Binance fees: 0.1 percent to trade, and one drawback compared with MiCA-licensed exchanges

Search for Binance fees and you are usually after a single number: what does a trade cost? The exchange's own pricing page puts it at 0.1 percent in spot trading, the same for buyers and sellers. For investors in Germany, that figure has told only half the story since the summer of 2026. On July 1 Binance stopped accepting new deposits and new buy orders in the European Union, because the exchange does not hold the authorisation required under the EU's MiCA regulation. The cheapest fee rate is worth nothing if the venue is shut to you.

This piece puts the two side by side: the documented rates for spot trading, futures, deposits and withdrawals, and next to them the licensing position that decides whether you can pay them at all. Fees are the slice of your return that is gone before the first tick, and in crypto they land twice, on the way in and on the way out. What an exchange really costs therefore only emerges from the sum of trading fee, spread and withdrawal cost. If you want to compare, the licensed providers for the German market are gathered in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Binance spot fees: 0.1 percent for makers and takers

Binance's own fee overview lists 0.100 percent for the "Regular User" tier, for makers and takers alike. That tier applies as long as your trading volume over the past 30 days stays below $1 million, and it demands no minimum token holding. In practice: a purchase of €1,000 carries roughly one euro in fees, and the same again on the way out.

What separates a maker from a taker

A maker is an order that adds liquidity to the book, a limit order that is not filled at once and waits for a counterparty. A taker is an order filled straight away against an existing one, typically a market order. Many exchanges reward makers with a lower rate, because they make trading possible in the first place. At Binance the two rates are identical in the entry tier, and the advantage of the patient order only appears in the higher volume tiers.

That leaves simple arithmetic for practice: a full round trip, buying and selling, costs 0.2 percent in the entry tier. A price has to rise by a little over two per mille before you break even. With a monthly savings plan it adds up over a year to twelve purchase fees, the ones most people leave out of the sum.

The BNB discount pushes the spot fee down to 0.075 percent

Binance cuts the trading fee by 25 percent if you pay it in the exchange's own token. The 0.100 percent then becomes 0.07500 percent, as the fee table states. BNB is the exchange token and has to be sitting there as a balance for the discount to apply; with an empty balance the system settles at the full rate.

The discount carries a cost that is not in the table: you hold an extra, volatile position purely to save on fees. At €1,000 of monthly trading volume the saving comes to 25 cents. If the token you have to keep for it drops by one percent, the advantage is wiped out several times over. The discount therefore pays off for active traders with high volume, and not for a monthly savings plan.

Binance futures: 0.02 percent for makers, 0.05 percent for takers

Rates are markedly lower in derivatives. For USDⓈ-M futures, contracts settled in a dollar stablecoin, Binance's own help pages give 0.02 percent for makers and 0.05 percent for takers. A future is a forward contract: you are trading an agreement about a coin's future price rather than the coin itself, usually with leverage.

Why the rebate is smaller on futures

The rebate for paying in the exchange token comes to only 10 percent in derivatives instead of 25. There is also a condition that often defeats it: the balance has to sit in the futures account itself, not in the main account. If it falls short, the system deducts the stablecoin and the rebate lapses for that trade.

The apparently low rates disguise what derivatives trading really costs. Trade at twenty times leverage and the 0.05 percent applies to the whole position rather than to the sum you put up, which is twenty times the fee measured against your own money. There is also the funding rate, which flows between buyers and sellers every eight hours and costs more than any trading fee when positioning is heavily one-sided. How much of this is open to retail investors in Germany has shifted repeatedly; we wrote it up using FX perpetuals at hundredfold leverage as the example. Where trading in perpetual contracts now takes place is set out in our comparison of perp DEX platforms.

The MiCA deadline of June 30, 2026 and the retreat from Greece

MiCA is the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets, and under it every provider of trading, exchange or custody services needs official authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. Firms already in the market had a transition period, and it ended on June 30, 2026.

Binance had applied for authorisation in Greece and pulled the application on June 24, 2026, six days before the deadline expired and without any formal decision having been issued. The exchange cast the step as a cautious decision on a long-term compliant path in Europe and said it was not leaving the continent; authorisation is now to be sought in France. As CoinDesk reported on June 26, Binance told customers in the EU at the same time that it would provide no crypto services from July. The background to the failed Greek authorisation is traced in detail in our report on Binance's MiCA licence. The duties the regulation imposes on companies are set out in our overview of the MiCA licence and its obligations.

What existing German customers have found at Binance since July 1

The restriction is not a shutdown. According to reports on the customer letter, users in the EU lose new spot buy orders, new deposits, new registrations and the exchange's yield and staking products. Withdrawals stay open, existing positions can be closed, and Binance stressed that balances remain safe and reachable at any time. The exchange pointed out expressly that it had not asked customers to withdraw by July 1.

