Bitcoin Options Expiry of September 25: What Holders of Leveraged Positions Should Know in Hindsight

On Friday, September 25, 2026, at 08:00 UTC — 10:00 in Germany — Bitcoin options covering roughly 181,896 Bitcoin expire. At an index level of $79,117 that is $14.39 billion in a single morning. Anyone simply holding Bitcoin in their own wallet need do nothing about it. Anyone holding a leveraged position, a futures contract or an option, by contrast, has three things to settle by then: when their own contract runs out, how far away the liquidation price is, and what the position eats in financing costs until that day.

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on September 9, 2026. Instead of taking a figure from a wire report, we read the derivatives market at the Deribit exchange directly: every open options contract in Bitcoin and Ether, together with the stored expiry times, the index level and the futures. We evaluated 908 Bitcoin contracts and 794 Ether contracts.

Options expiry on September 25: $14.39 billion runs out in a single morning

September 25 is the quarterly date. It carries 41.5 percent of the entire open interest in Bitcoin options, which across all eleven expiry dates amounts to 438,795 Bitcoin and thus $34.72 billion. No other date this year comes close to that size. The December date ranks second with 113,079 Bitcoin; the October date follows far behind with 42,063 Bitcoin.

The time of day is not a guess, it is in the contract data itself. Every options contract at this exchange carries a stored expiry time, and for all eleven dates it reads 08:00 UTC. In September, summer time still applies in Germany, so 08:00 UTC becomes 10:00 in the morning. Anyone holding a position that runs out on that day should not count on still being able to close it at 11.

In parallel, options covering 725,262 Ethereum expire on the same day, measured at $1.81 billion. There too, 41.5 percent of the entire open interest falls on this one date. The two largest crypto derivatives markets are therefore running in lockstep towards the same hour.

Counted at the derivatives market ourselves: 438,795 Bitcoin across eleven expiry dates

Method in one sentence: using the exchange's public programming interface, we retrieved all active options contracts together with their open interest, grouped them by expiry date and by strike price, and formed the sums ourselves. Open interest is the number of contracts that are actually open at that moment, meaning neither closed nor expired. It is the more honest measure than turnover, because a contract that changes hands ten times a day inflates turnover tenfold while raising open interest only once.

Three smaller dates totalling 46,065 Bitcoin, which only run out in 2027, are left out of the table. The put-call ratio sets the open interest in put options against that in call options. A value below 1 means more calls are open. Across all dates that value sits between 0.07 and 0.77, so the field is clearly dominated by calls.

What an options expiry is, and why spot investors usually need do nothing

An option is a contract that gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to take delivery of or hand over a certain amount of Bitcoin at a fixed price. That fixed price is called the strike price. A call is the option to buy and gains value when the price rises above the strike. A put is the option to sell and gains when the price falls below it. On the expiry date settlement takes place: contracts that are in the money are settled, all the rest expire worthless.

At this exchange settlement is made in the cryptocurrency itself, so a Bitcoin contract settles in Bitcoin. That is stated in the contract data and can also be read in the exchange's technical documentation, which additionally describes that futures and perpetuals are settled daily at 08:00 UTC.

Why a large expiry does not automatically mean a price jump

A figure such as $14.39 billion sounds like an event that must inevitably move the market. What it describes, though, is the notional value of the underlying Bitcoin, not the sum that changes hands on the day. By far the largest part of the contracts expires worthless because it sits too far from the price. Measured against our numbers, 69.8 percent of all calls at this date are out of the money; among puts it is as much as 91.9 percent. What actually generates movement is the hedging activity of trading houses in the hours beforehand, and its scale cannot be measured from the outside.

Max pain at $72,000: what the number describes and what it cannot do

Across the 66 strike prices of this expiry we calculated the so-called max pain point ourselves. That is the price at which the sum of all payouts to option buyers would be smallest. For September 25 it sits at $72,000 and therefore 9.0 percent below the measured index level of $79,117. For Ether it sits at $2,250, 10.0 percent below the index there of $2,499.

This number describes the position of the open contracts, nothing more. It is not a price target, no more a forecast, and it says nothing at all about the direction of the market. It also shifts daily, because new contracts are constantly being opened and old ones closed. Anyone reading it as a timetable is confusing a snapshot of the contract distribution with a prediction. It is useful nonetheless, because it shows where the mass of contracts hangs and how the market is currently positioned.

Call wall at $85,000 and $90,000: where the open interest really sits

By some distance the largest strike price of the September date is $70,000. There, 19,788 Bitcoin are open, split into 10,960 Bitcoin in calls and 8,828 Bitcoin in puts. Next come $85,000 with 9,654 Bitcoin, $90,000 with 9,323 Bitcoin and $80,000 with 8,355 Bitcoin. What stands out is the distribution above the price: strikes from $100,000 upwards account for 29,133 Bitcoin, or 24.2 percent of all calls at this date.

A quarter of the call volume therefore sits in contracts that would need a price jump of more than 26 percent within 16 days to be worth anything at all. Such positions are cheap to acquire and are readily bought as lottery tickets. For placing the date in context that means: the sheer number of open calls is no evidence of a positive market expectation, since a considerable part of it is a low-stake bet.

Anyone holding such positions should know at which venue they sit and what rules apply there for margin calls and forced closure. The differences between platforms are considerable, and they only show up once things get tight. An overview of the venues for derivatives is in the comparison of perp DEX providers.

Ethereum options: 725,262 ETH on the same day, max pain at $2,250

The Ether derivatives market is larger in units and smaller in value. Across all dates, 1,748,015 Ether are open, which is $4.37 billion. Of that, 725,262 Ether fall on September 25: 458,326 in calls, 266,936 in puts, a put-call ratio of 0.58.

