Polymarket charges a flat 0.75 percent fee on the taker side of every trade and zero on the maker side, which means a round-trip position (enter as taker, exit as taker) costs 1.50 percent in venue fees, a passive limit order that gets filled costs nothing, and a $1,000 buy executed against the book pays exactly $7.50 to the protocol. The polymarket fee schedule has no tiered rebates, no volume discounts, and no separate listing fee; the CLOB matches at the quoted price and the fee comes out of the resolved payout, not the entry premium. Compared to a typical US sportsbook vig of 4 to 6 percent on a two-way market, the polymarket trading fees breakdown puts the venue at roughly one-quarter to one-third the cost of equivalent retail betting. Below is the full structure, what each fee component actually pays for, and how the maker-zero design shapes the order book.
The full polymarket fee schedule
Polymarket runs on a central limit order book (CLOB) where every trade has two sides: a maker who posted a resting limit order to the book and a taker who removed that resting order by submitting a marketable order against it. The fee structure follows the standard maker-taker convention used by most modern exchanges, but with one important simplification: the maker fee is exactly zero rather than a small rebate or a small charge. Only the taker pays, and the taker always pays the same rate.
| Side | Fee rate | How it is charged | Where it applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker (resting limit order) | 0.00 percent | Not charged | All CLOB markets |
| Taker (marketable order) | 0.75 percent | Deducted from resolved payout | All CLOB markets |
| Round-trip (taker in, taker out) | 1.50 percent | Sum of two taker legs | Active trading |
| Round-trip (maker in, taker out) | 0.75 percent | One taker leg | Patient entry, fast exit |
| Round-trip (maker in, maker out) | 0.00 percent | Both legs passive | Pure market making |
| Withdrawal / deposit | 0.00 percent on Polygon | Gas only | USDC.e on Polygon |
That is the entire schedule. There are no maker rebates (a few CEXs pay makers a small percentage to encourage liquidity; Polymarket does not), no size-tier discounts (Binance and Coinbase tier their fees by 30-day volume; Polymarket does not), and no separate listing or reporting fees passed through to traders. The polymarket clob fees are a single number per side, applied uniformly to every wallet from a $10 retail bet to a $1 million whale fill.
How the 0.75 percent is actually deducted
The mechanic that surprises new traders is that the taker fee is not deducted at the moment of trade. The premium you pay at execution is the quoted price, full stop. The fee is taken at resolution: when the market settles and the YES holders are paid out, the protocol withholds 0.75 percent of the gross payout before crediting the winners. Losers do not pay an additional fee on their entry; their entry premium is simply gone (which is the normal outcome for a binary contract that resolves against you). The effective per-trade taker rate is therefore 0.75 percent of the side that won the contract, not 0.75 percent of every dollar that entered the market.
For arithmetic-minded readers, that means a $1,000 long position purchased at 0.40 (so 2,500 shares of YES, costing $1,000) that resolves YES at 1.00 pays out 2,500 minus the 0.75 percent fee on the $2,500 gross, equal to $2,481.25 net. Profit is $1,481.25 rather than the $1,500 a fee-free version would produce. The 0.75 percent comes out of the $2,500 winnings, not the $1,000 stake.
Maker vs taker, illustrated
Round-trip cost: maker, taker, and mixed routes on a $1,000 position
Why the maker fee is zero (and why it stays that way)
The polymarket maker taker fees structure is a deliberate liquidity-bootstrap decision. A new prediction market has the chicken-and-egg problem common to every exchange: traders want tight spreads before they post liquidity, and makers want flow before they quote tight. Setting the maker fee to exactly zero (rather than a small charge) tilts the marginal economics in favour of any wallet willing to post a passive limit order. Setting it to a positive rebate would do more, but rebates come out of taker revenue and Polymarket runs a relatively thin margin on the 0.75 percent taker rate.
The zero-maker design has three measurable consequences I see in the data. First, the resting book on liquid markets is unusually deep for the dollar volume; politics markets with $5 million of weekly volume routinely show $20,000 to $40,000 of resting size within one cent of the mid. Second, the percentage of volume that crosses as market-maker versus aggressive flow runs higher than on equivalent CEX order books for similar dollar volumes. Third, traders who can wait do wait; the median fill latency for limit orders posted within two cents of the mid is over four minutes, which is a long time by exchange standards but rational behaviour given the zero maker cost.
