What is max pain?
Max pain is the expiration price where option buyers, added together, get paid the least. It takes about ten lines of arithmetic and no model at all. This page does the whole calculation by hand so you can see there is nothing hidden inside it — and then tells you what the research says it is worth.
The one-sentence version
Every listed option is a contract between a buyer and a seller. If a stock settles at some price on expiration day, some of those contracts pay out and the rest expire worthless. Add up every payout at that settlement price and you get a total. Do it again for a different settlement price and you get a different total. Max pain is the settlement price that makes that total as small as possible.
Small total payout means option buyers collectively received the least, and whoever sold them those options kept the most. Hence the name — the point of maximum pain for buyers.
The two words you need first
Strike price is the price written into the contract. A call struck at $50 lets its holder buy at $50; it is worth something only if the stock is above $50 at expiration. A put struck at $50 lets its holder sell at $50, and is worth something only below $50.
Open interest is how many of those contracts currently exist and have not been closed out or expired. It is not the same as volume: volume counts trades during the day, open interest counts positions still standing after the day. The clearing house settles it overnight, once, which is why every honest max pain figure on the internet updates once a day at most. One contract covers 100 shares.
The calculation, worked all the way through
Take an imaginary stock trading at $54.50. It has five strikes with open interest:
| Strike | Call open interest | Put open interest |
|---|---|---|
| $48 | 200 | 900 |
| $50 | 800 | 1,800 |
| $52 | 1,500 | 700 |
| $54 | 2,500 | 300 |
| $56 | 600 | 100 |
Two rules, applied at each candidate settlement price:
- A call struck below the settlement price pays (settlement − strike) × open interest × 100.
- A put struck above the settlement price pays (strike − settlement) × open interest × 100.
Take $50 as an example and do it slowly:
Settlement = $50
Calls that finish in the money (strike below $50):
$48 call: ($50 - $48) x 200 x 100 = $40,000
call total = $40,000
Puts that finish in the money (strike above $50):
$52 put: ($52 - $50) x 700 x 100 = $140,000
$54 put: ($54 - $50) x 300 x 100 = $120,000
$56 put: ($56 - $50) x 100 x 100 = $60,000
put total = $320,000
Total payout to option holders = $360,000Repeat that for all five candidates and you have the whole answer:
| Settlement | Paid to call holders | Paid to put holders | Total payout |
|---|---|---|---|
| $48 | $0 | $900,000 | $900,000 |
| $50 | $40,000 | $320,000 | $360,000 |
| $52 | $240,000 | $100,000 | $340,000 |
| $54 | $740,000 | $20,000 | $760,000 |
| $56 | $1,740,000 | $0 | $1,740,000 |
The smallest total is $340,000 at $52, so max pain is $52. The stock is trading at $54.50, which is 4.81% above it. While you are in the table, the call wall — the single strike with the most call open interest — is $54, and the put wall is $50. The put/call open-interest ratio is 3,800 puts against 5,600 calls, or 0.68.
Notice what just happened. The answer sits between the two walls, not at either of them, because it is a balance point: push the settlement price up and the calls start paying, push it down and the puts start paying. That is the whole mechanism. Real chains have hundreds of strikes instead of five, but the arithmetic is identical.
Why anyone cares: the pinning idea
The retail version of the story says market makers "walk the price" to max pain so that everyone's options expire worthless. That version is wrong, and you should be suspicious of anyone selling it. Nobody has the size or the coordination to steer SPY.
The mechanical version is real and much less dramatic. When a dealer sells you an option, they hedge by holding a matching amount of stock — that is delta hedging, and delta is the number of shares the option currently behaves like. As expiration approaches, those hedges have to be unwound: an option that will finish worthless needs no hedge, and an option that will finish in the money needs a full one. Around a strike with a lot of open interest, that unwinding produces buying just below and selling just above — which nudges price toward the strike.
