Kalshi Fees by Market 2026: 195 Exceptions
Kalshi fees by market, read from all 15,393 series on 25 October 2026: 15,198 charge one rate and 195 do not. The 14 that charge nothing, named.
Affiliate disclosure: contains affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We have no commercial relationship with Kalshi. 18+ only — see BeGambleAware.org. Last updated 25 October 2026.
Key takeaways
- Kalshi fees by market are almost entirely uniform: 15,198 of its 15,393 series charge the identical rate. We read every series on 25 October 2026. Only 195 (1.27%) price away from the standard formula, which is the opposite of Polymarket's category pricing.
- Only 33 of those exceptions are cheaper. The other 162 are dearer. Fourteen series charge nothing at all, nineteen charge half — and 162 add a maker fee where the default maker multiplier is zero.
- Every single half-price series is baseball. All 19 of them, from
KXMLBHRtoKXMLBF7. No other sport and no other category gets the 0.5 taker multiplier. - The free markets are long-dated geopolitics and macro — Iran succession, a Greenland purchase, annual GDP, Bitcoin's end-of-year range. Three of the fourteen have no open market at all, so the discount is on something you cannot currently trade.
- The maker-fee set is where the money is — the Super Bowl (197.8m contracts), the NCAAF championship (66.3m), the NBA title (47.2m), the Fed decision (17.8m). Not obscure corners: the flagship products. And the S&P 500 is not half price, whatever two widely-syndicated guides say.
On this page
Every guide to Kalshi fees by market ends at the same dead end: a sentence telling you that some series have their own fee multipliers, followed by a link to a PDF. Nobody tells you which series. That matters because the difference is real money — on 1,000 contracts bought at 50 cents the standard fee is $17.50, the half-rate is $8.75 and on fourteen series it is nothing. So we stopped reading the guides and read the exchange instead: all 15,393 series in a single API request on 25 October 2026, every one of them carrying its own fee_type and fee_multiplier. This is the list, named, with the direction of each exception and whether the market is liquid enough to use.
What Kalshi fees by market actually come to
Kalshi does not charge a percentage of your stake. It charges on the expected value of the contract, which means the fee peaks at 50 cents — where the outcome is most uncertain — and falls away towards both ends of the price range. Kalshi's own help centre puts the principle plainly: "Kalshi makes money by charging a transaction fee on the expected earnings on the contract."
The published formula multiplies a coefficient by the number of contracts and by P × (1 − P), then rounds up. The taker coefficient is 0.07; the maker coefficient is a quarter of it, which Kalshi's API reference states as a "0.25" maker multiplier. A series' fee_multiplier then scales the whole calculation. Here is what that produces per 100 contracts at each tier we found on the exchange.
Per 100 contracts, rounded up to the next $0.0001. Tiers are the ones actually present on the exchange on 25 October 2026.
Two things follow immediately. The peak taker fee is 1.75 cents per contract, and a round trip — buying and selling rather than holding to settlement — pays it twice, so $3.50 per 100 contracts at the midpoint. And the combo maker tier, which applies to Kalshi's multi-leg parlays, charges makers double the ordinary maker rate: Kalshi's API reference describes it as the same structure "with a 0.5 maker multiplier instead of 0.25". No guide we found mentions that.
The 195 exceptions to Kalshi fees by market, counted today
Here is the headline, and it is a negative finding that nobody has published: Kalshi is not category-priced. Of 15,393 series, 15,198 — 98.73% — carry fee_type: quadratic and fee_multiplier: 1, the identical published rate. Whether you trade an NFL game, a Fed decision or a question about Greenland, the default is the same arithmetic. That is the inverse of Polymarket's fee structure, where the rate genuinely does depend on which category you are in.
The exceptions sort into five tiers, and the direction is the part the existing coverage leaves out.
All 15,393 series, read 25 October 2026. The single "half and maker" series is KXMLBGAME.
So 162 of the 195 exceptions make trading more expensive, not less. That is the framing every competing page inverts by calling them "non-standard fees" and leaving it there. A fourth value, flat, is documented in the API's fee-type enum and is carried by zero series today — worth knowing if you are writing code against the field, because it will parse something you have never seen.
One more reason not to trust a hand-copied count: the best competing guide published 157 non-standard series on 19 October, measured on 10 October. Fifteen days later the live figure is 195, a 24% rise. These numbers move. The last section of this guide shows you the one request that gets today's.
