Funding is a payment between the two sides of a perpetual contract. When it is positive, longs pay shorts. When it is negative, shorts pay longs. Nothing goes to the venue. It exists to pull the perp’s price back toward the thing it tracks, and along the way it publishes a number most markets never show you: what one side is willing to pay to keep its position.
The hourly rate and the yearly rate
The venue charges funding every hour, so the native figure is tiny. Multiply it by 24 and by 365 and you have the annualised rate, which is the one people quote. That multiplication is a unit conversion. It assumes nothing about the future and it does not compound. A perp showing 5.5% a year is charging about six ten-thousandths of a percent an hour, right now, and that is all the number says.
A resting rate is not a signal
Here is the trap. On 4 October 2026 most of the largest stock perps showed the same funding to the decimal: about 5.5% a year, on NVDA, on the S&P 500, on gold. When dozens of unrelated markets show an identical rate, you are looking at the formula’s resting value. Nobody is crowding into all of them equally.
The information is in the ones that differ. The same day a few markets sat far from that resting value, some sharply negative, which means shorts were paying to stay short. Those are the markets where positioning is actually leaning.
Read it against its own history
A single funding print is a level. What makes it useful is where it sits against that market’s own past, which is the argument made for crypto in funding has a ceiling. For stock perps that history is short everywhere, because the markets are new. NoVo started recording funding on every one of them hourly on 4 October 2026, and the dashboards label the average with the span it really covers until the record is long enough to call it a week.
What funding does not tell you
It does not tell you direction. High positive funding means longs are paying, which describes who is crowded. Crowded longs can keep being right for a long time. What funding gives you is the cost of being wrong slowly: a position that pays 30% a year to hold needs the move to come soon.
It also does not carry across venues. The same ticker on two books can show two funding rates, and the gap between them is itself the read. Averaging them produces a number that describes neither market.
Where to see it
The Stocks On-Chain tab of the NoVo Crypto Market Map shows live funding and its recorded average for every stock and index perp. On the Trader dashboard the index perps’ funding sits in Market Intel, live all week.