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 (Journal of Financial Economics 78(1), 49–87) — finds exactly that: stock closing prices cluster at option strike prices on expiration dates more often than chance would predict, and the authors size the average distortion at 16.5 basis points of return or more per expiration date. They present evidence that two channels contribute to the clustering: hedge rebalancing by option market makers, and what they call stock price manipulation by firm proprietary traders. Both are effects on individual stocks at individual strikes on an expiration date. Neither is the market-wide steering toward max pain that the retail story describes.
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 — the balance point of the whole chain, not a concentration at one strike. Evidence for one is not evidence for the other.
- The effect is small and short. What the paper documents is expiration-date closing prices, 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 52.0% within five bars, 62.4% within ten and 69.7% within twenty. Directionally right, badly inflated. Max pain deserves the same treatment: useful as context, oversold as a signal. The rest of the folklore gets the same test — the full verdict table is on the methodology page. And if you want a general framework for weighing a claim like pinning, how to read a trading probability walks through the four questions to ask of any quoted statistic.
How people actually use it
- As context on where the chain's payout collapses. The number says how far a given strike sits from the balance point of the whole chain. It says nothing about what that strike is worth.
- As a map of the week's crowded prices. The call wall and the put wall are the single strikes carrying the most call and the most put open interest. That is a fact about where contracts are concentrated, not a fact about price — we have not measured what price does around them.
- 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.
The latest max pain levels
Front expiration for every ticker we track, recomputed nightly from end-of-day open interest. Latest snapshot in this table: 2026-09-03. 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 | $317.21 | 2026-09-09 | $320.00 | -0.87% | 0.37 |
| AMD | $490.97 | 2026-09-09 | $457.50 | +7.32% | 0.79 |
| AMZN | $255.83 | 2026-09-09 | $257.50 | -0.65% | 0.37 |
| AVGO | $366.34 | 2026-09-09 | $350.00 | +4.67% | 0.44 |
| BA | $212.41 | 2026-09-11 | $210.00 | +1.15% | 0.58 |
| COIN | $181.12 | 2026-09-11 | $180.00 | +0.62% | 0.47 |
| DIA | $528.71 | 2026-09-11 | $536.00 | -1.36% | 0.93 |
| F | $14.36 | 2026-09-11 | $14.00 | +2.57% | 0.60 |
| GLD | $403.46 | 2026-09-08 | $410.00 | -1.60% | 1.11 |
| GME | $19.34 | 2026-09-11 | $18.50 | +4.54% | 0.20 |
| GOOGL | $333.45 | 2026-09-09 | $337.50 | -1.20% | 0.32 |
| INTC | $101.10 | 2026-09-09 | $90.00 | +12.33% | 0.76 |
| IWM | $294.96 | 2026-09-08 | $295.00 | -0.01% | 1.12 |
| LCID | $4.64 | 2026-09-11 | $5.00 | -7.30% | 0.76 |
| META | $616.97 | 2026-09-09 | $590.00 | +4.57% | 0.48 |
| MSFT | $492.07 | 2026-09-09 | $502.50 | -2.08% | 0.83 |
| MSTR | $137.81 | 2026-09-11 | $130.00 | +6.01% | 0.70 |
| MU | $1,019.29 | 2026-09-09 | $925.00 | +10.19% | 0.54 |
| NFLX | $76.21 | 2026-09-11 | $80.00 | -4.74% | 0.41 |
| NIO | $3.75 | 2026-09-11 | $4.00 | -6.37% | 0.44 |
| NVDA | $230.36 | 2026-09-09 | $222.50 | +3.53% | 0.42 |
| PLTR | $171.29 | 2026-09-11 | $172.50 | -0.70% | 0.98 |
| QQQ | $716.39 | 2026-09-08 | $715.00 | +0.19% | 1.93 |
| RDDT | $154.07 | 2026-09-11 | $155.00 | -0.60% | 0.99 |
| RIVN | $15.77 | 2026-09-11 | $16.00 | -1.47% | 0.49 |
| RSP | $217.71 | 2026-09-11 | $220.00 | -1.04% | 0.58 |
| SMH | $573.33 | 2026-09-08 | $550.00 | +4.24% | 5.54 |
| SNAP | $5.45 | 2026-09-11 | $5.50 | -1.00% | 0.22 |
| SOFI | $18.09 | 2026-09-11 | $18.00 | +0.51% | 0.42 |
