How Hyperliquid funding payments are taxed

Updated July 2026 · Settled · Not tax advice. Confirm treatment with your tax professional.

If you hold a perp position on Hyperliquid, you pay or receive funding every hour. Over a year of active trading that's thousands of small cash flows, and they are taxable. They are also the single most mishandled item in crypto tax software.

Funding is not a trade

A funding payment is a cash transfer between longs and shorts that keeps the perp price tracking the index. You didn't sell anything. You didn't dispose of property. So it doesn't belong on Form 8949, which exists for dispositions.

The common treatment used by preparers: funding received is ordinary income (like interest or staking rewards), and funding paid is an investment expense. Whether that expense is deductible depends on your situation, especially trader vs. investor status. That's a real conversation to have with your CPA, and you need the actual numbers to have it.

What tax software does instead

Tools that don't model funding either drop it entirely (understating your income) or force each payment into a fake buy or sell (corrupting your capital gains and inflating your transaction count). Both are wrong, and both are hard to unwind later because the errors are spread across thousands of rows.

What you actually need: a schedule listing each funding payment with its date, market, and signed USDC amount, plus annual totals for received and paid. Hand that to your preparer as a separate document from your capital gains.

Getting your funding history

Hyperliquid's public API exposes your complete funding ledger by wallet address (the userFunding endpoint). You can pull it yourself and build the schedule in a spreadsheet, or use Settled, which generates the funding schedule alongside Form 8949 and Koinly/CoinTracker exports. The preview is free and shows your net funding for the year immediately.

Get your funding schedule.

Paste your address, see your funding received and paid for any tax year, free. Full downloads are $29 per tax year. Computed in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Check my funding history →

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How Hyperliquid perps are taxed: the 2026 guide · Koinly missing your Hyperliquid perps?