Polymarket Deposit Fees 2026: The Real Cost
Polymarket deposit fees measured on 9 October 2026: $100 bridged from 13 chains through the live quote API, and the route that costs 135x the cheapest.
Affiliate disclosure: contains affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. 18+ only — see BeGambleAware.org. Last updated 9 October 2026.
Key takeaways
- Polymarket itself charges nothing to deposit. We pulled live quotes for 13 routes on 9 October 2026 and the bridge's app-fee field read 0 on every one. The cost of funding an account is the chain you pick and the asset you send.
- That choice is worth 135x. $100 of USDC from Optimism cost $0.018 all-in; the same $100 of USDT from Tron cost $2.46. Tron's gas is flat, so it does not shrink on smaller deposits.
- The published minimums are wrong in both directions. Polymarket's docs table says Ethereum $7, Bitcoin $9, Tron $9; its live endpoint said $3, $3.60 and $2. The best-ranking guide says $10 for all three.
- Two published minimums cost more in gas than they let you deposit. A $2 USDT deposit from Tron burns $2.28 of gas and credits $1.95 of pUSD: $4.28 out, $1.95 in.
- Send a stablecoin, not a coin. USDC crossed at 0.018%; the same value in ETH cost 0.658% and in SOL 0.851% — 36x and 47x more — because anything that is not already a dollar gets swapped.
On this page
Every guide to Polymarket deposit fees tells you the same two things: depositing is free, and avoid Ethereum because gas is expensive. The first is nearly true. The second is backwards, and acting on it can cost more than a hundred times what the cheapest route does.
The gap between the best and worst route we measured is $2.44 on every $100, paid again on every top-up. On two chains the published minimum deposit is less than the gas needed to make it — send exactly the minimum and you lose more than half of it.
So we stopped reading guides and called Polymarket's own pricing endpoint. Every figure below comes from live quotes pulled on 9 October 2026 at 14:55 UTC for a $100 deposit from each supported chain, plus the live asset list the docs tell developers to trust over their own table. Outliers were re-quoted three times.
What Polymarket charges to deposit: nothing
Polymarket's bridge exposes a quote endpoint that returns a full breakdown before you send anything: gas, an app fee, a fill cost, swap impact and a total. It is the same endpoint the deposit screen uses.
The documentation's sample response shows appFeePercent: 0.3 under the label "Bridge fee", and if you read only the docs you would conclude Polymarket skims 0.3% off deposits. It does not. On all 13 routes we quoted, the live app fee came back as 0 — not a reduced rate, zero. The 0.3% is an illustrative number in an example payload, and copying it into an article would have been the easiest mistake available here.
Withdrawals match: the withdrawal docs state that "withdrawals are instant and free", and the help centre says there are no Polymarket fees to deposit or withdraw, though intermediaries like Coinbase or MoonPay may charge their own.
So if the house takes nothing, every dollar you lose funding an account is lost to the plumbing — and the plumbing has a price list nobody publishes. For what Polymarket charges once your money is on the platform, see our guide to Polymarket trading fees.
Every chain priced: $100 into Polymarket
All deposits, whatever you send and from wherever, are converted to pUSD on Polygon, the collateral every Polymarket trade settles in. So each route is a bridge plus a swap, and both legs cost something.
The two costs are charged differently. Gas you pay on the source chain from your own wallet; it never appears in the amount that arrives. Impact (fill cost plus swap impact) comes out of the amount in transit, showing up as a smaller credit. The all-in column adds both.
Live quotes from Polymarket's bridge for a $100 deposit, 9 October 2026, 14:55 UTC. Quotes are estimates and move with gas and pool depth.
Ten of the thirteen routes land inside four cents of each other. The decision everyone agonises over — Base or Arbitrum or Polygon — is worth about half a cent. What matters is the two routes at the bottom of the table, and the asset you send.
One oddity: the estimated completion time came back as 27 seconds for every route, Ethereum and Solana and Tron alike. That is a flat placeholder rather than a per-chain model, so read it as "under a minute when nothing is wrong", not as a promise about Bitcoin.
Why Tron costs 135 times Optimism
Tron is the route most guides recommend for cheap stablecoin transfers, and on Polymarket it is comfortably the most expensive. $2.277 of gas, against $0.123 on Ethereum and under half a cent on every layer-2 we tested — 18x Ethereum's gas and roughly 490x Polygon's.
