Polymarket charges takers a fee that varies by market category and peaks when a contract trades near 50¢. Makers — the orders that add liquidity to the book — pay nothing and can earn rebates instead. There is no deposit fee, no withdrawal fee, and no subscription. The entire cost of trading is the taker fee plus whatever spread you cross, and both are knowable before you click.

That's a meaningful change from how Polymarket used to work. As of the April 28, 2026 exchange upgrade, fees are charged in USDC at the moment your order matches, rather than being baked into share counts. They now show up as a line item in your trade history instead of quietly reducing the shares you received. This guide breaks down exactly what you pay, how the number is calculated, and where the real cost of a trade actually hides.

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The Short Answer

• Makers pay 0%. If your order rests on the book and gets filled, you're a maker. No fee — and you may earn a rebate.
• Takers pay a per-category fee, charged in USDC when the order matches.
• The fee peaks at a 50¢ share price and shrinks toward both extremes (1¢ and 99¢).
• Geopolitical and world-events markets are fee-free for both sides.
• No deposit, withdrawal, or account fees. Polymarket settles on Polygon; the only other cost is gas, which is abstracted away in normal trading.

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The Fee Formula

Polymarket's taker fee is defined by a single formula:

fee = C × feeRate × p × (1 − p)

where C is the number of shares traded, feeRate is the category rate, and p is the share price (between 0 and 1).

The p × (1 − p) term is what makes the fee peak at 50¢. At p = 0.50, that term is 0.25 — its maximum. As the price moves toward 1¢ or 99¢, the term collapses toward zero, and so does the fee. A trade at 30¢ incurs the exact same dollar fee as a trade at 70¢, because 0.3 × 0.7 equals 0.7 × 0.3. The fee is symmetric around the midpoint.

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Taker Fee Rates by Category

Each market category has its own feeRate:

The "peak fee" column is the most a taker pays per 100 shares, which only happens at a 50¢ price. Expressed against the $100 face value of 100 shares, that peak is feeRate ÷ 4 — so 1.75% for crypto, 1.25% for the 0.05 categories, 1.00% for the 0.04 categories, and 0.75% for sports.

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Worked Examples

The formula is easy to run yourself. Three buys of 100 shares in a crypto market (feeRate 0.07):

• At 50¢ (you spend $50): 100 × 0.07 × 0.50 × 0.50 = $1.75
• At 70¢ (you spend $70): 100 × 0.07 × 0.70 × 0.30 = $1.47
• At 90¢ (you spend $90): 100 × 0.07 × 0.90 × 0.10 = $0.63

Same in a sports market (feeRate 0.03), 100 shares at 50¢: 100 × 0.03 × 0.25 = $0.75.

The number that matters for sizing isn't the headline rate — it's the fee relative to the capital you actually deploy, and that relationship is not symmetric.

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Why Longshots Cost More Than They Look

The dollar fee is symmetric around 50¢, but the cost of the capital you put up is not. Buying low-priced longshots is proportionally the most expensive thing you can do, and the formula shows why.

Take the crypto market again. At 90¢ you spend $90 to buy 100 shares and pay $0.63 — about 0.7% of your stake. At 10¢ you spend just $10 for the same 100 shares and pay the same $0.63 — now 6.3% of your stake. Identical dollar fee, wildly different bite. A 10¢ contract has to clear nearly a 7% hurdle before you're in profit on fees alone.

This is the single most overlooked cost in prediction-market trading. Traders who load up on cheap longshots are paying the steepest effective fee on the platform without realizing it.

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Makers Don't Pay — They Get Paid

Only takers are charged. If you post a limit order that sits on the book and someone else fills it, you paid no fee and you qualify for the Maker Rebates Program.

This trips people up, because most crypto exchanges charge both a maker and a taker fee. Polymarket doesn't: its fee schedule lists a maker fee rate of 0 across every category, alongside the taker rates above. Makers earn rebates instead of paying — the inverse of the usual exchange model.

Taker fees fund a daily rebate pool that's redistributed to the makers who provided the liquidity that got taken. The share you earn is proportional to your filled liquidity, weighted by the same fee curve, calculated per market. The rebate rates are 20% in crypto and 25% in every other fee-charging category. Geopolitics markets, being fee-free, have no rebates.

