  We study Majorana fermions bound to vortex cores in a chiral $p$-wave
superconductor at temperatures non-negligible compared to the superconducting
gap. Thermal occupation of Caroli de Gennes-Matricon states, below the full
gap, causes the free energy difference between the two fermionic parity sectors
to decay algebraically with increasing temperature. The power law acquires an
additional factor of $T^{-1}$ for each bound state thermally excited. The
zero-temperature result is exponentially recovered well below the minigap
(lowest-lying CdGM level). Our results suggest that temperatures larger than
the minigap may not be disastrous for topological quantum computation. We
discuss the prospect of precision measurements of pinning forces on vortices as
a readout scheme for Majorana qubits.
