What is Maintenance margin?

Maintenance margin is the floor under a leveraged position. Opening a trade takes the initial margin, which is position size divided by leverage; keeping it open takes only the maintenance margin, a smaller fraction of the position’s value. Between the two sits the room a position has to move against you. When losses bring equity below the maintenance requirement, the venue starts closing the position.

Venues publish the numbers per market. On Hyperliquid the maintenance margin is half the initial margin at the coin’s maximum leverage: 1.25% for a coin with 40x maximum leverage, such as BTC at the time of writing, and 16.7% for a 3x coin. Lighter sets three fractions per market; for BTC at the time of writing they are 2% initial, 1.2% maintenance and 0.8% close-out, the level at which the remaining positions are taken over. Very large positions fall into tiers with lower maximum leverage and a higher maintenance requirement, on Hyperliquid and on centralized exchanges alike.

The maintenance margin is what turns leverage into a liquidation price. A 10x long on Hyperliquid BTC posts 10% of the position as margin and must keep 1.25%, so ignoring fees and funding it is liquidated after a fall of roughly 8.9% from entry. The liquidation price calculator does the arithmetic for any entry, leverage and side, and the Hyperliquid and Lighter versions read each market’s current requirement.

The requirement does not move, but your side of it does. Funding paid, fees on each fill and, in cross margin, the losses of every other position all eat into equity, so the distance to maintenance shrinks even when price stands still. TrueHold reads positions and margin on Hyperliquid by address, on Lighter through a read-only token and on exchanges by read-only key, and shows the liquidation distance of each position next to the rest of the portfolio.