Two things make it worse than one number suggests. First, it is flat. We quoted the same route at $2, $3, $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $1,000 and the gas came back as $2.2779 every time, to four decimal places. A fixed toll bites hardest where people deposit smallest.
Second, the reason it will not self-correct: Tron prices gas in burnt TRX, so the cost tracks the TRX price rather than demand for block space. Ethereum's fee market falls when the chain is quiet; Tron's does not. Every guide recommending Tron was written when Ethereum was congested, and nobody went back to check. We measured the same inversion on crypto cards earlier this year, on a separate set of providers — it is not a Polymarket quirk.
What that flat toll does to a small deposit, starting at Tron's own published minimum:
Same route, seven sizes, one flat gas figure. Quoted 9 October 2026.
If your money is already in USDT on Tron, the cheapest move is usually not to bridge it to Polymarket at all. No guide on page one says so, because none of them priced the route.
The Polymarket minimum deposit nobody states correctly
There are three published answers to "what is the minimum deposit on Polymarket", they disagree with each other, and the right one is the one nobody quotes.
Polymarket's docs carry a table of per-chain minimums, and directly underneath it a note telling you not to rely on it: "Supported assets change over time. Always call /supported-assets for the current list before initiating a deposit." We did. The endpoint returns 236 assets, each with its own minCheckoutUsd, and it disagrees with the table above it on four of fifteen chains.
Three sources, one subject. Live column read from Polymarket's own /supported-assets endpoint, 9 October 2026.
The docs table is too high on three chains, which costs you flexibility; the top-ranking guide is too high on everything. The floors are not even uniform within a chain — the endpoint sets them per token, while the table prints one number for all 79 Ethereum assets.
The real finding is what the correct minimums collide with. Tron's floor is $2 and its gas is $2.28. Bitcoin's floor is $3.60 and its gas is $1.91. On both chains a deposit at the published minimum loses a double-digit percentage of itself before arriving, and nothing warns you, because gas is not Polymarket's to charge or disclose.
Send a stablecoin, not a coin
Chain choice is the famous variable. Asset choice is the bigger one, and the reason is buried in what pUSD is.
USDC arriving at the bridge is wrapped into pUSD through what the docs call the Collateral Onramp — a dollar becoming a dollar, and it prices like one. Anything that is not a dollar has to be sold for one first, and you pay the spread on that trade.
Live quotes, 9 October 2026. The BTC row is sized at roughly $41 because larger Bitcoin quotes failed — see the next section.
Even USDT and USDG, both dollar tokens, cost 10 to 15 times what USDC does, because they are swapped rather than wrapped. Volatile assets are where the real money goes: sending ETH instead of USDC turned a two-cent cost into a seventy-one-cent one.
The practical rule is dull and saves most of the money on this page: hold USDC before you deposit, and bridge from whichever cheap chain you already use. Selling ETH or SOL for USDC on your own exchange, where you can see the spread, usually beats letting the bridge do it where you cannot.
Bitcoin is the one route to avoid outright
Bitcoin is listed as supported, has a published minimum, and is the only route where we could not get a normal deposit quoted at all. Quotes for roughly $5, $10, $20 and $50 of BTC returned fine.
Quotes for $100 and above returned cannot get quote, repeatedly, across sizes and retries, as did every Lightning quote at every size. We will not guess at the cause from outside — thin instant-liquidity depth is the obvious candidate, and the fee breakdown relabels its app-fee field "Instant liquidity cost" on BTC routes — but a $100 Bitcoin deposit could not be priced on 9 October 2026.
What we could price was bad enough: gas of $1.911 flat regardless of size, on top of an impact starting at 1.27% and climbing as the deposit shrinks. At roughly $41 in, the all-in cost was 5.9%; at the published $3.60 minimum it would take close to half the deposit.
Polymarket offers a deposit recovery tool for funds sent as the wrong token, and warns that unsupported tokens can be lost irrecoverably. Convert to USDC on an exchange and bridge from a layer-2 instead. Above $50,000 from any non-Polygon chain, Polymarket's own advice is to skip its bridge and use DeBridge, Across or Portal to limit slippage.
Four chains are live that the docs do not list
Comparing the docs table against the live endpoint turned up a second mismatch, the other way round: four chains accept deposits without appearing in the docs, and four chains in the docs no longer accept them.
