Available vs Locked Balance: Why Usable Differs From Total

Two numbers, one holding

Every exchange account shows a total and a usable figure, and the gap between them generates more support tickets than almost anything else. The gap has a small number of causes and they are all documented in the venue’s own API.

Binance’s spot account endpoint reports each asset as two fields: free and locked. Both are strings, both belong to the same asset, and their sum is the holding. There is no third field and no hidden adjustment — the exchange is telling you, in the response body, that part of the balance is reserved.

OKX’s v5 API uses a wider vocabulary, and reading it is the fastest way to understand what “reserved” can mean:

Five fields, one asset. ordFrozen is the one that matters most often: it is the portion committed to orders that have not finished. The existence of a separate fixedBal is a reminder that a venue can invent reasons to reserve funds, and that a well-designed API names each one rather than collapsing them into “unavailable”.

What actually reserves the money

The mechanism is settlement, not suspicion.

A resting buy order promises to pay quote currency. The exchange reserves the maximum it might have to pay — price multiplied by quantity, plus any fee buffer — out of the quote asset’s free balance. That amount cannot be withdrawn, cannot back a second order, and cannot be converted. When the order fills, the reservation becomes a trade; when it is cancelled, the reservation is released.

A resting sell order promises to deliver base currency. The exchange reserves the base asset instead. This is why a grid bot’s ladder of sells can leave an account with a healthy total and almost no free base asset: every rung above the price is holding inventory it may have to hand over.

A partially filled order keeps the unfilled remainder reserved. This is the case most often mistaken for a bug: the order fills 30%, the balance does not visibly move much, and the free figure stays stubbornly low because the other 70% is still committed.

Nothing is charged until a fill. A reservation is not a fee, and a cancelled order costs nothing beyond whatever the venue charges for the order itself, which on most spot markets is nothing.

“Available” is scoped to a wallet

The second and larger source of confusion is that an account is not one balance. It is several wallets, and each has its own free and locked sides.

On Binance those wallets are separate products: spot, margin, futures, Earn, and the funding wallet that receives some deposits and processes some withdrawals. Funds held in an Earn product accrue there and are not spendable from the spot wallet until they are redeemed. Funds in a futures wallet back positions and are not part of the spot balance. The spot account endpoint reports the spot wallet only, which is exactly why a user who has just subscribed to an Earn product can see a total that looks unchanged and an available figure that has collapsed.

The fix is not a support ticket. It is a transfer between wallets, or a redemption before the transfer.

OKX makes the same point more explicitly by attaching account-mode qualifiers to individual fields. Its documentation marks several balance fields as applicable to spot mode, futures mode, multi-currency margin or portfolio margin, and equity fields that exist only in the derivatives modes. A holding can therefore produce different available figures depending on which mode the account is in — not because the money moved, but because the definition of available changed.

The reservations that are not orders

Two other things reduce an available balance, and separating them from order reservations is the practical skill.

Withdrawal holds. A withdrawal may sit in a pending state because of a setting rather than a network. Binance’s withdrawal settings page describes a whitelist limit that blocks transfers to newly added addresses for 24, 48 or 72 hours, and a second window that starts if the whitelist itself is changed. During that time the amount is committed to the withdrawal and is not free. The timers are laid out in Binance withdrawals: whitelists, network suspensions and the wait.

Venue holds. An identity review, a deposit under question or a risk review can restrict an asset in a way that no order explains. This is the case where cancelling orders does nothing, and the diagnostic is arithmetic: if the locked amount does not correspond to any open order, it is a hold, and the remedy is the venue’s review process rather than a cancel button.

A triage table

The first three rows account for almost every case. The fourth is the one worth escalating, and the fifth is not a balance problem at all.

Why the numbers can lag

A balance change arrives at a client as an event, not as a poll. Binance’s user data stream describes outboundAccountPosition as being “sent any time an account balance has changed and contains the assets that were possibly changed” — the wording is careful, because the event tells you which assets to re-read rather than giving you the authoritative number.

That design has a visible consequence. After a cancel, the reservation is released when the cancellation is processed; a client that renders from the event alone may show the old split for a moment. The floor is the REST endpoint, which is why any tool that matters asks for the account again after acting rather than trusting the stream’s payload.

What to check before blaming the venue

1. Sum free and locked. If the total is right, nothing has been lost.
2. List the open orders and compare their notionals with the locked amount.
3. Check the other wallets — Earn, futures, margin, funding.
4. Check pending withdrawals and which timer is running.
5. Check the order’s state, including partial fills, which keep the remainder reserved.
6. Only then contact support, with the numbers from steps 1 to 3, because those are the questions you will be asked first.

The mechanics of what a resting order is and when it crosses the spread are in maker versus taker orders, and the difference between a pending withdrawal and an unconfirmed chain transfer is in crypto withdrawal holds versus confirmations.

Risk note. The field names and descriptions in this article were read from Binance’s spot API documentation and OKX’s API v5 documentation on 2026-10-31, and the withdrawal timers from Binance’s support pages of the same date. Field sets, account modes and hold policies change; the authoritative description of your own balance is the one returned by the endpoint at the time you ask, and a locked balance may in some circumstances reflect a review rather than an order.