The 14 series that charge nothing
This is the list no published guide contains. Fourteen series carry fee_multiplier: 0, which zeroes the whole calculation — taker and maker, at every price. We then asked the exchange how many open markets each one has and how many contracts have traded in them, because a free market you cannot trade is not a discount.
"Contracts traded" counts volume in the series' currently-open markets only; settled markets are not included.
The pattern is consistent enough to be a rule. Every one of the fourteen is long-dated: eight one-off questions, three annual, three custom-scheduled. None is a recurring daily or hourly product. These are positions held for months, and waiving the fee is how an exchange persuades anyone to tie up capital that long.
Three of them are empty. KXNEXTIRANLEADER, KXTRUMPOUT and KXEXPAND have no open market, so their zero fee buys you nothing today. On a one-market series the quoted spread will cost you more than the fee ever would — the trade-off we worked through for slippage on thin order books. The one genuinely usable free market is KXBTCY: 28 open markets, 43.2m contracts traded. To bet on where Bitcoin finishes the year, Kalshi charges nothing.
Every half-price series is baseball
Nineteen series carry a 0.5 taker multiplier, halving the fee at every price. The existing coverage describes them as "mostly baseball series". They are not mostly baseball. They are 19 of 19 baseball — every MLB product Kalshi lists, from the game line down to individual stolen bases, and nothing else on the exchange.
Two observations worth having before you get excited about the discount. The entire half-price set has traded 470,189 contracts across its 259 open markets — less than 1.1% of what the single free Bitcoin series has done. Half of a small fee on a thin market is still a thin market.
And KXMLBGAME, the one that matters most, is the exchange's only series that is both discounted and maker-charged. If you take liquidity there you pay half the usual rate; if you rest an order you pay a maker fee you would owe nowhere else in baseball. That is a deliberate nudge towards taking rather than making, and it is the exact opposite of the incentive Polymarket pays its makers.
The 162 series that charge makers too
On 98.9% of Kalshi, resting an order costs nothing: the standard schedule sets the maker multiplier to zero, so only takers pay. On 162 series it does not. These are the exceptions that cost you money rather than saving it, and they are concentrated in a way that tells you exactly what they are for.
Two series hit our 1,000-market page limit, so the Exotics count and the Sports totals are floors, not exact figures.
Sport is 107 of the 162, and the named series are not minor. The maker-fee set contains the Super Bowl (KXSB, 197.8m contracts across 32 open markets), the NCAAF championship (66.3m), the NBA title (47.2m), the NFL MVP (37.2m), the Heisman (36.6m), the Ballon d'Or (21.5m), the World Series (21.4m) and the NFL game line (20.5m). On the macro side it holds the Fed meeting (KXFEDDECISION, 17.8m), CPI, GDP, unemployment and the gas-price series. In Science & Technology it covers the GPU price ladders — H100, H200, B200, RTX 5090 — and the year-end top-LLM market.
Kalshi's help centre explains the variation this way: fees differ across markets, "often due to special events" such as elections, awards ceremonies or major sporting championships. That is directionally right and incomplete. The awards half checks out — all six Emmy categories and the Super Bowl halftime headliner are in the set. But so are the monthly macro releases, which are nobody's special event, and the entire GPU complex.
The simpler reading: Kalshi turns the maker side on where it expects professional two-sided flow. Championship futures, Fed decisions and hardware ladders are the markets makers actually want to quote, and charging them is how an exchange earns from liquidity it no longer needs to subsidise. If you only ever hit the bid or lift the offer, none of this changes your cost. If you rest orders for a living, these 162 tickers are your whole cost structure.
The S&P 500 half-fee claim is wrong
Two guides that rank for prediction-market fee queries state that Kalshi's S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 markets run at a halved multiplier — one of them puts it as "0.035 instead of 0.07". It is repeated often enough to look settled. It is not true, and the field that would prove it is public.
We pulled every series whose ticker contains INX, NASDAQ or DJIA — 76 of them, covering the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Dow in every flavour Kalshi lists: hourly, 15-minute, weekly, monthly, yearly, range, above/below, maximum, minimum, election-day. Every single one carries fee_multiplier: 1. Not one is discounted. And two of them — KXINXY (S&P 500 yearly range) and KXNASDAQ100Y (Nasdaq yearly range) — carry quadratic_with_maker_fees, which makes them more expensive than the default, not less.
