Exchange Fee Structures and Maker Taker Pricing

Maker rebates and taker fees run in fractions of a cent per share, and that small gap is what makes passive posting profitable at scale.

Maker taker pricing pays a rebate to the order that adds liquidity to an exchange's book and charges a fee to the order that removes it, and the amounts involved are tiny on a per-share basis, commonly a fraction of a cent, which only becomes meaningful once it is multiplied across the millions of shares a market maker trades in a session.

When a resting limit order sits on the book and gets filled by an incoming order, the resting order is said to have added, or made, liquidity, and the incoming order is said to have taken it. Most U.S. equity exchanges pay the maker a small rebate per share and charge the taker a slightly larger fee per share, with the exchange keeping the difference as its own revenue on the trade.

This model gives every exchange a direct financial reason to attract resting orders, since a deep, competitively priced book draws in more takers willing to pay for immediate execution, which in turn makes that exchange more attractive to the next maker deciding where to post. The rebate is the incentive that keeps this cycle running.

Reported maker rebates on major U.S. equity exchanges commonly fall in a range around $0.0020 to $0.0030 per share, while taker fees are commonly capped at $0.0030 per share under SEC Rule 610, which limits the access fee any exchange can charge for taking liquidity in a stock priced at $1.00 or more. These figures move with tiered volume schedules and change periodically, so a specific number on any given day should be read as a typical reported range rather than a fixed constant.

Some exchanges run an inverted model, paying a rebate to the taker and charging a fee to the maker, reversing the standard structure entirely. An inverted venue tends to attract a different mix of order flow, since it rewards a participant for crossing the spread rather than for waiting, and routers built with fee awareness will send certain order types to inverted venues specifically to capture that reversed incentive when the strategy calls for it.