The trade-off the taker pays for
The flip side is that the taker fee is doing all the work of funding the venue. At 0.75 percent it is not a negligible number; on a high-frequency strategy that turns over capital 20 to 50 times per month, the taker fee is the single largest variable cost in the P&L and frequently exceeds the realised edge. The polymarket trading fees breakdown for a typical retail wallet looks like this: a $5,000 bankroll, four to six round-trips per month, average position size $400, taker on both legs of roughly 80 percent of trades, taker fee paid per month around $25 to $35. That is 0.5 to 0.7 percent of bankroll per month flowing to the protocol, which is sustainable for a profitable edge and corrosive for a marginal one.
Where the fee goes after it leaves your wallet
The 0.75 percent does not disappear into a single bucket. The protocol publishes the high-level allocation in its help docs: the fee funds the resolution oracle (UMA optimistic oracle), the operational cost of running the matching engine and front-end, and the development budget for new features. Polymarket does not currently distribute fee revenue to a token (the venue has no live token at time of writing) so the fee is purely operational rather than redistributive. This is different from some DEX models where a portion of trading fees accrues to liquidity providers; on Polymarket the makers are uncompensated except by the spread they choose to quote.
The single largest cost line inside the protocol is, by my reading of public statements, the oracle dispute bond and the dispute-resolution flow. UMA-based resolution requires a bond to be posted on every market, and disputed markets escalate to a token-holder vote that takes real time and real economic incentive to clear. The 0.75 percent fee is calibrated to cover that ongoing oracle expense plus margin for the rest of the operating stack.
How fees interact with gas, slippage, and edge
The taker fee is one of four costs on a Polymarket trade. The other three are gas (the on-chain transaction cost for placing the order on Polygon), slippage (the price impact of crossing more than the top-of-book size), and adverse selection (the systematic tendency for a market to move against you after you fill). The full polymarket gas fees breakdown is covered separately and lands at roughly $0.01 to $0.05 per order under normal Polygon conditions, so it is a rounding error compared to the taker fee on any position over about $100.
Slippage is the variable cost. On a thin market with $500 of size at the top level, a $2,000 taker order will eat through three or four book levels and pay an effective price 1.5 to 3 percentage points worse than the touch. Combine that with the 0.75 percent taker fee and the total round-trip cost on a thin market can reach 5 to 8 percent — meaningfully worse than the headline fee number suggests. This is the case where the order book structure matters more than the fee schedule.
The math for a copy-trade subscriber
For a Poly Syncer copy-trade subscriber, the fee math collapses to a simple rule. The mirrored fills inherit the source wallet’s taker-vs-maker mix; if the source wallet trades 80 percent taker (typical for momentum strategies) the subscriber pays 0.75 percent on roughly 80 percent of fills. On a $10,000 mirror bankroll turning over 1.5 times per month, that is approximately $90 per month in venue fees plus another $5 to $15 in slippage drag. Net of fees, a source wallet that produces 4 percent monthly gross edge passes through 2.5 to 3 percent monthly to the subscriber.
What the free maker tier does not change
Three things the zero maker fee does not change. First, the maker is still exposed to adverse selection; if your limit order gets filled, it is disproportionately because the price was about to move against your side. The fee being zero does not make adverse selection free. Second, the maker still pays gas for posting and (sometimes) cancelling orders. On Polygon those costs are small but non-zero, and a market maker who reposts orders thousands of times per day will pay meaningful gas in aggregate. Third, the maker still requires capital to be posted as collateral; the order ties up USDC in escrow until it fills or cancels, which has an opportunity cost equal to whatever return that capital could earn elsewhere.
The combined effect is that “zero maker fee” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for profitable market making. The market maker who turns the zero-fee structure into actual P&L is doing more than just collecting the absence of a charge; they are managing inventory risk, scoring information flow, and quoting spreads that compensate for the adverse selection that the fee schedule does not.
