Polymarket fees explained: what you pay to trade, deposit and withdraw, and the rates the docs don't list

The short answer

Polymarket charges one trading fee, to one side of the trade, and the amount depends on the market and the price. We read the fee settings of every open market on November 5, 2026, then checked them against fills on the chain.

• Only takers pay. An order that fills at once pays. An order that rests and gets filled pays nothing and earns a rebate.
• The formula is shares × rate × price × (1 − price). The rate runs from 0 to 0.07. Per share the fee peaks at 50¢.
• As a share of what you spend, cheap shares cost the most. A crypto buy pays 6.3% at 10¢, 3.5% at 50¢ and 0.7% at 90¢.
• The docs' table is not the whole schedule. It gives sports one rate, 0.05. We found 22,314 open sports markets at 0.03. One NFL game can carry both.
• 1,238 open markets are free. They held 22.0% of the 7-day volume on markets open that day.
• Moving money costs little. Polymarket charges nothing, and the swap on the way in or out quoted at about 0.02%.

If you trade through an app, add its builder fee: our check of 591 builder codes found rates from 0% to 4%.

The formula

The fee on a fill is:

fee = shares × rate × price × (1 − price)

Polymarket works it out when the trade matches, so you don't put a fee in your order. It is rounded to 5 decimal places, and the smallest fee is 0.00001 USDC, so very small trades near 0 or $1 can pay nothing.

Per share, the fee is the same at 30¢ and 70¢, and it peaks at 50¢. That peak gets misquoted. "1.75%" is 1.75¢ on a share that pays out $1. A share at 50¢ costs half that, so as a share of your money the crypto fee is 3.5%. Polymarket's table has it the same way: 100 shares at $0.50 are a $50 trade and pay $1.75.

For a buy, the percentage is simply rate × (1 − price). Here is the fee at each rate, per share and per $100 spent:

This is why long shots are expensive to take. The same crypto trade costs nine times as much at 10¢ as at 90¢, measured against the money you put in. It is also why resolution sniping near $1 is cheap to execute.

A round trip pays twice. Buy at 50¢ and sell at 50¢ on a crypto market, taking both ways, and you pay 3.5¢ a share on a 50¢ position: 7% of your stake, before the spread. If you hold to the end there is no second fee. Polymarket's fee docs list no charge for redeeming a winning share at $1, or for merging a YES and a NO back into $1, which our hedging guide covers.

A market buy costs more than its amount. The amount on a market buy is before fees, and fees go on top. Set maxSpend if the total has to fit a budget. Our order types guide covers the rest of what an order has to fit.

What every open market actually charges

Each market reports its own fee settings. This is what they said on November 5, 2026:

The two rows in bold are not in Polymarket's docs, which list sports at 0.05 with a 15% rebate. One more market, an old XRP window from February, still reports a 0.25 rate with an exponent of 2. Every other market has an exponent of 1.

Read the volume column with care. It covers markets that were open at the pull, as Gamma reports volume. A game that has finished or a 5-minute window that has closed isn't in it, so sports and crypto minute markets trade far more than this shows. Combos are also missing, since they trade through their own quote flow. Their rate is 0.05 with no maker rebate, whatever the legs are.

Sports has two rates, and the docs list one

Two fee types sit at 0.03. Together they are 22,314 markets, 10.7% of open sports markets, but 49% of the 7-day volume on open sports markets.

• sports_fees_v2 covers season-long futures such as the Champions League winner, the NBA Finals and the MLS Cup, plus much of CS2 and cricket.
• sports_fees_nfl_cfb_oct26 covers NFL and college football. The name suggests a schedule dated October 2026, which may or may not be permanent. Polymarket doesn't explain it.

It doesn't go by sport. NFL and college football markets are split: 20,183 at 0.03 and 22,884 at 0.05, and the same kinds of market appear in both groups. Nearly all of the week's volume was at 0.03 ($1.13M against $0.01M). The result is that one game can carry two rates. On the Jaguars at Ravens game of November 6, the moneyline is at 0.03 and the first-quarter moneyline is at 0.05.

We didn't take the API's word for it. We read 505 fills on the chain from 28 markets across the fee types, on November 5:

Of the 170 fills that paid, 152 sat exactly on the rate. 17 paid more, including the 2 on fee-free markets, which is what a builder fee on top looks like, though we didn't split it out here. One was too small to measure. Each match logs a fill for both sides, so the fills with no fee are the maker side, plus both sides on free markets.

For a sports bot this is real money. At 50¢, 0.03 costs $1.50 per $100 and 0.05 costs $2.50, so a strategy that passes on an NFL line can fail on the first-quarter line of the same game. Our sports guide covers the rest of that trade.

Fee-free markets

Polymarket's docs say geopolitical and world events markets are free. In practice 1,212 open markets had fees switched off and 26 more carried a zero rate. The biggest by 7-day volume:

The title won't always tell you. "Putin out as President of Russia by December 31, 2026?" is free. "Xi Jinping out before 2027?" pays the 0.04 politics rate. The zero-rate list also has album-release markets, such as Taylor Swift releasing an album in 2026.

Free cuts both ways for a bot. Taking costs nothing, which helps arbitrage legs. But the docs say fills on a fee-free market earn no maker rebate and no weighted volume toward a taker tier, so a market maker earns only the spread and any liquidity reward.

