Hyperliquid Position & Liquidation Calculator

How liquidation price is derived

A leveraged position is closed by the exchange when the loss on it consumes the margin backing it. Everything else is bookkeeping around that one sentence. Your position carries a fixed quantity of the asset, your margin is a fixed amount of collateral, and as price moves against you the unrealised loss eats into that collateral. Liquidation is the price at which what remains falls to the exchange's maintenance requirement.

Solving for that price gives the formula this calculator uses:

long:   liq price = entry × (1 − 1 ÷ leverage) ÷ (1 − maintenance %)
short:  liq price = entry × (1 + 1 ÷ leverage) ÷ (1 + maintenance %)

Set maintenance margin to zero and this collapses to the shortcut most traders carry in their head: a position at N times leverage is liquidated roughly 100 ÷ N percent away from entry. That shortcut is close enough to be useful and always slightly optimistic, because a real venue liquidates a little earlier than the point where equity would hit exactly zero.

What leverage actually buys, and what it costs

Leverage does not increase your expected return. It scales both sides of the distribution while leaving your edge unchanged, and it compresses the distance you can be wrong before the decision is taken out of your hands. That second effect is the one that matters, and it is worth seeing as a table rather than as a number.

The important consequence is that high leverage does not mainly liquidate people whose direction was wrong. It liquidates people whose direction was right but whose timing was slightly early, because the position no longer exists by the time the thesis plays out. Being right and being solvent are separate problems, and leverage is what pulls them apart.

Three things that move your liquidation price after you open

The number this calculator returns is correct at the moment you open the position. It does not stay still.

• Funding payments. Every funding payment you make is deducted from margin, which drags liquidation closer by a small amount each time. Hyperliquid charges funding hourly, so a position held for several days accumulates far more of these deductions than the same position on an exchange charging every eight hours.
• Added or removed margin. Topping up an isolated position pushes liquidation further away immediately, which is the only reliable way to buy yourself room once a trade is already open. Withdrawing margin does the reverse.
• Cross margin exposure. Under cross margin every position shares one collateral pool, so an unrelated losing trade pulls this position closer to liquidation even though nothing about this market has changed. Isolated margin ring fences the risk at the cost of losing that buffer.

Break-even is not your entry price

A position is not profitable at entry plus one tick. You pay a fee to open and another to close, and on a held perpetual you pay or receive funding for the entire duration. Break-even is the price that covers all of it.

long break-even  = entry × (1 + open fee % + close fee %) + funding paid ÷ size
short break-even = entry × (1 − open fee % − close fee %) − funding paid ÷ size

At low leverage the fee component is small enough to ignore. At high leverage and high turnover it stops being a rounding error: a strategy that trades many times a day can spend more on round-trip fees than it earns from its actual edge. The fee panel above breaks this out so you can see the number rather than assume it.

A worked example

Suppose you open a $10,000 long on BTC at $60,000 using 10x leverage, which requires $1,000 of margin.

• Liquidation sits near $54,000, roughly 10% below entry, slightly higher once maintenance margin is applied.
• A 5% move against you costs $500, which is half your margin, with the position still open.
• A 5% move in your favour returns $500, a 50% return on margin from a 5% price move.
• Held for three days at 0.01% hourly funding, the position pays roughly $72 in funding alone, which is materially more than the round-trip trading fee.

Change leverage to 25x in the calculator above and the same trade needs only $400 of margin, but liquidation moves to roughly 4% from entry. The trade thesis has not changed at all. The probability of surviving long enough to find out whether it was right has changed enormously.

Where the calculator stops and reality starts

This tool models a single position in isolation, filled exactly at the price you enter. Real trading adds slippage on entry and exit, maintenance margin that varies by asset and by venue, cross margin interaction with your other positions, and auto-deleveraging in extreme conditions. Treat the output as a well-calibrated estimate rather than a guarantee, and enter your venue's actual maintenance margin when precision matters.

For the concepts underneath the arithmetic, see how liquidation works and leverage and margin explained. For a walkthrough of this specific tool, read the liquidation calculator guide. To see these numbers computed from real fills instead of typed inputs, paste a Hyperliquid wallet address on the LabelYX dashboard.