How polymarket clob fees compare across venues
Putting the polymarket fee schedule next to other prediction-market and trading venues helps frame the number. Sportsbooks at 4 to 6 percent vig are roughly 5 to 8 times more expensive on equivalent two-way exposure. Kalshi charges per-contract fees that depend on price, typically working out to 1 to 7 cents per contract, which on a 50-cent price is 2 to 14 percent equivalent — a wider range, lower at high prices, higher at low. Crypto perp DEXs charge 0.05 to 0.10 percent taker fees, which is one-tenth of Polymarket, but prediction markets and perps are not directly comparable products. The closest peer in spirit is Kalshi, and for low-priced contracts (long-tail YES at 5 to 10 cents) Polymarket is materially cheaper; for high-priced contracts (heavy favourites at 90 cents plus) Kalshi can be cheaper.
The polymarket fee schedule is not the cheapest venue on the internet, but it is the cheapest reasonable venue for binary prediction markets at the size and liquidity Polymarket runs. The 0.75 percent taker rate is the price of admission for access to the deepest peer-to-peer event book that exists right now.
Practical advice for managing the fee
Three practical patterns I see profitable traders adopt to manage the polymarket trading fees breakdown. First, default to limit orders rather than market orders, even at the cost of fill latency; posting one tick inside the resting bid or ask flips the taker fee to a maker fee on a meaningful share of fills. Second, batch positions; rather than nibbling at a market with ten $100 orders, post one $1,000 limit order. The taker fee is the same percentage but the gas cost amortises over a larger trade. Third, avoid taker orders on thin books; the combined fee-plus-slippage cost on a book with under $1,000 of resting size routinely exceeds 3 percent of the trade, which is more than the realised edge of all but the best strategies. On thin books, post limit orders and walk away.
The deeper structural point is that how Polymarket makes money is identical to the question of how much you pay to use it. The 0.75 percent taker fee is the venue’s revenue model, the operational budget, and the friction on your strategy all at once. Understanding the fee structure is identical to understanding the venue’s incentives, and both lead to the same practical conclusion: provide liquidity when you can, consume it only when the edge justifies the 0.75 percent toll, and treat the fee as a cost of doing business rather than a hidden tax.
Frequently asked questions
What are the polymarket maker taker fees?
Polymarket charges 0.75 percent on the taker side of every trade and 0.00 percent on the maker side. A taker is a wallet that submits a marketable order that crosses against resting liquidity; a maker is a wallet that posted the resting liquidity. The fee is deducted from the gross payout at market resolution rather than at the moment of trade. There are no volume tiers, no rebates, and no size discounts.
How much does a round-trip Polymarket trade cost in fees?
A round-trip where both entry and exit are aggressive (taker-taker) costs 1.50 percent of the position. A patient entry followed by an aggressive exit (maker-taker) costs 0.75 percent. Pure market making (maker-maker on both legs) costs zero in venue fees. On a $1,000 round-trip position the dollar amounts are $15.00, $7.50, and $0.00 respectively.
Does Polymarket pay a rebate to makers?
No. The maker fee is exactly zero, not a positive rebate. A maker pays no fee but does not receive one either, which is different from some centralised exchanges that pay makers a small percentage to incentivise liquidity. Maker profitability on Polymarket comes from the quoted spread net of adverse selection, not from a rebate stream.
Are there volume discounts on Polymarket clob fees?
No. The 0.75 percent taker fee applies uniformly to every wallet regardless of 30-day volume, lifetime volume, or position size. A $10 retail bet pays the same percentage as a $1 million whale fill. This is different from CEXs like Binance and Coinbase which tier their fees by volume.
How does the Polymarket fee compare to a sportsbook?
A typical US sportsbook two-way market carries 4 to 6 percent vig, baked into the offered odds rather than disclosed as an explicit fee. Polymarket’s 0.75 percent taker fee (or 1.50 percent round-trip) is roughly one-quarter to one-third the cost of equivalent sportsbook exposure on the same event. The trade-off is that Polymarket requires self-custody, on-chain settlement, and the user to manage their own resolution risk.