Liquidation price calculator
Stocks don't liquidate you — at worst you're stuck holding underwater. Futures are different: the price touches one line and your margin goes to zero. See that line before you open a position. Enter your entry, your leverage and whether you're long or short, and get the estimated liquidation price plus how much room is left from the current price.
Leave blank to use the default 0.5%; Binance uses tiered maintenance margin rates, so the real figure differs a little.
This is a simplified, isolated-margin, single-position estimate. It uses only the entry price, leverage and maintenance margin rate — it doesn't include opening fees, funding, realised PnL or any added margin. Binance's actual liquidation price is worked out from cross/isolated mode, your margin balance, tiered maintenance margin rates and more, so the number will differ; go by what the Binance futures page shows. This tool is for education, not a signal to open a trade.
Where the liquidation price actually comes from
It's not complicated: the margin you post can only absorb so much of a move against you. Open at 10x leverage and, roughly, once the price moves about 10% the wrong way your margin is gone and the system force-closes the position — that's liquidation. So the approximation this tool uses is: for a long, the liquidation price is about entry × (1 − 1/leverage + maintenance margin rate); for a short it's entry × (1 + 1/leverage − maintenance margin rate). The higher the leverage, the closer that line sits to your entry, and the less room you have to be wrong.
The maintenance margin rate is a buffer the exchange keeps: you aren't closed only when margin truly hits zero — you're closed when it drops below a certain ratio, estimated here at 0.5% by default, so a real liquidation happens slightly earlier than "wiped out". People from stocks tend to underestimate this — you're used to the worst case being "held underwater, just a matter of time", but in futures, touch the line and you're out, with no "wait for it to come back". To understand leverage and forced liquidation properly, read leverage and liquidation, then use the position calculator to size your trade smaller — those two steps are the most practical thing you can do here.
Take one entry price and run the leverage from 3x up to 50x: at 3x there's over thirty percent of room before liquidation, more than an ordinary pullback could eat; at 50x the price only has to move a couple of percent against you to hit the line — basically opening on the edge of a cliff. Most beginners blow up on futures not because they read the direction wrong, but because the leverage was maxed out and normal volatility swept them out. Put your real numbers in, see where this line sits first, and you'll usually dial the leverage down a few notches.