Kraken rebuilt its fee tiers around what you hold
On 9 July Kraken re-tiered every account automatically and pitched the change as rewarding loyalty: hold more, pay less per trade. Its own fee schedule tells a narrower story — holding counts for nothing below $20,000, your tier can now worsen the day the market drops, and Kraken hasn't published a single old-versus-new comparison.
RewardHunter Who I am → 16 Jul 2026 · 3 min · 4 sources
What Kraken says
Since 9 July, one fee-tier system covers Kraken's spot and futures trading. You didn't have to do anything: "On July 9, 2026, your account was automatically placed in the appropriate fee tier," says the company's own support page. Your tier is now the most favorable of three measures — 30-day spot volume, 30-day futures volume, or Assets on Platform (AoP): the current dollar value of what you keep on Kraken, including crypto, cash, staked balances and tokenized assets.
The pitch, in the words of Kraken's blog title: fee tiers "now reward what you hold, not just what you trade." And the live schedule — 17 rows of it — does get cheaper as you go up:
| Tier | 30-day volume | or AoP | Spot maker / taker |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0+ | — | 0.40% / 0.80% |
| 2 | $2,500+ | — | 0.30% / 0.60% |
| 3 | $10,000+ | $20,000 | 0.22% / 0.38% |
| 5 | $50,000+ | $100,000 | 0.15% / 0.30% |
| 12 | $10M+ | $10M | 0.00% / 0.10% |
A long-term holder who rarely trades can now sit in a lower tier than the volume-only system ever allowed. That part is real.
What the schedule says
Look at the AoP column again. On Tiers 1 and 2 it's not there at all — holding assets qualifies you for nothing until Tier 3, which takes $20,000 held.
Second mechanic, and it's easy to miss: AoP is measured on your balance right now, not smoothed over a month. Kraken's support page states it plainly — "Your AoP is assessed point-in-time — it reflects your current balance, not a 30-day rolling average." The consequence cuts both ways: a market drawdown moves your tier down the day it happens, and so does withdrawing your own money. A fee schedule that reprices you for taking funds off the exchange is also, quietly, a reason never to take funds off the exchange — and keeping crypto on any exchange rather than in your own wallet is a counterparty decision, not a free perk.
And the third thing is what Kraken hasn't published: any old-versus-new comparison. There is no table showing what your tier cost before 9 July, and no grandfathering. The blog concedes as much: "This is a change to how tiers are calculated, not a blanket reduction in fees. It does not mean every account's rate is going down." We couldn't verify the old base rates against an archived copy of the schedule, so we won't print a before/after number — but when a company declines to show the old prices next to the new ones, checking your own tier is not paranoia, it's arithmetic.
One more transparency note: every figure in this article traces to Kraken's own pages — for a company's price list, the company is the authoritative source.
What actually bugs me is the missing comparison: if that old-versus-new table were good news for small accounts, it would be the first thing on the page.
What to check
If you trade on Kraken, log in and look at your current tier, then compare the maker/taker rates against a recent trade confirmation. Two minutes. If you hold under $20,000 there, your tier still runs on volume alone. Kraken holds an EU MiCA licence, one of the exchanges on our list of MiCA-licensed platforms, so none of this changes where it may operate — only what it charges.
Crypto assets are volatile and holding them on any exchange carries counterparty risk. This article reports Kraken's published schedule and statements; it is not investment advice, and whether any platform suits you depends on how — and how much — you trade.
Sources
- Kraken — live fee schedule (the 17-row table with volume and Assets-on-Platform thresholds; AoP marked N/A on Tiers 1–2, first qualifying at Tier 3 = $20k)
- Kraken — support: Cross-platform fee tier changes, July 2026 (automatic placement on 9 July; tier = the most favorable of spot volume, futures volume, or AoP; AoP assessed point-in-time)
- Kraken — blog: 'Kraken Pro fee tiers now reward what you hold, not just what you trade' (source of the headline claim, and of the concession that this is not a blanket fee reduction)
- NewsBTC — the only independent write-up we found; syndicated to TradingView and CryptBull, carries none of the schedule's figures. Listed for transparency: no major outlet has checked these numbers
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