It is worth being precise about what went wrong, because the same mistake produces the next wrong claim. Kalshi's schedule has a Specific Trading Fees Table for product families priced on their own terms, and index products appear in that discussion. Reading "handled separately" as "half price" is an easy slip. But the API is the exchange's own answer, it is one request, and it disagrees.
The same caution applies in the other direction to our own numbers. A multiplier is a live field; Kalshi can change it tomorrow and did change 38 series in the fifteen days before we looked. Treat every figure in this guide as read on 25 October 2026 and check your own series before you size a position — which takes about ten seconds.
Check your own market in one request
Every competing guide ends by telling you to consult Kalshi's fee-schedule PDF. That advice has two problems: you have to translate the document into your own trade, and it sits behind a bot check that refused our requests from two separate networks with an HTTP 429. The API has no such gate, needs no key, and answers in one line.
curl -s "https://api.elections.kalshi.com/trade-api/v2/series?limit=200" \
| python3 -c "import sys,json
for s in json.load(sys.stdin)['series']:
if s['fee_type'] != 'quadratic' or s['fee_multiplier'] != 1:
print(s['ticker'], s['category'], s['fee_type'], s['fee_multiplier'])"That returns every exception on the exchange today in about two seconds — all 15,393 series arrive in one page. To check a single market, take the part of its ticker before the first hyphen (KXNFLGAME-26OCT25DALWAS belongs to series KXNFLGAME) and look for it in the output. Two fields decide your cost: fee_multiplier scales everything, and fee_type says whether resting an order is free.
The three-second version. fee_multiplier: 1 and fee_type: quadratic means you are paying the standard rate and makers pay nothing — which is what 98.73% of the exchange looks like. Anything else, read the row.
Kalshi also shows the fee on the ticket before you confirm: its help centre points to an information icon next to "You're buying". That is the number that will actually be charged, and if it disagrees with anything here, it wins.
Read the multiplier before you read the odds
Both venues publish the field that sets your cost, and neither puts it next to the price. On Kalshi it is the series fee multiplier; on Polymarket it is the category rate. One line tells you more about your edge than any guide can.
Visit Polymarket.com →Affiliate link to Polymarket; we have no commercial relationship with Kalshi. 18+ only. Polymarket restricts access from the United States, Canada and other listed jurisdictions. Prediction markets carry a substantial risk of loss. Nothing here is financial advice.
My verdict on Kalshi's fee structure
The useful finding is the thing that does not vary. Kalshi charges one rate for 98.73% of what it lists, so for almost every trade you will place, "what are Kalshi's fees by market?" has a single answer: 0.07 × contracts × P × (1 − P), peaking at 1.75 cents a contract, nothing to pay if you rest the order and nothing at settlement. Guides implying a complicated category grid are describing Polymarket's problem, not this one.
What the exceptions tell you is where the exchange is still buying something. Fourteen free series, every one long-dated, are an exchange paying for term risk — and three of them are empty, which is the honest shape of that offer. One hundred and sixty-two maker-charged series, led by the Super Bowl and the Fed decision, are an exchange charging for flow it no longer needs to attract. Both groups move: 157 exceptions on 10 October became 195 on 25 October.
What this cannot tell you is the cost of a trade. A fee is the smallest of three charges — the spread you cross and the slippage on a thin book beat 1.75 cents most days, which is why the single-market geopolitics series are worse value than their zero fee suggests. Nor does a multiplier say when you get paid; for that we timed 15,382 Kalshi settlements and found a median wait of 2m52s.
One habit is worth taking away. Before you size a position, read the multiplier, not the guide — including this one. It is one request, it is free, and it is the exchange's own answer.
Related guides
- Kalshi Payout Time 2026: 15,382 Timed — how long settlement actually takes on the same exchange, measured the same way.
- Polymarket Fees 2026: Every Rate by Category — the venue that is category-priced, for the contrast this guide keeps drawing.
- Polymarket vs Kalshi 2026 — eligibility, deposits and who decides a result, for choosing between the two.
- Polymarket Maker Rewards 2026 — the other side of the maker question: one venue charges makers, the other pays them.
- Polymarket Slippage 2026 — why a thin free market costs more than a liquid one with a fee.
- Polymarket Arbitrage 2026 — where fees decide whether a spread is a trade or a mirage.
Kalshi fees by market FAQ
How much does Kalshi charge per contract?