Live but undocumented: Ink, Robinhood, Lightning and Hypercore. Two are genuinely interesting — the Robinhood chain accepts ETH, WETH, USDe and USDG, a brokerage-adjacent rail into a prediction market, and Ink carries nine wrapped-equity tokens (wTSLAx, wAAPLx, wNVDAx, wSPYx, wMSFTx, wGOOGLx, wMETAx, wAMZNx, wQQQx), so tokenised Tesla can mechanically become Polymarket collateral. Documented but gone: Abstract, Ethereal, Katana and Lighter.
236 accepted assets across 15 live chains, counted from /supported-assets on 9 October 2026.
The lesson is the one Polymarket's own note gives: the asset list is a live object, and any article's version of it — this one included — is a snapshot. Check the deposit screen before you send.
Withdrawals are free, with one dependency worth knowing
Getting money out prices better than getting it in, for a simple reason: your pUSD is already on Polygon, so the gas is Polygon gas whatever the destination. We quoted $100 of pUSD out to ten destinations.
Live withdrawal quotes for $100 of pUSD, 9 October 2026. Three destinations returned "cannot get quote".
Every EVM destination costs the same fraction of a cent, and the Polygon row came back marginally positive — a rounding artefact of the unwrap, not a profit. Solana, Tron and Bitcoin withdrawals would not quote, so "any supported chain" is the documented intent rather than what we observed.
The dependency deserves more attention than it gets. Coming out, pUSD is unwrapped to USDC through a single Uniswap v3 pool, with the interface enforcing less than 10 basis points of difference in output. Polymarket's own warning says that pool "may be exhausted" at times, and advises breaking the withdrawal into smaller pieces or waiting for a rebalance. A free, instant withdrawal is free and instant when one pool has depth. You can withdraw pUSD directly and skip the pool, with the caveat Polymarket flags itself: some exchanges no longer accept pUSD deposits.
Check the quote before you send
The deposit screen shows the same breakdown we measured. For readers outside the US and Polymarket's restricted countries, this is our affiliate link to polymarket.com.
Visit Polymarket.com →Affiliate link. 18+ only. Not for US residents or residents of restricted countries, including the UK. Prediction markets carry a substantial risk of loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
The US app is a different system entirely
Everything above is polymarket.com, the international product, funded by crypto. US residents trade on Polymarket US, a separate CFTC-regulated venue funded by card and bank that never touches a chain. Three of its rules catch people out.
From Polymarket US's deposit docs, read 9 October 2026. Card and ACH also cap at $2,000,000 over a rolling 60 days. Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo and USDC are also offered.
First, funds in flight. Card and ACH deposits credit instant buying power, so you can trade at once — but you cannot withdraw that money, or anything you win with it, until the deposit fully clears, which takes those 3–4 business days. Second, withdrawals return only to the original funding source, never a new or third-party account. Third, first-in-first-out: if you funded $100 by card and then $200 by bank, your first $100 out goes back to the card. Polymarket US attributes FIFO to anti-money-laundering compliance.
Two notes on wires, because the circulating numbers are wrong: the minimum is $5,000, not $500, and wire withdrawals are not available in the app at all — you must contact support. Deposits must also come from an account in your own name.
My verdict
Polymarket's deposit pricing is honest; its documentation of it is not quite. The platform takes nothing, the quote endpoint shows everything before you commit, and on the ordinary route — USDC from any layer-2 — funding an account costs about two cents per $100, which is as close to free as this industry gets.
The failure is that the numbers a depositor needs most are published wrongly: the docs' minimums are wrong on three chains, the chain list on eight, and two correct minimums are smaller than the gas needed to use them. None of that is expensive if you know it; all of it is if you follow a guide that copied the table.
What I would do: hold USDC, bridge from Base, Optimism, Arbitrum or Polygon, never send BTC or Tron USDT, and read the quote on the deposit screen before confirming. It is the same endpoint we measured, and it tells you the truth about your own transfer on the day you make it.
Related guides
- Polymarket Fees 2026: What You Actually Pay — the trading fees, once your money is on the platform.
- How Does Polymarket Work? UK Beginner's Guide 2026 — YES/NO shares, wallets and redemption, from scratch.
- Polymarket UK 2026: Is It Legal? Honest Guide — the restricted-country list and what it means in practice.
- Polymarket vs Kalshi 2026: Fees, Access and Who Settles — the two venues compared, including the US app.
- Polymarket Referral Code 2026: What You Actually Get — the deposit incentive on the US app, and why credits are not cash.
- Polymarket Resolution 2026: When UMA Decides — what happens to your money when a market is disputed.
