Max pain is a curve, not a number — and sources disagree

Look up max pain and you usually get one line:

"Max pain for SPX this week is 7,755."

One number. And that one number misses two things that matter.

• How sharp it is — 7,755 and 7,760 may be effectively tied, or worlds apart
• When the data behind it is from — one session of staleness moved it 30 points

I checked both. Here is what I found, in order.

1. What max pain is

The expiration price at which option buyers, in aggregate, collect the least. That is max pain.

At expiry, buyers collect intrinsic value only. Time value is gone.

• A 5,000 call pays 100 points if the index settles at 5,100, and nothing at 4,900
• A 5,000 put pays 100 points if the index settles at 4,900, and nothing at 5,100

Add that up across every strike and you get total payout as a function of the settlement price. The price where that total is smallest is max pain.

Hence the name. It is the worst outcome for the people who bought options — which is the same as the cheapest outcome for the people who sold them.

2. Working it by hand is faster than reading definitions

Say the market holds only these options. The numbers are open interest — contracts still open at that strike.

Strike	Call OI	Put OI
4,900	200	100
4,950	300	200
5,000	500	500
5,050	200	300
5,100	100	200

Suppose expiry lands at 5,000.

What call buyers collect — only calls struck below 5,000 have value.

• 4,900 call: (5,000 − 4,900) × 200 = 20,000
• 4,950 call: (5,000 − 4,950) × 300 = 15,000
• Subtotal 35,000

What put buyers collect — only puts struck above 5,000 have value.

• 5,050 put: (5,050 − 5,000) × 300 = 15,000
• 5,100 put: (5,100 − 5,000) × 200 = 20,000
• Subtotal 35,000

Total 70,000. (Units are points × contracts; multiply by the 100 contract multiplier for the dollar figure.)

Repeat for every candidate price.

Settlement	Calls	Puts	Total pain	vs. minimum
4,900	0	145,000	145,000	+107.1%
4,950	10,000	85,000	95,000	+35.7%
5,000	35,000	35,000	70,000	0% ⬅ max pain
5,050	85,000	10,000	95,000	+35.7%
5,100	145,000	0	145,000	+107.1%

Max pain = 5,000. That is the whole calculation. No hard math anywhere.

3. The minimum is not the point — the shape is

What is worth noticing in that table is not 5,000. It is that one strike over — 50 points — total pain jumps 35.7%.

The curve drops off steeply. When it looks like that, the minimum is well-defined.

Real curves vary a lot in shape.

Shape	What it means
Narrow, deep basin — a few points out and pain climbs fast	The minimum is distinct and that tight zone means something
Wide, flat dish — pain barely moves across dozens of points	The whole zone is effectively tied. Naming one point is close to meaningless

"Max pain is 7,755" cannot tell those two apart. Take the number alone and you can end up mistaking a tied zone for a sharp magnet.

Compute the curve and the difference is immediate. You do not need anything fancier than a "% above minimum" column.

4. One real curve — August 17, 2026 expiry

📌 This is a dated observation. Calculated directly from the option chain as of the August 14 close. That expiry has passed. I am keeping it here because it shows how to read the shape.

Inputs: actual SPX chain for the 2026-08-17 expiry. 207 call rows, 229 put rows, put/call open interest ratio 1.38.

Strike	Total pain	vs. minimum
7,700	$0.4197B	+32.3%
7,725	$0.3517B	+10.9%
7,750	$0.3184B	+0.4%
7,755	$0.3172B	0% ⬅ max pain
7,760	$0.3191B	+0.6%
7,775	$0.3306B	+4.2%
7,800	$0.3796B	+19.7%
7,850	$0.5796B	+82.7%

How to read it:

• 7,745 to 7,765 all sit within 0.6%. Those 20 points are effectively tied. Saying "the mid-7,750s zone" is truer to the data than saying "7,755."
• The upside is steep. Fifty points up from 7,750 to 7,800 is +19.7%; 7,850 is +82.7%.
• The curve is asymmetric — gentle below, sharp above. That says call open interest was stacked heavily overhead for that expiry.

A single number tells you none of the three.

5. Same expiry, different answer — 30 points apart

Here is the second thing.

For the same August 17 expiry, max pain differed depending on which data source it came from.

	Result	Data behind it
One paid data service	7,725	open interest as of August 13
Calculated directly	7,755	the August 14 close chain

Thirty points apart. And the cause was not the formula. It was the date of the inputs. One session, nothing more.

6. Why this happens structurally

The only input max pain needs is open interest — which carries an unavoidable lag.

Open interest is not counted in real time by the exchange. The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) produces it after pairing the day's opening and closing transactions and settling them. The Options Industry Council describes it the same way — the OCC can only report new open interest after the day ends and positions have been settled and reconciled.

So the open interest you see during the session is always as of the prior close. Nobody knows in real time how many contracts are actually alive right now.

On top of that sits each vendor's own refresh schedule. Some update every morning, some run a day behind. The gap is widest on Monday mornings — whether a source has Friday's data or is still holding Thursday's.

Open interest moves quickly as expiry approaches. A one-day gap showing up as 30 points is not strange at all.

7. One question to ask

Wherever your max pain number comes from, ask one thing.

"Open interest as of which date?"

If a source cannot answer that, treat the number as potentially off by something like 30 points.

And get the curve when you can. The "% above minimum" column tells you far more than the minimum does. As section 2 showed, the calculation is multiplication and addition — with chain data you can build it yourself.

8. What I do not know yet

• I have not established that max pain pulls settlement toward it. Expirations do land near it sometimes, but separating "pulled there" from "open interest simply accumulated where trading was already concentrated" needs a far larger sample than I have run. I have not done that work yet.
• So I use max pain as a map of where open interest is concentrated, not a forecast of where price will settle.
• There are only two things here I can state firmly: the shape of the curve carries more information than the number, and you have to check the date of the inputs. Both are verifiable by calculation, so neither depends on my judgment.

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Open interest is also an input to the gamma flip calculation. The dating problem in section 5 applies there too — the same one-session lag moves that level as well.

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This is an explanation of how an options metric is calculated and of checking data freshness. It is not a recommendation to trade any security. Your decisions and their outcomes are your own.