Every hour
The funding rate on Hyperliquid is paid every hour. The formula applies to an 8-hour funding rate, and funding is paid every hour at one eighth of the computed rate for each hour.
That is the whole answer, and it is also the source of a common error. A figure called a funding rate may be the 8-hour rate, the hourly rate or an annualised one, and the three differ by a factor of eight and then of 8,760. Read which one a screen is showing before comparing it with anything.
How the rate is computed and capped
The 8-hour rate is the average premium index plus a clamped interest term: Funding Rate (F) = Average Premium Index (P) + clamp(interest rate - Premium Index (P), -0.0005, 0.0005). If the contract's price is higher than the oracle price the premium, and so the funding rate, is positive, and the long position pays the short position.
The premium is measured against the depth of the book, not its top: the difference between the oracle price and the impact prices, the average execution prices to trade impact_notional_usd on the bid and on the ask, 20000 USDC for BTC and ETH and 6000 USDC for all other assets. It is sampled every 5 seconds and averaged over the hour.
The interest term is fixed: 0.01% every 8 hours, which is 0.00125% every hour, or 11.6% APR paid to short. And there is a ceiling: funding on Hyperliquid is capped at 4% an hour.
The payment itself is position_size * oracle_price * funding_rate, at the oracle price and not the mark price. Funding is purely peer-to-peer and no fees are collected on the payments: what one side pays, the other side receives.
A worked example
Take a long of 0.1 BTC with the oracle at 100,000 dollars, so a notional of 10,000 dollars. Two hourly rates: 0.00125%, the interest term alone and what a long pays when the premium is nil, and 0.01%, eight times that. The rate changes every hour, so these columns are arithmetic on a held rate, not a forecast.
| Held for | At 0.00125% an hour | At 0.01% an hour |
|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | $0.125 | $1.00 |
| 24 hours | $3.00 | $24.00 |
| 7 days | $21.00 | $168.00 |
| 30 days | $90.00 | $720.00 |
Annualised the simple way, a rate times the 8,760 hours of a year as this site does, 0.00125% an hour is 10.95% and 0.01% an hour is 87.6%. Neither figure claims the rate will hold for one more hour: over a single day a market can pay in both directions, and a market page's seven-day average says more than a snapshot.
What the cap means in money
Funding is capped at 4% an hour. On the same 10,000 dollar notional that is 400 dollars an hour, or 9,600 dollars in a day: more than the notional itself in a little over a day. A rate anywhere near the cap is rare, and the side that pays it pays it every hour it stays in the position.
Funding is not a fee taken at the exit. It comes out of the account's equity every hour, and Hyperliquid liquidates a position when account equity falls below the maintenance margin. So a position that pays funding drifts towards its liquidation while the price does nothing at all. On a position held for days, count the funding before you count the target.
Where to read it
The funding page of this site lists every perpetual of the main dex with the hour's rate and the same rate over a year, the highest and the negative ones side by side, as Hyperliquid's public API gave them at the snapshot. Each market page shows the average hourly funding over seven days and the share of those hours in which longs paid shorts.
The position cost calculator puts both costs together before an order is sent: the venue's fees on each leg, Locker's service fee, and the funding over the days the position may be held. Our own pilot runs the same check and refuses a trade when the costs eat its target; in its screen of the day, a side that would pay more than 30% a year of funding loses ten points.