Polymarket Fees 2026: What You Actually Pay

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Nearly every page that explains Polymarket fees prints the same line: Crypto 7%, Sports 5%, Politics 4%, Geopolitics free. Those four numbers are correct and the word attached to them is not. They are coefficients in a formula, not percentages of your money, and the difference is not small — 7% of a $50 trade would be $3.50, while Polymarket's own published fee table charges $1.75 for exactly that trade.

Get that wrong and you will mis-price every edge you think you have. A 2% edge looks like it survives a 1.75% fee and dies against a 3.5% one, and the same trade can be either depending on whether you measure the fee against your stake or against what the position pays out. So this guide does the arithmetic rather than repeating the table.

I read both fee schedules on 3 October 2026 — Polymarket.com's and the Polymarket US app's, which was republished exchange-wide two days ago — and recomputed every row below from the published formula rather than copying the summary. New to the platform? Start with our Polymarket explainer and come back for the costs.

What Polymarket fees are in 2026: the short answer

The first thing to settle is which Polymarket you are on, because the two products do not share a fee schedule and most guides blur them together.

Two things fall straight out of that table. Polymarket takes nothing from the money going in or the money coming out — every cent it charges is charged at the moment a trade fills. And on the international site the fee depends entirely on what you are trading: the identical $500 position costs $17.50 in a Crypto market, $10.00 in a Politics market and nothing at all in a Geopolitics one.

Perps is a third product with its own schedule and is not covered here. Everything below is the two exchanges above.

The fee formula, and why "7%" is the wrong number

Polymarket publishes the formula openly. On the international site it is fee = C × feeRate × p × (1 − p), where C is the number of shares and p is the price you paid. The US app writes the same shape as Fee = Θ × C × p × (1 − p). The term that gets dropped in every summary is the last one.

That (1 − p) is what makes the fee behave nothing like a percentage. Polymarket spells out the consequence in a sentence worth memorising: "a trade at 30¢ incurs the same dollar fee as a trade at 70¢." The fee is symmetric around a 50% probability and collapses towards both ends of the book, which is the opposite of how a commission works.

Here is the same crypto market, 100 shares, read three ways. The dollar column is Polymarket's published figure; the two percentage columns are that figure divided by what you staked and by what the position pays if it wins.

Read the fourth column from the top down. The only place the crypto fee gets anywhere near 7% of your money is a 1¢ longshot — and there the fee is seven cents, which nobody is going to feel. At the midpoint, where most liquidity sits, the honest number is 3.5%. In the fifth column, which is the one that matters if you think in terms of what the bet returns, the worst case across the whole book is 1.75%.

The practical upshot: the fee is worst in percentage terms exactly where it is smallest in cash terms, and biggest in cash terms exactly where it is middling in percentage terms. If you are grinding 90¢ favourites the fee is close to irrelevant; if you are taking coin-flips in size it is the single largest line item you face.

Polymarket.com taker fees by category in 2026

On the international site the coefficient changes with the category, and so does the slice of collected fees that goes back to market makers. The first three columns are Polymarket's published table; the last two I computed from the formula at the 50¢ worst case.

Geopolitics is the row people miss. Polymarket's wording is unambiguous — "Geopolitical and world events markets are fee-free. Polymarket does not charge fees or profit from trading activity on these markets." If a question can be framed as a world event, trading it costs nothing at all on the taker side.

Crypto is the other end. At 0.07 it is nearly double Politics, and it is the only category whose maker rebate is cut to 20% rather than 25%, so proportionally more of the fee is kept. That pairing — most expensive to take, least generous to make — tells you where the house economics are.

One more line from the same page is worth holding on to: "Makers are never charged fees. Only takers pay fees." On Polymarket.com, posting a limit order that someone else hits is free, every time, in every category. That is a structural discount available to anyone willing to wait for a fill instead of crossing the spread.

Polymarket US fees: the schedule that changed on 1 October 2026

The US app is a separate exchange with separate accounts, and its fee page carries a date stamp most write-ups have not caught up with: "Effective exchange-wide from 10 AM ET, Thursday October 1, 2026." Two days old at the time of writing.

The headline difference is that there are no categories. Where the international site runs five different coefficients, the US app runs one — Θ of 0.0695 for takers, and −0.0125 for makers, which means the maker is not merely exempt but paid. Here are the published rows at the prices that matter.

The curve is symmetric, so $0.90 costs the same as $0.10 and $0.99 the same as $0.01. Against the international site, a US trader pays marginally less at the midpoint — $1.74 rather than $1.75 — and considerably more on anything that would have been Politics or Geopolitics over there. A $500 politics position at 50¢ costs $17.38 on the US app and $10.00 on Polymarket.com, and the fee-free geopolitics category has no US equivalent at all.

Two mechanical details that cost real money if you do not know them. Fees are rounded with banker's rounding — round half to even, so $0.025 becomes $0.02 and $0.035 becomes $0.04 — and "On small trades (low quantity or prices near $0.00 or $1.00), the fee can round down to $0.00." And cancelling costs nothing: "If your order is canceled, expires, or is rejected, no fee is charged." Resting an order and pulling it is free on both exchanges.

Combos cost more, on a curve almost nobody publishes

This is the part of the US schedule that no competing guide I could find covers at all. Multi-leg combo trades do not use the standard curve; they use Fee = C × p × [0.0695 × (1 − p) + 0.06 × (1 − p)⁴], and that fourth-power term bites hardest exactly where combo traders live — at long odds.

