How exchanges pay rebates and how to check yours

A discount at the time of the trade. The exchange charges a lower fee on each fill. Nothing arrives later; the saving is already in the fee column of your trade history. To see it, compare the fee charged with the base rate for your tier.

A credit paid afterwards. You pay the full fee, and the exchange returns the share later as a separate transaction. This is the more common form for partner rebates. It shows up in the rebate, referral or commission section of the account, or as a line in the asset or transaction history.

Which way an exchange uses is part of its partner programme. Every Getref exchange page has a line on how that exchange credits the rebate — see, for example, KuCoin or Bybit.

Economically, hardly. A discount of a given share and a later credit of the same share cost you the same over a month. The differences are practical. A discount is immediate and needs no checking beyond the fee column, but it is easy to overlook, because nothing ever "arrives". A credit is visible as its own transaction, which makes it easy to verify, but you carry the full fee until the payout, and a credit in the exchange's token or a stablecoin may be worth slightly more or less than the fees it refers to by the time it lands.

• Schedule. Daily, weekly and monthly payouts are all common. The first payout can come a full cycle after your first trade, so an empty history on the first day is normal.
• Currency. Either the coin the fee was paid in, or a conversion into a stablecoin or the exchange's own token.
• Account. Usually the main spot or funding account, not necessarily the sub-account or futures wallet where the trade happened.
• Minimum amounts. Some programmes skip payouts below a threshold and add them to the next one.

The guide on calculating trading fee savings shows how to get the fee total right, including the maker and taker mix.

If no code is attached at all, some exchanges allow adding one for a limited time after registration: on Bybit the window is 14 days. The guide on what to do if you forgot the referral code goes through each exchange.

Most rebate questions are easy to settle with a few facts, and hard to settle without them. When you open the account, save a screenshot of the sign-up page with the referral code filled in, and note your UID, the registration date and the code. After the first payout cycle, note the date and amount of the first credit. If something goes wrong months later, that record answers the questions support will ask, and it takes a couple of minutes to keep.

Getref has no access to your exchange account. The exchange's partner tools show us whether an account was registered through our link, and nothing about trades, balances or fees. So we cannot see your rebate, recalculate it or pay a missing amount — only the exchange can.

What we can do is keep the conditions on each exchange page accurate, with the source and the date of the last check, and update them when the exchange changes its terms. If the terms on the exchange's site differ from ours, the exchange's site wins, and we would like to hear about the difference.

Getref Rewards points are a separate programme: Getref's own points for tasks such as registering through our link and submitting your UID, described on the tasks page.

A short, specific request gets a faster answer. Include:

• your UID, the account number shown in your profile;
• the date you registered and the referral code you expected to be attached;
• the dates of the trades and the market;
• what you expected to receive and what arrived.

Never send your password, 2FA codes, API secret keys or recovery phrases: no genuine support agent needs them. Use only the support channels listed on the exchange's official site, and be wary of anyone who contacts you first offering to "recover" a rebate.