Most futures traders pay a monthly data fee without knowing whether they are buying the top of the book or the whole book. That one choice separates seeing the current price from seeing the intentions stacked behind it, and for some strategies the depth is the entire edge while for others it is money set on fire. Buy too little and you blind yourself to the order flow your method depends on. Buy too much and you bleed a few hundred dollars a year on a feed you never actually read.
What market data is
Start with who owns the price. The exchange does. CME Group generates the real-time feed for futures, and having a trading account does not entitle you to it for free. You license it, usually as a recurring monthly fee, and that license gets paid either by you directly or passed through by your platform, broker, or prop firm on your behalf.
Two structural facts drive everything else on your bill. First, fees are assessed per exchange. CME Group is not one exchange. It is four separate designated contract markets: CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX. You pay for each one you want data from, or you buy a bundle covering all four. Second, for the display products the fee is billed per device or per user, so two screens can mean two charges depending on how the product is structured.
That per-exchange, per-device structure is stable and worth knowing, because it explains how the same "market data" costs one trader a few dollars a month and another trader several hundred. The dollar amounts move around. The structure does not.
Level 1 explained
Level 1 is the top of the book. You get the best bid, the best ask, and the last trade with its price and size. One price level on each side, nothing behind it. CME's own product name for this tier is literally "Top of Book."
A large share of traders consume nothing more. If your entries and exits fire off chart patterns, a moving average cross, a signal service, an indicator, or an external system, you are reading price, not the resting order queue. Swing traders, position traders, and most systematic chart traders never look past the touch. Level 1 covers them, and paying for anything more spends money on data the strategy will not act on.
If nothing in your process reacts to resting size stacked away from the current price, you are a Level 1 trader. Buying depth changes nothing about your fills.
Level 2 explained
Level 2 is market depth, also called depth of market or the DOM. Instead of one price on each side, it shows the ladder of resting bid and ask sizes stacked at multiple price levels away from the best bid and offer. CME calls the product "Depth of Market."
This is the feed order-flow traders live on. Ladder scalpers, footprint readers, and absorption traders watch how much size sits where, how it refreshes, and how it pulls when price approaches. CME's traditional aggregated depth feed caps that ladder at up to 10 price levels per side, which is why help pages often describe it as the 5 to 10 best bids and asks. If your method reads the book, that depth is not a luxury. It is the raw material.
The real question is never whether depth is "better." It is whether your entries and exits are actually triggered by what sits in the ladder. If they are, Level 2 is the price of admission. If they are not, it is a subscription to information you will never open. For a deeper walkthrough of how traders read the ladder, the order flow and DOM guide covers the mechanics.
MBP vs MBO depth
Not all depth is the same depth, and this is where most explanations quit early. The exchange can hand you the book two different ways.
Market-by-price, MBP, is the standard feed and what almost every retail and prop DOM shows. It aggregates all resting size at each price into a single number per level, typically a total quantity and an order count. You see that 400 contracts sit at a given price. You do not see whether that is one 400-lot order or forty 10-lots. Historically MBP tops out at 10 levels per side.
Market-by-order, MBO, exposes every individual resting order with its own size and its own place in the queue, across all price levels rather than a capped 10. It is backward compatible with MBP, richer, heavier to process, and licensed as a separate, pricier premium feed. That premium is real, but data vendors and platforms set it rather than a single published number, so treat "more expensive" as directional and confirm the exact figure with your provider.
MBP tells you how much is stacked at a price. MBO tells you how many orders make up that stack, and where you sit in the queue.
The distinction matters for exactly two things: true queue position and iceberg or hidden-order detection. If you need to know whether you are first or fortieth in line at a price, or you are hunting refreshing icebergs and resting stops, MBP cannot show it and MBO can. Whether MBO is even available inside a given platform depends on what the firm provisions, and the underlying feed plumbing (Rithmic and others) is its own topic, covered in the Rithmic data feed explainer.
Who needs which
Match the feed to the strategy and the answer stops being ambiguous.
- Chart, swing, and position traders: Level 1 is enough. Your triggers are price and patterns, not the resting book.
- Signal followers and systematic chart traders: Level 1. The system reads price, not depth.
- Scalpers, ladder traders, footprint and absorption traders: Level 2 depth. The book is your signal.
- Traders who read queue position or hunt icebergs and stops: MBO, not just MBP. Aggregated depth cannot show individual orders.
- Trade copiers: neither Level 2 nor MBO. A copier acts on fills and positions replicated from a leader account, not on the resting ladder, so depth is pure wasted cost.
The copier case deserves a blunt statement because it is a common overspend. If your whole method is copied signals, the Level 2 versus MBO debate is moot. A copier consumes the fill and position stream, and Level 1 covers everything it reads. Thor, our own server-based copier, replicates fills across platforms at roughly 17ms and never touches the book, which is exactly why a copier user should not be paying for depth to run it.