The distribution across the strike prices is even more lopsided than for Bitcoin. Strikes from $3,000 upwards account for 252,395 Ether and thus 55.1 percent of all calls at this date. The largest single strike is $2,000 with 50,111 Ether, followed immediately by $3,000 with 48,946 Ether. At $2,100 there are 37,228 Ether in puts alone, by far the largest put block of the date.

The two short Ether dates are worth noting: on September 9 and September 11 the put-call ratio stands at 1.34 and 1.16 respectively. Those are the only dates in the entire field at which more puts than calls are open. Short-term hedging therefore deserves more attention there than a glance at the big quarterly date.

Fed meeting on September 16: why the September 18 expiry carries the highest put share

Between today and the quarterly expiry lies a date that does not come from the crypto world. The US central bank meets on September 15 and 16 — the date stored in the Federal Reserve's official meeting calendar — and it is one of the meetings with published economic projections. How the decision turns out is open, and we claim nothing about it.

Something else is measurable: the expiry immediately after the meeting, September 18, carries the highest put-call ratio of all September dates in Bitcoin at 0.77. For comparison, the quarterly date on September 25 stands at 0.51 and the September 12 date at 0.07. Hedging is therefore visibly concentrated on the days around the rate decision. That is an observation about how the market is positioned, not a statement about who will turn out to be right.

Funding rate of 0.0075 percent per eight hours: what perpetual holders read from it

Most retail investors do not trade options at all. More common are perpetual futures, meaning futures contracts without an expiry date. Such contracts run on indefinitely, and to keep their price from drifting away from the spot price, one side regularly pays the other a fee. That fee is called the funding rate. For the Bitcoin perpetual we measured it at 0.0075 percent per eight hours. Extrapolated, that is around 0.023 percent a day and about 8.2 percent a year, flowing from the long side to the short side.

Open interest in the Bitcoin perpetual stood at $860.35 million, and in the quarterly future on September 25 at $469.79 million. The quarterly future was quoted at $79,248 against an index of $79,117, a premium of 0.16 percent. The December contract carried a premium of 1.35 percent at $80,190.

For your own position these are two very practical numbers. The funding rate says what holding costs if the price does not move at all. The futures premium says how much of an advance on a price rise is already in the price: anyone buying the December contract pays 1.35 percent more than for Bitcoin on the spot market and first has to make up that gap.

Your leveraged position before September 25: check liquidation price, margin and maturity

The expiry date itself is harmless for most retail investors. What becomes dangerous is the combination of leverage and a market that on individual days moves faster than usual. You can settle these points in your account within a few minutes:

• Maturity of the contract. If your position's name contains a date, it runs out on that day and is settled. If it says perpetual, it runs on but costs funding continuously.
• Liquidation price. The platform shows it directly in the position overview. What matters is not the value itself but its distance from the current price in percent. Anyone carrying a liquidation price of $74,000 at $79,117 has 6.5 percent of buffer, and on a volatile trading day that is not much.
• Free margin. Check how much collateral is unencumbered in the account and how quickly you could top it up. A transfer that takes two business days is no help in a fast move.
• Automatic margin-call protection. Some providers close positions by themselves before the account goes negative; others demand a top-up. The difference is in the terms and conditions and decides the outcome.
• Treat loan positions separately. Anyone who has pledged Bitcoin as collateral for a loan has a second chain that can snap. How the liquidation threshold is calculated there is in our calculation on the forced liquidation of crypto loans.
• Order size around 10 in the morning. If you intend to trade on the expiry day anyway, expect wider spreads between bid and ask. A limit order protects you better here than a market order.

How to tell whether the date concerns you at all

You are affected if you hold options, futures or leveraged certificates whose term extends beyond September 25 or ends on it. Anyone holding Bitcoin and Ether in their own wallet or on an exchange without leverage is untouched by the settlement. For that group the date is at most a day with a little more movement, and it passes.

What we could not measure: other venues and the question of who is on which side

Honesty about the limits of one's own survey is part of the job. Our figures come from a single exchange. Options on Bitcoin are also traded on the CME derivatives exchange, as well as through exchange-traded funds and further platforms whose open interest we have not captured here. The share of these venues has grown in recent years. Our totals therefore represent a large but not a complete section of the market.

Equally unmeasurable is the question of who stands behind the contracts. Open interest says nothing about whether a contract is held for speculation or to hedge an existing holding. A trading house that owns Bitcoin and sells calls against it appears in the same statistic as an investor betting on falling prices. Anyone deriving a sentiment from the put-call ratio should keep that blur in mind. And finally, every one of these numbers is a snapshot from the morning of September 9 that may still shift considerably by the expiry date.

Checking the Bitcoin options expiry: what to take away

1. Look today at whether your position carries a date. If it runs out on September 25, decide now whether to close it, roll it or let it settle. Anyone wanting to roll should know the cost of the next date: the December contract currently carries a 1.35 percent premium. Which platforms offer which maturities and fees is shown by the comparison of perp DEX providers.
2. Work out the distance to your liquidation price in percent. If it is below ten percent, the position is tightly set for a date of this size. Either you reduce the leverage or you add collateral before the market takes the decision out of your hands. Which providers offer which leverage and which margin-call rules is set out in the crypto broker comparison.
3. Secure the records for every settlement. Derivatives are treated differently for tax purposes than a simple sale of Bitcoin, and the settlement of an expired contract is an event the tax office will want to see later. Download your platform's settlement file on the same day. Tools that prepare such data cleanly can be found among the crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

(As of September 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)