What Terminal Actually Charges

The Flat 1%, and Why There Is No Tier Table

Terminal charges 1% of trade value. In the shipped code it is a fee of 100 basis points applied as value multiplied by one plus the rate, so it is added on top of what you are spending rather than skimmed out of it. There is no maker and taker split because Terminal is not an order book; it routes your order into whichever AMM pool holds the token, across sixteen Solana venues and a dozen or so on the EVM side.

Searching the bundle for a volume tier table returns nothing. Trading volume is tracked, but it drives the rewards system rather than the fee rate. The only variable rates that exist are custom discount and referral-share fields gated on an account type of KOL, which is a negotiated partner arrangement rather than something a tier ladder unlocks. If a page tells you Terminal fees drop with volume, it is guessing.

The Fee Underneath: pump.fun's 1.25%

This is the part most write-ups skip. Terminal's 1% is what the terminal charges for routing the trade. The venue charges separately. If the token is still on a pump.fun bonding curve, pump.fun takes 1.25%, split as 0.30% to the token creator and 0.95% to the protocol. That is published on pump.fun's own fee page and it applies whether you trade through Terminal, through the pump.fun site, or through anything else.

So a bonding-curve buy through Terminal costs 2.25% all in before network costs. Both parties are owned by pump.fun after the October 2025 acquisition, which is worth knowing but does not change the arithmetic: they are charged as two separate fees and only the Terminal half earns cashback.

pump.fun rates from its official fee page, verified 6 August 2026. The canonical PumpSwap schedule steps from 1.25% down through 1.20, 1.15, 1.10, 1.05, 1.00 and 0.95% as market cap rises, reaching 0.30% above $20M. Note that pump.fun's own embedded fee JSON has a bug in the SOL-denominated table, where mid-tier market cap floors read as 2, 3, 4 and 5 instead of millions. Use the USDC table.

A Worked Example

Say you buy $1,000 of a token that is still on the bonding curve, then sell the whole position later at roughly the same size.

Excludes priority fees, builder tips and price movement between the two legs. Cashback is described in the archived rewards documentation as applying to trading fees, which we read as Terminal's share rather than pump.fun's; we have not been able to confirm that against a live payout, so treat the exact base as unverified.

Cashback: 10% by Default, 35% Through a Referral

The referral link does not change what you pay. It changes what comes back. Terminal's rewards documentation, captured in March 2026 and marked as updated twelve days before that, states it directly:

"Every trade on Padre earns you cashback, paid out in SOL. By default, all users receive 10% cashback on trading fees. But if you signed up using a referral link, your rate is boosted to 35%, the highest on the market."

Sourcing note, because it matters here. The 35% referred rate is confirmed in live in-app copy. The 10% default floor comes from archived documentation only and we have not re-verified it in the current app, so it is the weakest number on this page. The gap is directionally right; the exact floor is unconfirmed.

Mechanically, cashback accrues per trade in real time and is claimed manually from the rewards panel. Payouts go to SOL and EVM rewards wallets you set yourself, so EVM trades accrue too. No minimum claim amount is stated anywhere, which we read as there being none, but we cannot prove a negative. The important part is that the rate is fixed at signup. It is bound when the referral code stored in your browser is read at account creation, and there is no route to change it afterwards. Our referral page covers the mechanics, and Terminal fees explained goes deeper on every line item.

Priority Fees and Tips Are Not Platform Fees

Two more numbers show up on your trade and neither goes to Terminal. Priority fees pay the network for faster inclusion, defaulting to about 0.001 SOL on trades, 0.0001 SOL on transfers and 0.00002 SOL on campaigns. Tips go to block builders, defaulting to between 0.0001 and 0.001 SOL depending on which execution preset you are on and jumping to 0.012 SOL in Inferno mode. On EVM chains the equivalent is a priority fee denominated in Gwei.

Inferno mode is worth a note here because it looks expensive and mostly is not. It broadcasts the same transaction to four routes at once and a custom program finalizes only the fastest, discarding the others, so you pay one tip rather than four. The tip is larger, but it is paid once. More on execution presets in the trading hub.

Offers That Have Expired

When pump.fun acquired Vyper in February 2026 and wound its app down four days later, migrating users were offered up to 90% fee cashback for a limited period. That offer is dead. The string vyper appears zero times in Terminal's current bundle and the live in-app copy reads "up to 35% cashback". Any page still advertising 90% was written in February and never updated.

What pump.fun Charges Around the Trade

For completeness, since Terminal traders regularly ask: creating a token on pump.fun costs 0 SOL and 0 USDC. Graduating a token from the curve to PumpSwap costs 0.015 SOL. Since 13 May 2025 a creator revenue share of between 0.05% and 0.95%, varying by venue and market cap, applies to every coin on the curve and on PumpSwap. The pump.fun mobile app adds a surcharge of up to 0.1% on certain transactions. None of these are Terminal costs, and the wider ownership picture is in what Terminal is and who owns it.