The CME fee structure
Now the numbers, and read them as a snapshot rather than a law. CME publishes a fee list that changes at least once a year, and specific rates get restated, bundled, and marked up differently by every broker and prop firm. Nothing below should be quoted as a current price. Treat the figures as illustrative of the structure and confirm live rates at cmegroup.com/market-data before you rely on any of them.
The illustrative shape of a recent CME fee list looks like this, with all amounts approximate and subject to change:
| Product | Per exchange / month (approx.) | All four exchanges, bundle (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Non-Pro Top of Book (Level 1) | around $1.50 per device | around $5 |
| Non-Pro Depth of Market (Level 2) | around $12 per device | around $36 |
| Professional real-time display device | roughly $130 to $140 | can exceed $500 |
The Level 1 versus Level 2 gap is real but small in absolute terms. Depth for all four exchanges as a non-professional runs somewhere in the mid-thirties per month. The headline number on a data bill is almost never that gap. It is the non-professional versus professional classification.
Professional status is billed per exchange, and published and restated figures cluster somewhere in the region of $130 to $140. Different sources cite different points inside that band, which is exactly why you should treat it as a range and verify the current figure rather than trusting any single number. Across all four exchanges, professional status can run past $500 a month, well over ten times the non-professional bundle for what is fundamentally the same feed.
One more reason broker and prop quotes look higher than any exchange table. Those tables are exchange fees only. Platform and software markup sits on top, which is why the same Level 2 surfaces as one price at one broker, a different bundle at another, and something else again at a prop firm. The exchange pass-through is the floor, not the final price. The full picture of what stacks onto a funded account is broken down in the funded futures costs guide.
Prop firm data bundles
"Free data" earns its scare quotes here. Plenty of prop firms bundle Level 1 into the evaluation and simulated funded subscription at no separate charge, treat Level 2 as an add-on, and quietly rewrite the arithmetic the moment you go live. The pattern is common. The specifics are firm by firm, so you have to read your own firm's pages.
Consider a documented public example, with the standing caveat that any figures shift and you should confirm current ones. Some firms, Topstep among them, include Level 1 free on a simulated evaluation or simulated funded account and instruct traders to select non-professional status on the CME agreement, then offer Level 2 as an optional monthly upgrade in the tens of dollars. Cheap, so far.
Now walk a concrete trader through the transition, using round illustrative numbers to show the mechanics rather than to quote a price. Say you scalp ES and NQ, both on CME, plus occasional CL on NYMEX, and you read the ladder, so you take the depth add-on. To keep the math clean, assume the Level 2 add-on runs $38 and the professional per-exchange fee runs $133, both figures illustrative and both worth verifying.
- Stage A, simulated funded: Level 1 free, plus the $38 Level 2 add-on. Total data cost to you: $0 + $38 = $38 per month.
- Stage B, promoted to a live funded account with real capital: the firm now treats you as professional and bills CME pro fees per exchange to your card. You touch two exchanges, CME and NYMEX, at $133 each. That is $133 + $133 = $266 per month.
Set that $266 against the roughly $36 non-professional depth bundle covering all four CME Group exchanges. Same depth data, $266 versus $36, a gap of about $230 a month purely because the account flipped from non-pro to pro. Over a year, $266 times 12 is $3,192 against $36 times 12 of about $438, a delta near $2,750. The switch from Level 1 to Level 2 cost this trader $38. The switch from simulated to live multiplied the bill by roughly seven.
A firm's "free data" offer often applies only to the simulated phase. Confirm who pays and at what status once real capital is involved, before you celebrate the deal.
Other firms are sometimes described as folding data and platform fees into the evaluation cost with a Level 2 CME bundle in the low forties plus a small processing charge, but that kind of claim usually comes from secondary sources, so verify it with the firm directly. The rule holds everywhere. Check three things on the firm's current help center. Is Level 1 free? Is Level 2 an add-on, and how much? Does the live funded account flip you to professional, and whose card gets billed?
Push back on one narrative while you are at it. A round of prop-adjacent blogs has been circulating a "2026 CME bombshell, all funded prop traders reclassified as professional" framing, with numbers that never agree with each other. That blanket claim is overstated. It is not in CME's official fee list, and the industry-press licensing coverage it borrows urgency from concerns end-of-day and non-display licensing, not a retail reclassification. What is actually documented is narrower and account-specific. Live real-capital funded accounts at certain firms are professional, while simulated combine and funded accounts stay non-professional. The classification tracks the account type and the firm, not "all prop traders."
Choosing your data
Run this in order and you will buy the minimum feed your strategy actually reads.