Polymarket deposit FAQ
Does Polymarket charge a deposit fee?
No. We pulled live quotes for 13 routes on 9 October 2026 and the bridge's app-fee field returned 0 on every one. The docs' sample quote shows a 0.3% "Bridge fee", but that is an illustrative figure in an example response, not the live rate. What you do pay is gas on the source chain plus a bridge impact of about 0.018% on a USDC deposit.
What is the minimum deposit on Polymarket?
$2 on most chains, read from Polymarket's live /supported-assets endpoint on 9 October 2026, with Ethereum at $3 and Bitcoin at $3.60. Polymarket's own docs table says $7, $9 and $9; the best-ranking third-party guide says $10 for all three. The docs tell developers to call the endpoint rather than trust the table, and minimums are set per token, so they vary within a chain.
What is the cheapest way to deposit on Polymarket?
USDC from a layer-2. On 9 October 2026 a $100 USDC deposit cost $0.018 all-in from Optimism and Ink, $0.019 from Base, Monad and Hypercore and $0.022 from Polygon — ten of thirteen routes landed within four cents of each other. The expensive choices are the asset and two specific chains, not which layer-2 you use.
Is Tron cheap for Polymarket deposits?
No, it is the most expensive route available. Tron gas quoted at $2.277 on 9 October 2026, against $0.123 on Ethereum and under half a cent on every layer-2 tested — roughly 490 times Polygon's. It is also flat across sizes from $2 to $1,000, so the percentage cost is worst on small deposits. Tron prices gas in burnt TRX, so the cost follows the TRX price rather than network demand, which is why guides calling it cheap have not self-corrected.
What is pUSD on Polymarket?
pUSD, or Polymarket USD, is the dollar token on Polygon that all Polymarket trading settles in. Whatever you deposit is converted to it automatically — USDC and USDC.e are wrapped through what the docs call the Collateral Onramp, and anything else is swapped first, which is why non-USDC deposits cost more. On the way out pUSD is unwrapped back to USDC through a single Uniswap v3 pool; you can also withdraw pUSD directly, though some exchanges no longer accept it.
Can you deposit Bitcoin on Polymarket?
It is listed as supported, but we would not. Bitcoin gas quoted at $1.911 flat on 9 October 2026, on top of an impact of 1.27% or more — an all-in cost of 5.9% on a roughly $41 deposit. Quotes for $100 and above returned "cannot get quote" on repeated attempts, as did every Lightning quote at any size. Converting to USDC and bridging from a layer-2 is far cheaper.
How long do Polymarket deposits take?
The quote endpoint returned an estimated 27 seconds for every route, identically, which makes it a flat placeholder rather than a per-chain estimate — read it as under a minute when nothing goes wrong. On the US app it is documented and different: card and ACH deposits take 3–4 business days to fully clear and wires about 1 business day, though card and ACH credit instant buying power you can trade with first.
Why can't I withdraw my Polymarket US deposit?
Most likely because it has not fully cleared. Polymarket US calls uncleared money "funds in flight": you can trade with it at once, but neither it nor anything you win with it can be withdrawn for 3–4 business days on card and ACH. Two further rules apply — withdrawals must return to the same payment method used for the deposit, and they are processed first-in-first-out, which Polymarket US attributes to anti-money-laundering compliance.
Sources
All figures measured or read on 9 October 2026, quotes pulled for a $100 deposit per route at 14:55 UTC with outliers re-quoted three times. Quotes are estimates and move with gas and pool depth.
- Polymarket bridge: /supported-assets — the live asset list, 236 assets across 15 chains, with per-token minimums.
- Polymarket docs: supported assets — the published per-chain minimums table, and the note telling you to call the endpoint instead.
- Polymarket docs: bridge quote — the fee-breakdown fields, and the sample response showing a 0.3% app fee.
- Polymarket docs: deposit — pUSD, the Collateral Onramp, and the third-party bridge advice above $50,000.
- Polymarket docs: withdraw — "instant and free", and the Uniswap v3 pool exhaustion warning.
- Polymarket US docs: deposit methods — card, ACH and wire limits, clearing times and the $5,000 wire minimum.
- Polymarket US docs: withdrawal rules — funds in flight, original funding source, and FIFO.
- Polymarket help centre: trading fees — no Polymarket fees to deposit or withdraw USDC.
- Polymarket deposit recovery — the tool for funds sent as an unsupported token.