We obtain a derivative formula for various notions of capacity. Namely we identify the second order term in the asymptotic expansion of the capacity of a union of two sets, as their distance goes to infinity. Our result applies to the usual Newtonian capacity in the setting of random walks on the Euclidean lattice, to the family of Bessel-Riesz capacities, and to the Branching capacity, which has been introduced recently by Zhu [9] in connection with critical Branching random walks. On the other hand, the result remains open for the notion of capacity in the setting of percolation, which is introduced in a companion paper, but serves as a motivation, as it would have some interesting consequences there.