- What triggers your entries and exits? Chart patterns, indicators, a signal, or a copier feed means Level 1 is enough, so skip depth. Reading the ladder, footprint, or absorption means Level 2. Reading queue position or hunting icebergs means MBO, not just MBP.
- Which exchanges do your instruments live on? ES, NQ, and ZN sit on CME and CBOT. CL and GC sit on NYMEX and COMEX. You pay per exchange, so license only the ones you trade.
- What does your firm already bundle? Confirm whether Level 1 is free, what Level 2 costs, and whether going live flips you to professional and who pays. Do this before you buy any data yourself, or you will pay twice.
- Are you non-professional today? If you manage only your own assets, are not a registrant or exchange member, and use no more than two terminals, you likely qualify. Self-certify accurately, because misrepresenting status invites back-billing at professional rates.
- Only then, buy the minimum feed your strategy reads. Re-check the moment you go live, because that is where the cost jumps.
The honest tradeoff underneath all of this: more depth is not more edge. An MBO queue-position feed in the hands of a moving-average chart trader is pure cost with zero return. Richer data also fixes none of the problems traders actually blow up on. Latency, poor risk sizing, and strategy decay do not yield to a heavier feed, so buying MBO to rescue a losing chart strategy spends money on the wrong problem entirely. Match the feed to the strategy, watch your classification more closely than your depth level, and re-run the checklist every time your account status changes. If you are picking a platform to read that data on, the NinjaTrader versus Quantower comparison covers how each one presents depth.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Level 1 and Level 2 market data?
Level 1 is the top of the book: the best bid, the best ask, and the last trade with its price and size, showing one price level on each side. Level 2, also called depth of market or the DOM, shows the ladder of resting bid and ask sizes stacked at multiple price levels away from the touch, typically the 5 to 10 best levels on CME's aggregated feed. Level 1 suits chart and swing traders. Level 2 is for order-flow and ladder traders who react to what sits in the book.
Do I need Level 2 market data to trade futures?
Only if your strategy actually reads the resting order book. Chart traders, swing and position traders, signal followers, and trade copiers consume Level 1 and gain nothing from depth. Scalpers, footprint traders, and ladder or absorption traders need Level 2 because the book is their signal. Paying for depth you never read is wasted money, so match the feed to whatever triggers your entries and exits.
What is the difference between MBP and MBO depth?
Market-by-price (MBP) is the standard depth feed and aggregates all resting size at each price into a single quantity per level, historically capped around 10 levels per side. It shows how much sits at a price but not how many individual orders make up that total. Market-by-order (MBO) exposes every individual resting order with its own size and queue position across all price levels, and is a separately licensed, pricier premium feed. You only need MBO if you read true queue position or hunt icebergs and hidden orders.
How much does CME market data cost per month?
CME publishes a fee list that changes at least once a year, and brokers and prop firms restate, bundle, and mark it up differently, so any figure is a moving target. As a rough shape, non-professional Top of Book (Level 1) is a few dollars per exchange per device, and non-professional Depth of Market (Level 2) is in the low tens of dollars per exchange, with four-exchange bundles priced below the sum of the parts. These are exchange fees only, so always verify current rates at cmegroup.com/market-data before relying on any number.
Why is professional market data so much more expensive than non-professional?
Professional status is billed per exchange at a rate roughly in the region of $130 to $140 per exchange per month depending on the source, whereas the non-professional depth bundle for all four CME Group exchanges typically lands in the mid-thirties total. Across all four exchanges, professional status can exceed $500 a month for the same underlying feed, well over ten times the non-professional cost. On most data bills the classification, not the Level 1 versus Level 2 choice, is the biggest single line, so confirm your status carefully.
Are funded prop traders classified as professional for CME data fees?
It depends on the account type and the firm, not a blanket rule. On simulated evaluation and simulated funded accounts, traders are generally non-professional and select that status on the CME agreement. Some firms, such as Topstep, treat a live real-capital funded account as professional and bill CME professional fees per exchange to the trader's card. The claim that CME reclassified all funded prop traders as professional is overstated and is not in CME's official fee list, so confirm the current rule with your specific firm.
Does a trade copier need Level 2 market data?
No. A trade copier acts on fills and positions replicated from a leader account, not on the resting order book, so it does not read the ladder at all. Paying for Level 2 or MBO to run a copier is wasted money, since the fill and position stream, which Level 1 already covers, is everything it consumes. If your entire method is copied signals, the depth conversation simply does not apply to you.
How do I qualify as a non-professional data subscriber?
Non-professional status generally requires that you are a natural person using the data solely for personal use to manage your own assets, with no more than two terminals. You must not be a registered or qualified professional with the SEC, CFTC, or an exchange, not an exchange member or lessee, and not providing financial services to third parties. Failing any single one of those tests makes you professional. Self-certify accurately, because misrepresenting status can result in back-billing at professional rates.