| SOXX | $527.20 | 2026-09-11 | $500.00 | +5.44% | 1.15 |
| SPY | $766.83 | 2026-09-08 | $769.00 | -0.28% | 1.42 |
| TSLA | $360.46 | 2026-09-09 | $365.00 | -1.24% | 0.59 |
| UBER | $73.62 | 2026-09-11 | $76.00 | -3.13% | 0.77 |
| VOO | $704.90 | 2026-09-11 | $702.50 | +0.34% | 1.26 |
| XBI | $161.73 | 2026-09-11 | $162.00 | -0.17% | 4.12 |
| XLE | $65.17 | 2026-09-09 | $65.00 | +0.26% | 1.87 |
| XLF | $57.61 | 2026-09-08 | $58.00 | -0.68% | 1.20 |
| XLI | $175.07 | 2026-09-11 | $178.00 | -1.65% | 0.50 |
| XLK | $187.43 | 2026-09-11 | $187.00 | +0.23% | 1.03 |
| XLP | $84.15 | 2026-09-11 | $87.00 | -3.28% | 1.19 |
| XLU | $43.43 | 2026-09-11 | $43.00 | +0.99% | 1.27 |
| XLV | $168.20 | 2026-09-11 | $170.00 | -1.06% | 0.58 |
| XLY | $113.86 | 2026-09-11 | $115.50 | -1.42% | 0.65 |
Max pain hub — every ticker we track
Common questions
What is max pain in options?
Max pain is the expiration price at which the combined payout to everyone holding options would be at its smallest — so option buyers as a group lose the most and option sellers keep the most. It is calculated from open interest by testing each strike as a hypothetical settlement price, adding up what every in-the-money call and put would pay, and choosing the price with the smallest total.
How do you calculate max pain?
Pick a candidate settlement price, usually each listed strike. Every call struck below that price pays out (price minus strike) times its open interest times 100 shares per contract. Every put struck above it pays out (strike minus price) times open interest times 100. Add both sums together, repeat for every candidate price, and the candidate with the smallest total payout is max pain. No model, no volatility input, no fitted parameters — it is addition.
Does the max pain theory actually work?
Only weakly, and not in the way most people mean. Ni, Pearson and Poteshman (Journal of Financial Economics 78(1), 2005, 49-87) show that on expiration dates the closing prices of US stocks with listed options cluster at option strike prices, and they size the average distortion at 16.5 basis points of return or more per expiration date. They present evidence that two channels contribute to that clustering: hedge rebalancing by option market makers, and what they call stock price manipulation by firm proprietary traders. That finding is about individual heavy strikes on expiration dates, not about max pain, which is a whole-chain balance point. We grade the max pain version of the claim against our own nightly snapshots at quantdata.uk/research/does-max-pain-pin — every sample size stated — and it is not a price target.
When does max pain update?
Once a day. Open interest is the count of contracts still outstanding, and it is settled overnight by the clearing house, so it cannot change during the session no matter how much volume trades. Quant Data recomputes max pain nightly from that end-of-day file. Any site showing you an intraday max pain number is showing you last night's open interest with a fresh price on top.
What is the difference between max pain, the call wall and the put wall?
All three come from the same open-interest table. Max pain is a whole-chain calculation: it balances call payouts against put payouts to find the cheapest settlement price. Walls are far cruder. A call wall is whichever one strike carries more call open interest than any other; a put wall is the same idea on the put side. So a wall is one point of concentration, while max pain is the balance point of the entire chain.
The number in this table is also a JSON endpoint: GET /v1/maxpain/{symbol} returns the max pain strike for every expiration inside 45 days, for any optionable US stock or ETF — same code, same nightly open interest as this page. One $149/month plan covers it and the other three Quant Data endpoints (pricing). These free pages stay free.
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.