The $0.10 and $0.50 rows are Polymarket's own worked examples; the $0.25 and $0.75 rows I calculated from the published curve. Note what the shape does: at even money a combo costs about a tenth more than the same trade on the standard schedule, and by the time you are buying a 10¢ parlay it costs almost two-thirds more.

The maker side is unchanged — combo fills still pay the −0.0125 rebate — and the fee is calculated on the combo as a whole, not leg by leg. If you build multi-leg positions, price the extra in before you decide a combo beats buying the legs separately.

Polymarket deposit and withdrawal fees: zero, but check your on-ramp

Searches for Polymarket withdrawal fees run at several hundred a month, and the answer is short enough to be suspicious: there are none. It is the honest answer on both products, with one caveat that is not Polymarket's to fix.

Polymarket says it plainly on the international side — "There are also no Polymarket fees to deposit or withdraw USDC (though intermediaries like Coinbase or MoonPay may charge their own fees)" — and the US withdrawals page is headed "Withdraw your cash balance securely and for free".

That parenthesis is where the actual money goes. A card on-ramp into USDC will routinely take 3–4% before anything reaches your wallet, which dwarfs anything you will pay in trading fees all month. Fund from an exchange you already hold USDC on and the transfer is close to free; fund by card and the on-ramp is your biggest single cost. One more US-side rule to plan around: withdrawals must return to the original funding source, and only once the deposit has fully cleared.

Rebates: the part of Polymarket's fees you can get back

Both exchanges hand some of the fee back, on completely different models, and the international ladder is the more generous of the two by a distance.

On Polymarket.com the Taker Rebate Program scores you on 30-day Weighted Volume, where wV = Trade Size × (1 − Entry Price) × Category Weight. Category weights run Sports 1.0, Politics/Finance/Mentions/Tech 1.3, Economics/Culture/Weather/Other 1.7, Crypto 2.3, and Geopolitics 0 — the fee-free category earns you nothing towards a tier, which is the trade-off for trading it for free.

Bronze is the tier that matters for ordinary traders, and it is more reachable than the headline number suggests because of the weighting. A $500 crypto position bought at 50¢ earns 500 × 0.50 × 2.3 = $575 of weighted volume from a $500 stake, so four such trades in a month clear the $2,000 threshold. The same $500 in a sports market earns $250 and would need eight.

The US app works on cash volume instead, and sets the bar far higher — rebates only begin above $250,000 of prior-month taker volume, at 10%, rising to 25% above $1m and 50% above $10m. Its one quirk is worth knowing: taker volume is measured as what you put at risk, not face value, so selling 1,000 contracts at $0.30 counts as $700, not $1,000. There is also an "Accelerated Tier Placement" route for traders who can evidence trailing volume on a rival exchange.

How Polymarket's fees compare with Kalshi's

Close enough that fees should not decide it. Kalshi uses the same conceptual model — it charges "a transaction fee on the expected earnings on the contract", which is the same p × (1 − p) shape by another name — and when we read its published fee schedule on 1 October 2026 the taker range was $0.07 to $1.75 per 100 contracts. That is within a cent of both Polymarket schedules at the top.

Kalshi matches Polymarket on cancellations too: "there are no fees associated with canceling a resting order." Where they genuinely diverge is maker treatment — Polymarket.com never charges makers, while on Kalshi "in some cases, markets will have maker fees associated with them."

Since the top-line rates are effectively tied, the decision comes down to access, funding rails and who settles a disputed market. We work through all three in our full Polymarket vs Kalshi comparison.

If you are reading this from the UK

Then the fee schedules above are, for now, academic. The United Kingdom is one of 39 countries Polymarket lists as completely restricted, so you cannot open a Polymarket.com account, and the US app is limited to US residents. Polymarket's terms separately prohibit using a VPN to get around its geographic restrictions, and we are not going to suggest otherwise.

What the numbers are still good for is calibration. A 1.75%-of-payout ceiling on a liquid two-way market is a sharper price than almost anything on the UK high street, and it is a useful stick to measure a bookmaker's overround against. If you want the full legal position rather than the summary, we keep it current in our Polymarket UK guide, and the Polymarket hub collects everything else.

My verdict: what Polymarket's fees actually cost you

Cheap, if you read the schedule properly and trade accordingly. The worst case anywhere on either exchange is 1.75% of what a position pays out, it falls away fast towards both ends of the book, and three decisions move it more than anything else you can do.

Pick the category. The same $500 at even money costs $17.50 in Crypto, $12.50 in Sports, $10.00 in Politics and nothing in Geopolitics. If a question exists in more than one category — and around major world events they often do — check both before you click.

Post, do not take. Makers are never charged on Polymarket.com and are paid on the US app. Crossing the spread on a coin-flip is the single most expensive thing you can do on either venue, and patience is the only discount that needs no volume tier.

And if you are on the US app, think twice about combos. A 10¢ parlay costs 63% more than the same exposure on the standard curve, which is a tax most traders are paying without having read the formula that charges it. The three things to re-check before any big position: which exchange you are on, which category you are in, and whether you are the maker or the taker.

Related guides

• Polymarket vs Kalshi 2026: Fees, Access and Who Settles — the full comparison, including who resolves a disputed market.
• How Does Polymarket Work? UK Beginner's Guide 2026 — YES/NO shares, resolution and wallets, from scratch.
• Polymarket Referral Code 2026: What You Actually Get — the four referral programmes, and which one pays you.
• Polymarket UK 2026: Is It Legal? Honest Guide — what the 39-country restricted list means in practice.
• Crypto Casino Withdrawal Fees 2026 — the same exercise on the casino side of the fence.
• Crypto Casino Rakeback Explained 2026 — tiered rebates, but with a house edge underneath them.

Polymarket fees FAQ