Rebates are paid daily in USDC straight to your wallet, with a $1 minimum accrued before a payout goes out. For anyone running resting orders, the rebate program turns the fee structure from a cost into a potential income stream — the opposite of how takers experience it.

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What the April 2026 Upgrade Changed

Before April 28, 2026, fees were deducted in shares, which made them hard to see — the cost was absorbed into the number of shares you received rather than shown explicitly. The upgrade moved fees to USDC and made two changes worth knowing:

1. Fees are charged in USDC, so they appear as a readable line in your trade history instead of being hidden in share counts.
2. The fee is calculated when your order matches, not when you place it. A resting order's fee status is only decided at fill time — which is also what determines whether you ended up a maker or a taker.

For a trader, the practical upshot is transparency: you can now audit exactly what every fill cost you.

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Rounding and Minimums

Fees are rounded to five decimal places, and the smallest fee Polymarket will charge is 0.00001 USDC. Anything below that rounds to zero. In practice, very small trades — or trades at extreme prices where the p × (1 − p) term is tiny — can incur no fee at all.

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The Cost That Isn't a Fee: Spread

The taker fee is the explicit cost. The implicit one is the spread — the gap between the best bid and the best ask. When you take liquidity, you cross that spread, and on thin markets it can dwarf the fee.

This is why execution quality matters as much as the fee schedule. A market with a one-cent spread and a $1.00 fee on your trade is cheaper to enter than a market with a five-cent spread and no fee at all. If you're following a larger trader into a position, getting filled before the book moves is the difference between paying their price and paying the market's reaction to it — the core problem we covered in how to track Polymarket whales and in Block 0 copy trading.

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Trading Polymarket on FrenFlow

The fees above are Polymarket's — they apply wherever you place the order, because the trade settles on Polymarket's on-chain order book either way. What changes on FrenFlow is everything around the trade: you can copy proven wallets from the traders leaderboard in the same block they trade, your funds stay in your own self-custody wallet, and it works across the web app and Telegram. There's no subscription and no deposit or withdrawal fee on top of Polymarket's standard taker fee.

If you're choosing which markets to trade, the fee schedule is a genuine edge: a sports position costs less than half what the same-sized crypto position does, and geopolitical markets cost nothing at all. Factor it into sizing the same way you'd factor in the spread. For the full picture on automating it, see our guide to the best copy trading bot for Polymarket.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does Polymarket charge trading fees?

Yes, but only on the taker side. Orders that take liquidity from the book pay a fee in USDC that varies by market category and peaks at a 50¢ share price. Makers — orders that rest on the book and get filled — pay nothing and can earn rebates. There are no deposit, withdrawal, or subscription fees.

How much are Polymarket's fees?

The taker fee is shares × feeRate × price × (1 − price), where feeRate is 0.07 for crypto, 0.05 for economics/culture/weather/other, 0.04 for finance/politics/tech/mentions, and 0.03 for sports. The most you pay per 100 shares is at a 50¢ price: $1.75 in crypto, $1.25 in the 0.05 categories, $1.00 in the 0.04 categories, and $0.75 in sports. Geopolitical markets are fee-free.

Why is the Polymarket fee higher at 50¢?

Because the fee formula includes a price × (1 − price) term, which is largest (0.25) when the price is 0.50 and shrinks toward zero as the price approaches 1¢ or 99¢. The dollar fee is symmetric around the midpoint — a trade at 30¢ costs the same as one at 70¢.

Do makers pay fees on Polymarket?

No. Makers are never charged. Instead they qualify for the Maker Rebates Program, which pays a daily USDC rebate funded by taker fees — 20% in crypto and 25% in the other fee-charging categories, with a $1 minimum payout sent directly to the wallet.

Are there deposit or withdrawal fees on Polymarket?

Polymarket itself charges nothing to deposit or withdraw. Third-party on-ramps you might use to fund the account — Coinbase, MoonPay, or a bridge — can charge their own fees, and network gas applies, but none of that goes to Polymarket. Settlement happens on Polygon.

Which Polymarket markets are cheapest to trade?

Geopolitical and world-events markets are fee-free for both makers and takers. Among fee-charging categories, sports is the cheapest (feeRate 0.03), and crypto is the most expensive (feeRate 0.07). Buying low-priced longshots is proportionally the most expensive trade regardless of category, because the same dollar fee represents a much larger share of a small stake.