Kalshi vs Polymarket (2026): fees, coverage, live spread

What actually separates Kalshi from Polymarket?

Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated US exchange: every contract on it is a federally registered event contract, and its 97,194 tracked markets are open to US residents in most states. Polymarket is an offshore exchange whose 138,833 tracked markets are generally not open to US persons at all; Polymarket US, a separate CFTC-regulated venue under the same brand, runs a phased rollout instead. That regulatory split, not the fee formula, is the first fork in the road for a US-based reader deciding where to trade.

Both venues price the same underlying question - "will Team A win", "will Candidate B be elected" - independently, on their own order books, so their mids drift apart between venues for as long as no trader closes the gap. TapeXray's own markets archive tracks both catalogs continuously and its live board matches the ones that are plausibly the same bet, which is a smaller set than either catalog alone: two markets can ask the same real-world question in different words, at different close times, or under different settlement rules, and a naive title match would treat all of them as the same trade.

How do their taker fees actually compare?

Kalshi charges one flat rate, 7% of rate x contracts x P x (1 - P), on every contract regardless of category - documented from its published fee-schedule PDF, but not independently re-verified since that PDF has returned HTTP 429 on every automated fetch since 2026-09-21. Polymarket instead reads a rate per market from that market's own catalog row, from 0% on fee-free markets up to 7% on crypto, with most categories landing at 4-5%. The Kalshi fee page and the Polymarket fee page each work through one venue's formula and worked examples in full.

Which venue actually has more markets, and how many prices overlap?

Polymarket's catalog is larger: 138,833 tracked markets against Kalshi's 97,194. Size alone says nothing about overlap, though - most markets on either venue have no real counterpart on the other. Of the 10,869 pairs TapeXray's matcher paired by title on 2026-09-23, only 6 cleared the same-bet gate (a tight title match, matching books, and real 24-hour volume on both sides); the other 10,863 were rejected as too weak a match, too thin a book, or a raw gap too large to be the same real-world bet.

The closest miss that day sat 0.3c inside the fee line - a gap that was real but too small to clear both venues' round-trip taker fees. See the live board for the current count, which updates on every deploy and will not match this paragraph by the time you read it.

Which venue is licensed in more US states?

Kalshi is directly available in 39 of the 51 tracked jurisdictions (50 states plus DC), limited in 10, and unavailable in 2. Polymarket's global exchange - the venue this page's prices come from - is unavailable to US persons in all 51, by design: it is an offshore exchange, not a US-licensed one. Polymarket US, the separate CFTC-regulated venue under the same brand, instead runs a limited rollout in 50 of 51 and is unavailable in only 1, but its own market catalog and pricing are not the numbers this page compares.

Every one of those 51 rows carries its own verification date and a per-venue status; see the state-by-state pages for the one that covers where you actually live, since "available" on Kalshi's general schedule can still mean a narrower product set in a specific state.

Which venue has the cleaner settlement record?

This is the one comparison TapeXray cannot make yet, and says so rather than guessing: the resolutions archive behind [the live settlement feed] (/resolutions/) currently tracks 0 completed resolutions for either venue, so there is no dispute count to compare. That is a gap in the archive's coverage window, not a claim that either venue has a clean record - a market only enters this table once TapeXray has observed it resolve, and none has yet inside the window this export covers.

The resolutions feed fills in as markets settle and is the place to check this comparison again later; a page that quietly dropped this section instead of naming the gap would be making the same overstatement this site's whole brand is built against not making.

Is there a live gap worth checking today?

The table above this prose is not static like the rest of the page: it is rendered straight from the same export these figures cite, so it is current as of the last deploy rather than as of 2026-09-23. Most days it shows nothing, because a real, fee-adjusted gap between two venues pricing the same event is rare by construction - both venues' order books are liquid enough that an obvious mispricing gets traded away fast. See the fees hub for the calculator behind every number on this page, and Kalshi vs Polymarket fees in 2026 for a fuller walk-through of both venues' rate schedules.