At most 1.75 cents, and only if you take liquidity. The taker fee is 0.07 × contracts × P × (1 − P) rounded up, which peaks at a 50-cent price and falls towards both ends: $1.75 per 100 contracts at 50¢, $0.63 at 10¢ or 90¢, and about 7 cents at 1¢ or 99¢. On 15,198 of 15,393 series that is the whole cost, with no maker fee and no settlement fee.
Which Kalshi markets have no fees?
Fourteen series carry a zero multiplier as of 25 October 2026: KXBTCY, KXETHY, KXCITRINI, KXGDPYEAR, KXLAYOFFSYINFO, KXGREENLAND, KXEXPAND, KXTRUMPOUT, KXDOED, KXGAMBLINGREPEAL, KXIRANDEMOCRACY, KXPAHLAVIHEAD, KXELECTIRAN and KXNEXTIRANLEADER. All are long-dated one-off, annual or custom markets, and three of them have no open market at all.
Does Kalshi charge different fees for different categories?
Almost never. 98.73% of series carry the identical formula and multiplier, so category is not what sets your fee — the individual series is. That makes Kalshi the opposite of Polymarket, which does publish different rates by category. The 195 exceptions cut across categories rather than following them.
Do I pay a maker fee on Kalshi?
On most markets, no: the standard schedule sets the maker multiplier to zero, so resting an order is free and cancelling costs nothing. On 162 series you do pay, at a quarter of the taker coefficient — among them the Super Bowl, the NBA and NCAAF championships, the NFL game line, the Fed decision, CPI, GDP, the Emmy categories and the GPU price ladders.
Are Kalshi's S&P 500 markets half price?
No, though two guides say so. All 76 series we found with INX, NASDAQ or DJIA in the ticker carry a multiplier of 1, and two — the S&P 500 and Nasdaq yearly ranges — add maker fees, making them dearer than default rather than cheaper.
Why are all the half-price Kalshi markets baseball?
We can only report that they are: all 19 series with a 0.5 taker multiplier are MLB products — the game line, spreads, totals, innings markets and player props. Kalshi has not published a reason. The caveat is size: the whole half-price set has traded 470,189 contracts across 259 open markets, so the discount sits on thin books.
Does Kalshi charge a fee when my contract settles?
No. A winning contract pays $1.00 into your cash balance with nothing to claim, and the general schedule carries no membership fee either. Selling before settlement is a second trade with its own fee, so a round trip at 50 cents costs $3.50 per 100 contracts rather than $1.75.
What does fee_multiplier mean on Kalshi's API?
Kalshi's API reference describes it as "a floating point multiplier applied to the fee calculations" — it scales the whole fee, so 1 is standard, 0.5 is half and 0 is free. The companion field fee_type takes four documented values: quadratic, quadratic_with_maker_fees, quadratic_with_combo_maker_fees and flat. The last is carried by no series today.
Method and sources
On 25 October 2026 we read Kalshi's public series endpoint, which returns all 15,393 series in a single request, recording each one's category, fee_type, fee_multiplier and frequency. For every series that deviated from the default we then queried its open markets, one request per series, to count them and sum the contracts traded. Fee amounts in the first table are computed from the published formula and rounded up to the next $0.0001 — arithmetic, not quotes. Two caveats: that per-series query returns at most 1,000 markets, which KXMVECROSSCATEGORY and KXNCAAFSPREAD both exceeded, so the Exotics count and Sports totals are floors; and volume covers open markets only, excluding settled history. Kalshi's own fee-schedule PDF refused our requests from two networks with an HTTP 429 bot check, so the coefficients below are cited from documentation rather than read off that page. Multipliers are live fields the exchange can change at any time, and nothing here is financial advice.
- Kalshi API reference: GetSeries — the field definitions every figure above is read from, including the four
fee_typevalues, the "0.5 maker multiplier instead of 0.25" for combo markets, andfee_multiplieras "a floating point multiplier applied to the fee calculations". - Kalshi help centre: fees — the "transaction fee on the expected earnings on the contract" model, maker fees charged only when a resting order executes, no fee on cancellation, the "often due to special events" explanation, and the fee shown on the ticket.
- Allium: Kalshi series fee changes — the taker and maker coefficients (0.07 and 0.0175) and the rounding rule, documented against Kalshi's published schedule, plus the standard-schedule default of taker multiplier 1 and maker multiplier 0.
- Kalshi fee schedule — the General Trading Fees Table, Maker Fees section and Specific Trading Fees Table that the API reference points at for each
fee_type. Served behind a bot check that returned 429 to us; readable in a normal browser.