Academic work on expiration-day price clustering (the best-known being Ni, Pearson and Poteshman's 2005 study of US equity options) finds exactly that: stock prices land at or very near option strikes on expiration dates more often than chance would predict, and the explanation is hedge rebalancing rather than conspiracy.
What the evidence does not support
Read the honest limits before you use the number:
- Pinning is about individual strikes, not about max pain. The research documents clustering at heavy strikes. Max pain is a different, softer construct — a whole-chain balance point that often sits between strikes. Evidence for one is not evidence for the other.
- The effect is small and short. It shows up in the last day or two before expiry on names with heavy open interest. It is not a weekly forecast and it does nothing for a monthly view.
- Anything real overrides it. An earnings report, a rate decision or a strong trend runs straight through the level. The mechanical flow is a rounding error next to genuine news.
- The number is stale by construction. It is built from yesterday's settled open interest. After a violent session, much of that open interest was opened at prices that no longer exist.
- It is not a target and it is not advice. "Price is 4% above max pain" is a sentence about option positioning. It is not a reason to sell, and this site will never tell you it is.
That framing is house style here. Quant Data measures trading folklore instead of repeating it — when we tested the well-worn claim that 80% of trading-range breakouts fail, against real index futures data, the measured failure rate was 52% within five bars, 62% within ten and 70% within twenty. Directionally right, badly inflated. Max pain deserves the same treatment: useful as context, oversold as a signal. See how we fact-check the rest of it.
How people actually use it
- As a sanity check before buying a short-dated option. If you are paying for a strike far beyond where the chain's payout collapses, you now know what you are betting against.
- As a map of the week's crowded prices. The walls tell you where hedging activity will be busiest, which is often where price gets sticky and where spreads behave oddly.
- As one input among several. The distance from spot is more interesting when it is unusually large than when it is a fraction of a percent — and it means nothing at all on its own.
Live max pain levels
Front expiration for every ticker we track, recomputed nightly from end-of-day open interest. Latest snapshot in this table: 2026-07-23. Click through for the full chain, the open-interest chart and a plain-English read of that ticker's configuration.
| Ticker | Last price | Front expiry | Max pain | Price vs MP | Put/call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | $333.02 | 2026-07-27 | $325.00 | +2.47% | 0.91 |
| AMD | $521.95 | 2026-07-27 | $532.50 | -1.98% | 1.22 |
| AMZN | $232.11 | 2026-07-27 | $242.50 | -4.28% | 0.44 |
| ARKK | $71.89 | 2026-07-31 | $77.50 | -7.24% | 3.83 |
| AVGO | $381.92 | 2026-07-27 | $390.00 | -2.07% | 0.59 |
| BA | $209.52 | 2026-07-31 | $210.00 | -0.23% | 0.64 |
| COIN | $158.29 | 2026-07-31 | $165.00 | -4.07% | 1.12 |
