Polymarket US Sets a New Taker Fee and Adds a Maker Rebate

The schedule is published in the official documentation of Polymarket US, the CFTC-registered exchange operated by QCX LLC. It charges more for taking liquidity and pays traders who provide it.

What changed

The new schedule has four parts.

Here C is the number of contracts and p is the contract price in dollars. Fees are rounded to the nearest cent using banker’s rounding, which sends exact half-cent ties to the even cent.

The earlier schedule. Third-party reports published before October 1 described Polymarket US’s taker coefficient as 0.06, which we treat as the prior schedule. We have not reviewed an archived official copy of the old schedule, so we compare taker fees only. We cannot say how the old schedule treated makers or combos.

Worked examples

All examples assume 100 contracts on one side of a yes/no market. The p × (1 − p) term means fees are highest at 50 cents and shrink toward zero near 1 cent or 99 cents.

At 50 cents the math is 0.0695 × 100 × 0.50 × 0.50 = $1.7375, which rounds to $1.74. Under a 0.06 coefficient the same trade cost $1.50. That is an extra 24 cents on a $50 position, or about 16% more in fees at every price.

Note the pattern in the last column. In percentage terms, fees weigh most heavily on cheap long-shot contracts, even though the dollar fee peaks at 50 cents.

Maker rebate. If you post a resting limit order to buy 100 contracts at 50 cents and someone fills it, you receive 0.0125 × 100 × 0.50 × 0.50 = $0.3125, which rounds to $0.31.

Combo. A combo (multi-leg) contract priced at 25 cents carries an extra term that grows as the price falls. For 100 contracts: 100 × 0.25 × [0.0695 × 0.75 + 0.06 × 0.75⁴] = about $1.78. A single-leg contract at the same price would cost $1.30 in fees.

Why it matters

The change brings Polymarket US close to Kalshi on headline taker cost. Kalshi’s taker coefficient is widely reported as 0.07, which would make its peak fee $1.75 per 100 contracts against Polymarket US’s $1.74. We have not confirmed Kalshi’s coefficient directly in its fee-schedule PDF, which blocked our automated access. Crypto.com’s derivatives exchange publishes the same 0.07 taker formula for sports contracts.

With taker fees nearly level, the more useful differences between the two exchanges are now the maker side, combo pricing, market selection and state availability. For limit-order traders, a rebate instead of a fee is a meaningful change in incentives. Our Kalshi vs. Polymarket comparison covers those factors.

Who is affected

• Takers pay more. Anyone using market orders, or limit orders that cross the spread and fill immediately, is a taker.
• Makers earn a rebate when their resting orders fill.
• High-volume traders can recover 10% to 50% of taker fees under the volume tiers.
• Combo traders should check the preview, because the extra term is large on low-priced combos.

What to do next

Look at the fee line on the order ticket before you submit; it is the final word on what you pay. For a plain-English walk-through of fee formulas across platforms, read our guide to prediction-market fees. Our Polymarket US review covers funding, promotions and availability.