What Is Slippage in Crypto? A Plain-English Guide to Why Your Price Changes

Slippage in crypto is the difference between the price you expect when you place a trade and the price you actually get when it fills. If you hit buy on Bitcoin at $60,000 and the order settles at $60,150, that $150 gap is slippage. It is not a fee, and nobody charges it to you on purpose. It is just what happens when the market moves, or your order is bigger than the supply sitting at your price, in the seconds between clicking and confirming.

That is the short answer to what slippage means in crypto. It is worth going further, though, because slippage quietly eats into returns, and a handful of small habits keep it from costing you more than it should. This guide covers why it happens, how to work out the exact number, what the slippage tolerance setting actually does, how to keep slippage low, and why large orders are their own separate headache.

Slippage in trading, not just crypto

Slippage is not a crypto invention. It shows up anywhere prices move quickly and orders fill against live supply, which means stocks, forex, and futures all deal with it too. In forex, slippage tends to spike around economic data releases when currency pairs jump. Traders in every market watch it for the same reason: the fill price is what you live with, not the quote you saw a moment earlier.

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