An important point for context: the licensing duty is aimed at the provider, not at the customer. A German investor who holds a legacy balance on the exchange and moves it out is doing nothing unlawful. In practice the situation still means no new money can be put to work there, and that the fee table has become a historical note. The exchange imposed a comparable change in mid-flight on its customers back in September 2026, then with only a few days' notice.

Spread instead of fee: what makes instant buy dearer than the order book

The percentage from the fee table applies only to trading through the order book. Alongside it Binance runs a conversion service for quick purchases, and for that the exchange states it charges no fee. That does not make it free: the price contains a spread, the gap between buying and selling price, from which the provider draws its revenue. A spread is invisible, because it sits inside the price and shows up on no invoice.

For newcomers this is the most important number in the whole piece, because the convenient route is almost always the dearer one. How far apart the two can run is something we measured at another provider: in our survey of fees and spreads at Bitpanda from October 1, 2026, the mark-up on instant buy sat well above what an order book fee would have cost. To keep costs down, buy through the order book with a limit order, even if that means two more clicks.

Card purchases and deposits by bank transfer

Buying with a credit or debit card is the dearest way in. Comparison sites put Binance at around 2 percent per card payment, and across the industry rates for card purchases run closer to 2 to 5 percent. On deposits by SEPA transfer the figures diverge: some overviews list them as free, others name one euro flat. Because Binance currently takes no new deposits in the EU, the question is academic for German customers in any case; for a comparison with other providers it still matters, because a card mark-up of 2 percent is twenty times the trading fee.

Withdrawal fees hang on the network, not on the exchange

There is no fixed percentage for moving a balance out. What you pay follows the coin and the network you shift it over, because the exchange passes on the network fee and adds an amount of its own per asset. The same stablecoin often costs less than a euro over a cheap chain and a multiple of that over the Ethereum mainnet.

That carries one concrete consequence for anyone pulling a balance off Binance now: before the withdrawal, establish which network the destination wallet or the new exchange accepts, then pick the cheapest one they share. A single wrongly chosen chain quickly costs more than a whole year of trading fees on monthly instalments. And a withdrawal to an address on the wrong network is usually lost for good.

ESMA register and BaFin database: how to check the authorisation yourself

You do not have to rely on any comparison site, this one included. The European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA, keeps a public register of every crypto-asset service provider authorised under MiCA, and Germany's BaFin keeps a company database for providers licensed in Germany. Both are free to inspect. Binance does not appear in the European register of authorised providers; counts of that register in September 2026 arrived at 341 to 367 entries, depending on the cut-off date.

When you look at an exchange, weigh three things: whether the entry names exactly the company you are contracting with, which services the authorisation covers, and which country it comes from. The third point leads to the next question, because an authorisation from Dublin or Amsterdam is just as good for you in Germany as one from Frankfurt.

The EU passport: an Irish authorisation also covers customers in Germany

MiCA works through what is called the EU passport: an authorisation granted by a national supervisor in one member state entitles the provider to do business across the whole union. An exchange licensed by the Irish or the Dutch regulator may therefore serve German customers without obtaining a second permission from BaFin.

That explains why hunting for a "BaFin licence" as a seal of quality leads nowhere. What counts is that an authorisation exists at all, and which company it names. This is precisely where the usual overviews on the web part company: for the same large providers they name different supervisors and different dates. Only a look into the register itself is reliable.

Tax records when switching exchange: which proofs go missing after a withdrawal

One point regularly gets lost in a move: the German tax office settles crypto gains by the holding period, and that requires the acquisition data of every single position. Move a balance to another exchange and the coin travels with you, the purchase history does not. The new exchange knows only the incoming transfer, never the price you once paid.

So download the full transaction report before you empty the old account, as a file and not as a screenshot. At an exchange that is scaling back its offering in the EU this is especially pressing, because nobody guarantees how long access to old reports will last. Which tools read this data in and carry the holding period for each position is covered in the last step below.

Binance fees: without an EU authorisation, the venue decides

Binance's fees are low, and for years they were the exchange's strongest argument: 0.1 percent in spot trading, 0.075 percent with the discount, 0.02 and 0.05 percent in derivatives. Since July 1, 2026, that table no longer answers the question behind the search for investors in Germany. The question now is which authorised venue you can buy on at all, and what the full round trip costs there.

1. Check the authorisation before you move money. Look up in the European register and in BaFin's company database which company the permission names. The candidates licensed for the German market are gathered in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Add up the total cost rather than comparing the percentage. Put together the trading fee, the spread on instant buy, the deposit route and the withdrawal fee for exactly the sum you are really committing. The measured terms at the large providers are in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
3. Secure the records before the old account is empty. Pull the full transaction report as a file and load it into a tool that tracks the holding period for each position. Which ones are up to the job is shown in our comparison of tax software and portfolio trackers.

The fee rates in this piece come from Binance's fee schedule. Because pricing and licensing details change quickly, a look of your own before each purchase is worth the minute.

(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)