What you get back

Two programs return part of the fee. Our rebates study measures who collects them.

• Maker rebates pay resting orders a share of the taker fees in the same market: the percentages in the table above. They go out daily in pUSD once you have accrued at least $1.
• Taker rebates return 3% to 50% of your fees, based on your weighted volume over 30 days, from $2,000 for Bronze to $10M for Obsidian. A new rate applies only to trades after you reach the tier.

So the posted fee is the most you pay. A $3.50 crypto fee comes to $1.75 at the top tier. A new account pays all of it, which is why a seller's record doesn't transfer to a buyer's account.

Deposits, withdrawals and gas

Polymarket charges no deposit or withdrawal fee. Coinbase, MoonPay or your exchange may charge their own. Trading collateral is pUSD on Polygon, so most money goes through a conversion in each direction, and that has a small cost. We asked Polymarket's bridge quote endpoint for each route on November 5, 2026. Figures are the quote's total impact, and gas is the quote's separate line:

The quotes put $1,000 into Polymarket at about $0.24 and back out at about $0.19. The fee line in every quote was 0%. The example in Polymarket's docs shows a 0.3% bridge fee, but no route we tried charged one. A quote is an estimate for that moment, so ask again before a large transfer.

Things that can cost more than the table:

• Size. Over $50,000 from another chain, Polymarket suggests a third-party bridge. For large withdrawals it suggests splitting them.
• The withdrawal pool. pUSD is unwrapped and swapped to native USDC through a Uniswap v3 pool. The site holds that to under 0.1%, and the docs warn the pool can run out. Smaller amounts, waiting, or withdrawing pUSD directly are the ways around it, but some exchanges won't accept pUSD.
• Small deposits. Minimums run from $2 to $3.60 depending on the chain, and a deposit below the minimum isn't processed.

Gas is rarely a line item. Polymarket's relayer covers wallet operations for its smart wallets, so a bot on one needs a relayer key, not POL. A bot trading from a plain wallet pays a small amount of POL itself. Our wallets and keys guide explains which wallet does what.

Other Polymarket products

Three products have their own schedules, so don't mix them up with the table above:

The Polymarket US figures are from its fee schedule, in force since October 28, 2026. Its taker rebates start at $250,000 of volume, and from November 6 its tiers run on a rolling 30 days. The perps tiers are in the perps docs.

Read the fee from the market, not from a table

A bot that hardcodes "sports = 0.05" gets the fee wrong on about half of the volume in open sports markets, and may skip good trades. Ask the market instead:

curl -s "https://clob.polymarket.com/clob-markets/0xCONDITION_ID"

The fd field holds the rate, the exponent and whether only takers pay:

{ "fd": { "r": 0.03, "e": 1, "to": true } }

If there is no fd, the market has no fee. The same settings are on Gamma as feesEnabled, feeType and feeSchedule. Then work out the fee before you send the order:

def taker_fee(shares: float, price: float, rate: float, exponent: int = 1) -> float:
    return round(shares * rate * (price * (1 - price)) ** exponent, 5)

taker_fee(200, 0.50, 0.07)  # 3.5

Three habits follow from this:

1. Cache the rate per market, and refresh it. Rates differ inside one game, and Polymarket can change them. The docs also mention temporary fee holidays.
2. Compare the fee with the edge at the actual price. A 2¢ edge at 50¢ doesn't survive a crypto taker fee plus half a spread. Our cost guide adds up the full stack.
3. Rest when you can. A post-only order pays no fee and earns a rebate, in return for not always filling. In the busiest books the fee can exceed the half-spread, so resting matters more than a tight quote.

If you route through an app, a 0% builder code like Betmoar's adds nothing to these numbers, and a 4% code more than doubles them. For a bot you run yourself, Poly-Maker is an open-source starting point for the resting side.

Betmoar

Platforms & Tools

Web trading terminal and Discord bot on top of Polymarket, and the largest third-party interface by Polymarket's own count: rank 1 on the Builders leaderboard, with $2.2B attributed since the program began in October…

Platformfree · no builder fee

Poly-Maker

Open source · GitHub

Poly-Maker

Market Making

Open-source market-making bot for Polymarket. Quotes both sides of the book over WebSockets with configurable spreads, position merging and risk controls.

Botopen-source

Method

• Markets. Every market on Polymarket's Gamma API that was active and accepting orders, paged on November 5, 2026. We kept feesEnabled, feeType and feeSchedule for each. We count a market as free if fees are off or its rate is 0.
• Volume. As Gamma reports it, for markets open at the pull. It leaves out closed markets, so it is not the platform's volume by category.
• Chain check. For each fee type we took the four busiest markets priced 10–90¢, read their latest trades from the Data API, and decoded the OrderFilled events in up to eight transactions per market. Implied rate is fee ÷ shares ÷ (price × (1 − price)). The CLOB's fd matched Gamma on the markets we spot-checked. This is a sample, not an audit of every fill.
• Bridge quotes. POST /quote on Polymarket's bridge, using the example address from its docs, at $100, $1,000, $10,000 and $100,000. We use the quote's total impact field. Solana and Tron withdrawals weren't quoted because the example recipient is an EVM address. Quotes move no money.
• Script. scripts/fee-rates.mjs in our repository does the market pull and the quotes. It is plain Node with no keys.