX0.40%1,000 contracts (10 BTC)100x
Bybit0.50%$2.0M100x
Binancesee note125x (published)

Source: Bybit /v5/market/risk-limit, OKX /public/position-tiers, Bitget /mix/market/query-position-lever, retrieved July 18, 2026. Units differ by design: Bybit and Bitget cap tiers in USDT notional, OKX in number of contracts (BTC-USDT = 0.01 BTC each). Binance does not expose its leverage-bracket table without an authenticated call, so we do not publish tier figures for it here; its 125x BTC headline is from its own docs.

The cap collapses with size

Maximum leverage is inversely tied to MMR, and MMR climbs each tier. Bitget's BTC ladder from its API:

Bitget BTC tierPosition up toMaint. marginMax leverage
1$200k0.40%150x
2$1M0.50%100x
3$5M0.70%75x
4$15M1.00%50x
5$50M2.00%25x

So the "150x" is real only for the first $200k. A $2M BTC position sits in tier 3 at best — 75x — regardless of the headline. OKX's BTC ladder is steeper still: MMR runs 0.40% → 0.50% → 0.75% → 1.25% → 1.75% across its first five tiers, so a large position's maintenance requirement is multiples of the tier-1 rate.

Altcoins get a fraction of the room

The advertised leverage on majors almost never applies to alts, because the tier-1 size caps are tiny. On SOL:

SOL-USDT perpTier-1 maint. marginTier-1 size capMax leverage
Bybit0.50%$50k100x
Bitget0.50%$50k100x
OKX0.40%5,000 contracts (5,000 SOL)100x

On Bybit and Bitget, 100x SOL exists only up to a $50k position — a fortieth of Bybit's $2M BTC cap. Size up and you drop tiers fast: Bitget's SOL MMR jumps 0.50% → 0.80% → 1.00% → 2.00% by tier 4, capping leverage at 25x for a $5M position.

What it means at 20x

Suppose you open BTC at 20x (5% initial margin). You get liquidated roughly when adverse price movement eats your margin down to the maintenance requirement — approximately a (1/leverage − MMR) move against you, before fees and funding. At 20x:

The 0.1-point MMR gap is small at 20x — a few basis points of liquidation distance. It matters far more at the extreme leverage the headlines push, and it compounds with the tier you land in: a large position at MMR 1.0–2.0% has dramatically less room than the tier-1 number implies. The practical rule: your liquidation price is set by the tier your size puts you in, not by the number on the leverage slider.

Takeaways