Polymarket taker fee calculator (2026)
Polymarket sets its taker-fee rate per market and category rather than one flat number: TapeXray's 2026-09-23 sample of 20,000 of 138,876 catalog rows measured rates from 0% (fee-free) to 7% (crypto), with sports and politics markets the most common categories. Kalshi charges a flat 7% by comparison; see the Kalshi page for that formula.
On $100 at 50¢ you pay $3.50 in fees on Kalshi
1.75¢ per contract · 200 contracts
On $100 at 50¢ you pay $2.50 in fees on Polymarket US
1.25¢ per contract · 200 contracts
Polymarket rate read from the catalog for sports_fees_v3 (13,936 markets in a sample of 20,000 rows drawn from 11,637,244 in the archive). Kalshi's rate is its published general schedule; the PDF has been rate-limiting fetches, so it is documented rather than verified.
Exchange-side taker fees per each venue's published formula (rate × contracts × price × (1 − price)); contracts = stake ÷ price, rounded down to whole contracts. Fees peak at 50¢ and shrink toward the extremes. Most quoted cross-venue “arbs” are negative-EV after these fees; the taker-fee breakeven on a Kalshi/Polymarket pair is roughly 3.5–4¢.
How is a Polymarket market's fee rate set?
Polymarket's taker fee is rate x contracts x P x (1 - P) per order, the same curve Kalshi uses, but the rate itself is not one constant. Every Polymarket market publishes its own fee schedule on its Gamma catalog row, carrying a feesEnabled flag, a feeType label, and a rate. TapeXray reads that row rather than typing a category table by hand, because a hand-typed table cannot notice when Polymarket adds or changes a category; the measured distribution below is read straight from the archive's own catalog sample.
A market whose schedule is missing, unreadable, or does not explicitly set feesEnabled to true is priced at 0.07, the highest rate Polymarket publishes anywhere in the catalog (crypto). That is a deliberate conservative choice: an unknown fee must never make a trade look cheaper than it might actually be. A market whose row explicitly sets feesEnabled to false is fee-free and priced at 0.0 instead.
What did the archive actually measure on 2026-09-23?
This is a sample, not a census. TapeXray read 20,000 of the 138,876 rows in the Polymarket catalog partition on 2026-09-23, about 14% of the archive, and counted each row's fee type and rate. Reading every row's full schedule would exceed the export's memory budget, so a plain-LIMIT sample stands in; the table below carries its own row counts rather than implying it covers every market.
| Category (fee type) | Rate | Rows in the 20,000-row sample |
|---|---|---|
| sports_fees_v3 | 5% | 12,369 |
| politics_fees | 4% | 2,229 |
| weather_fees | 5% | 1,314 |
| sports_fees_v2 | 3% | 1,235 |
| crypto_fees_v2 | 7% | 1,010 |
| culture_fees | 5% | 780 |
| tech_fees | 4% | 445 |
| economics_fees | 5% | 321 |
| finance_prices_fees | 4% | 157 |
| fee-free (feesEnabled: false) | 0% | 90 |
| mentions_fees | 4% | 33 |
| general_fees | 5% | 17 |
Sports markets (two fee-type versions combined) accounted for the largest share of the sample at 13,604 rows, followed by politics at 2,229 and weather at 1,314. Only 90 sampled rows were explicitly fee-free. A category absent from this table simply did not appear in the 20,000-row sample that day; it does not mean Polymarket has no such category.
What does a Polymarket market cost compared with Kalshi?
Using the same $100-stake, 50c-price, 200-contract order as the Kalshi page, a Polymarket crypto market (7%) costs $3.50, matching Kalshi's flat rate exactly before rounding. A sports market (5%) costs $2.50, a politics market (4%) costs $2.00, and a fee-free market costs $0.00. Unlike Kalshi, Polymarket does not round the order fee up to the next cent, so these figures are exact, not a rounded ceiling.
| Category | Rate | Fee on 200 contracts at 50c |
|---|---|---|
| Crypto | 7% | $3.50 |
| Sports / culture / weather | 5% | $2.50 |
| Politics / tech / finance | 4% | $2.00 |
| Fee-free markets | 0% | $0.00 |
A market's real rate only reaches TapeXray's live board after that pair has already cleared a same-bet gate; every other match is ranked at the conservative 7% maximum first, because reading every one of roughly 10,900 matched pairs' real category rate up front would exceed the export's memory budget. See the fees hub for how the two venues' rates compare side by side, and Kalshi vs Polymarket fees in 2026 for the fuller write-up.