Slippage Calculator: What Your Trade Costs the Pool
On a low-cap token, the biggest cost of a trade is usually not any fee — it is your own order moving the price. Padre shows you an estimated receive amount before you confirm, but not what the damage would be at a different size. This works that out first.
Price impact calculator
Slippage tolerance is a ceiling you accept, not a cost you pay. What you actually pay isprice impact — how far your own order moves the price in a pool that size. Set the numbers and see it before you confirm.
Trade size (USD)
$1,000.00
Pool liquidity (USD, both sides)
$50,000.00
Slippage tolerance (%)
Token tax each way (%)
Price impact on this buy
3.85%
Within your tolerance
- Your order moves price by
- 3.85%
- Cost of that impact
- $38.46
- Round trip (in and out)
- $76.92
- Token tax, both ways
- $0.00
- Total before platform fees
- $76.92
Constant-product model (x·y=k) — the model Uniswap V2 and Raydium use, two of the venues Padre routes through. Concentrated-liquidity pools (Uniswap V3, Raydium CLMM) behave differently and are not modelled here: depth there depends on the ranges liquidity providers chose, which TVL alone does not tell you. Platform fees and gas are excluded. This is arithmetic on your inputs, not a quote — the order panel is authoritative.
What the number means
Price impact is the gap your own trade creates. Buy into a pool and you push the price up as you fill; sell and you push it down. The deeper the pool relative to your size, the smaller the gap — which is why the same $1,000 is harmless in one token and expensive in another.
Slippage tolerance is a different thing: the ceiling you set before the order gives up. Setting 20% does not cost you 20%; it means you have agreed to accept up to that. The calculator above tells you whether your size will trip that ceiling — and if it does, the order fails rather than filling badly, which is the protection working.
The trap in raising tolerance
When an order fails, the obvious move is to raise the tolerance until it goes through. That works, and it is exactly backwards. The failure was the warning. What changed is not the pool — it is that you authorised the bad fill the pool was going to give you.
The alternative is almost always better: trade a smaller size. Halve the order and the impact falls by roughly half. Two smaller fills usually beat one large one on a thin pool, even counting the extra gas — and the figures above let you check that rather than guess.
Where this fits with everything else
Price impact sits alongside the other cost layers rather than replacing them. Your preset decides the tolerance and the priority fee, the token contract may add a tax on both sides, and the platform takes its cut —the full stack is here. The rebate works against that total: 35% cashback applies to the platform fee, not to price impact.
Which venue your pair lives on matters too, because depth differs sharply between them — the DEXes Padre routes through are listed per chain. And on the way out, the same arithmetic applies in reverse: selling into thin liquidity is where most of the surprise losses happen.
Using it honestly
- Get pool liquidity from a chart tool before trading, not from the token page you were sent.
- Check the round-trip figure, not just the buy — you pay it twice.
- If impact is above a few percent, the position is too large for that pool. That is information, not an obstacle.
- Treat this as arithmetic on your assumptions. The order panel’s estimated receive amount is the authoritative number.
Sizing is the part of this that is actually under your control — the rest of what trade padre gg involves is on the main guide.
Slippage and price impact — questions
What is the difference between slippage and price impact?
Slippage tolerance is a ceiling you set — the worst fill you will accept before the order fails. Price impact is what you actually pay: how far your own order moves the price in that pool. You choose the first; the pool decides the second.
Why does my Padre order keep failing with a slippage error?
Because the price impact of your size exceeds the tolerance in your preset. Either the pool is thinner than you assumed or the order is too large for it. Raising tolerance makes the order fill — at the bad price it was warning you about. Splitting the trade into smaller parts is usually the better answer.
What slippage tolerance should I set?
Padre’s own documentation uses 20% in its EVM examples and 3% in a Solana one, which tells you there is no universal number. Set it from the pool: work out the price impact of your size first, then give the tolerance a little headroom above it.
Does this calculator work for Uniswap V3 and Raydium CLMM?
No, and it says so. Those are concentrated-liquidity pools where depth depends on the price ranges liquidity providers chose, which total TVL does not reveal. The constant-product model here applies to Uniswap V2 and Raydium, two of the venues Padre routes through.
Why is the round trip double the impact?
Because you pay it twice — once moving the price up as you buy, once moving it down as you sell. On a thin pool that round trip can exceed every fee layer combined, which is why it deserves checking before the trade rather than after.
Where does token tax come in?
It is charged by the token contract on each trade, separate from the pool and the platform. A 5% tax each way means a round trip starts 10% behind before any price impact. Padre’s glossary defines it as a percentage of each trade taken by the developer.
The calculator applies the constant-product formula (x·y=k) to the figures you enter; it is not a quote and uses no live market data. Slippage percentages cited as examples are Padre’s own, from documentation archived April 2025. Concentrated-liquidity pools are out of scope, as noted on the tool. Nothing here is trading advice.