Options volume climbs 13.6% in April as OCC clears 1.45 billion

Metric (April 2026)	Contracts	Change y/y
Total cleared volume	1,450,713,654	+13.6%
Equity options	723,067,287	+19.5%
ETF options	589,342,500	+5.8%
Index options	133,662,236	+23.8%
Total options	1,446,072,023	+13.9%
Futures	4,641,631	-28.4%
YTD average daily volume	69,149,314	+18.2%

The Options Clearing Corporation reported on May 4, 2026 that options volume cleared through its system in April reached roughly 1.45 billion contracts, a 13.6% increase over April 2025. Listed options accounted for almost all of that activity, about 1.446 billion contracts, up 13.9%. Because OCC clears trades from every U.S. options exchange, its monthly tally is the broadest public measure of how busy the listed options market was in a given month.

Single-stock equity options remained the largest category at about 723 million contracts, a 19.5% gain from a year earlier. Index options grew fastest of the three options groups, rising 23.8% to roughly 133.7 million contracts. ETF options lagged, up 5.8% to about 589.3 million. That spread matters because ETF products such as broad index funds are often the first tool for portfolio hedging, so slower ETF growth alongside faster single-stock and index growth points to a month driven more by targeted positioning than by blanket hedging.

Futures were the exception. OCC-cleared futures fell 28.4% to about 4.6 million contracts, the only major category to decline in the month. Futures are a small line for OCC relative to options, so the drop had little effect on the headline total, but it ran against the broader growth trend.

The year-to-date picture was stronger than April alone. Average daily volume for 2026 through April came to 69.1 million contracts, compared with 58.5 million in the same stretch of 2025, an 18.2% increase. With April’s monthly gain below that pace, the figures indicate that the first quarter did more of the heavy lifting for the year so far, and that April was a month of continued but slower expansion.

OCC’s securities lending program showed a split result. Average daily loan value rose 29.7% to about $226.9 billion, while total lending transactions fell 14.27% to 278,706. Higher value spread across fewer transactions suggests larger average loan sizes, a pattern worth tracking because securities lending supports short selling and the hedging activity of options market makers.

What to watch next: whether index options keep outpacing ETF options in the May and June reports, whether the futures decline proves to be a single soft month, and whether year-to-date ADV holds near 69 million contracts as the market heads into the typically quieter summer stretch. Readers should treat these as activity measures only; volume data say how much traded, not which direction investors were betting.