| DIA | $518.76 | 2026-07-31 | $522.00 | -0.62% | 0.83 |
| EEM | $63.33 | 2026-07-31 | $67.00 | -5.48% | 8.42 |
| EFA | $103.41 | 2026-07-31 | $101.00 | +2.39% | 2.56 |
| F | $14.37 | 2026-07-31 | $14.00 | +2.64% | 0.37 |
| GLD | $371.90 | 2026-07-27 | $372.00 | -0.03% | 0.33 |
| GME | $21.17 | 2026-07-31 | $22.00 | -3.77% | 0.18 |
| GOOGL | $319.74 | 2026-07-27 | $352.50 | -9.29% | 0.48 |
| HYG | $79.23 | 2026-07-31 | $80.00 | -0.96% | 1.20 |
| INTC | $92.32 | 2026-07-27 | $100.00 | -7.68% | 1.51 |
| IWM | $291.17 | 2026-07-27 | $295.00 | -1.30% | 6.04 |
| LCID | $6.30 | 2026-07-31 | $6.50 | -3.08% | 0.96 |
| META | $595.19 | 2026-07-27 | $635.00 | -6.27% | 0.82 |
| MSFT | $381.70 | 2026-07-27 | $387.50 | -1.50% | 0.32 |
| MSTR | $91.67 | 2026-07-31 | $102.00 | -10.13% | 2.63 |
| MU | $920.95 | 2026-07-27 | $940.00 | -2.03% | 1.83 |
| NFLX | $70.09 | 2026-07-31 | $70.00 | +0.13% | 0.65 |
| NIO | $4.49 | 2026-07-31 | $5.00 | -10.20% | 0.34 |
| NVDA | $206.84 | 2026-07-27 | $210.00 | -1.50% | 1.09 |
| PLTR | $122.92 | 2026-07-31 | $127.00 | -3.21% | 0.44 |
| QQQ | $684.23 | 2026-07-27 | $707.00 | -3.22% | 3.58 |
| RDDT | $168.73 | 2026-07-31 | $177.50 | -4.94% | 0.65 |
| RIVN | $15.84 | 2026-07-31 | $17.00 | -6.82% | 0.54 |
| RSP | $213.57 | 2026-07-31 | $212.50 | +0.50% | 0.08 |
| SLV | $52.59 | 2026-07-27 | $53.00 | -0.77% | 0.86 |
| SMH | $561.19 | 2026-07-27 | $572.50 | -1.98% | 6.26 |
| SNAP | $4.35 | 2026-07-31 | $4.50 | -3.33% | 0.95 |
| SOFI | $16.46 | 2026-07-31 | $17.50 | -5.94% | 0.19 |
| SOXX | $527.01 | 2026-07-31 | $575.00 | -8.35% | 4.68 |
| SPY | $738.93 | 2026-07-27 | $747.00 | -1.08% | 0.89 |
| SQQQ | $44.79 | 2026-07-31 | $38.00 | +17.87% | 0.18 |
| TLT | $83.25 | 2026-07-27 | $84.00 | -0.89% | 1.06 |
| TQQQ | $64.00 | 2026-07-31 | $71.00 | -9.86% | 1.36 |
| TSLA | $313.03 | 2026-07-27 | $380.00 | -17.62% | 0.74 |
| UBER | $65.94 | 2026-07-31 | $71.00 | -7.13% | 1.26 |
| UNG | $10.55 | 2026-07-29 | $10.50 | +0.48% | 1.02 |
| USO | $136.69 | 2026-07-29 | $125.00 | +9.35% | 0.82 |
| VOO | $679.14 | 2026-07-31 | $662.50 | +2.51% | 1.13 |
| XBI | $150.48 | 2026-07-31 | $160.00 | -5.95% | 7.47 |
| XLE | $59.62 | 2026-07-31 | $56.00 | +6.46% | 0.28 |
| XLF | $56.31 | 2026-07-27 | $56.00 | +0.55% | 0.92 |
| XLI | $182.66 | 2026-07-31 | $180.00 | +1.48% | 6.07 |
| XLK | $175.88 | 2026-07-31 | $181.00 | -2.83% | 1.18 |
| XLP | $84.13 | 2026-07-31 | $85.00 | -1.02% | 1.19 |
| XLU | $46.29 | 2026-07-31 | $45.50 | +1.74% | 0.36 |
| XLV | $162.57 | 2026-07-31 | $160.00 | +1.61% | 0.70 |
| XLY | $109.41 | 2026-07-31 | $114.50 | -4.45% | 0.29 |
Max pain hub, grouped by ETF and stock
Read next
What is gamma exposure? takes the same open interest and asks a daily question instead of an expiry question: how much stock must dealers trade every time the price moves 1%? Max pain vs gamma exposure puts the two numbers next to each other and explains what to make of it when they disagree.
Levels on this page are derived metrics computed nightly from end-of-day open interest — not raw market data, not live quotes (how we compute them). Educational only: not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a price forecast.