Polymarket Trading Fees

Yes — since January 2026. It is a per-trade fee charged only to the aggressive (taker) side of every fill, at match time. Passive (maker) orders pay nothing — makers instead receive a daily rebate funded by these fees.

Of every dollar in taker fees, roughly half is paid back to users as rewards — LP incentives, maker and taker rebates and referrals — and the rest is not returned to traders. The fee & reward flow page breaks it down. That residual is not profit — it excludes Polymarket’s operating costs and other flows we can’t see on-chain.

A small group of high-frequency traders dominates: the top few hundred wallets account for most of the total, while the typical (median) wallet has paid under a dollar. The fee leaderboard ranks every payer.

Trading fees launched in January 2026. Two contract eras followed: V1 (Jan–May 2026, CTF Exchange) charged buy-fees in outcome-token shares, which we value and scale to the USDC actually collected; V2 (Apr 2026 onward, CLOB) charges natively in USDC, taken as-is.

The taker fee is roughly baseRate × shares × price × (1 − price), where the base rate depends on the market category. Use the fee calculator to estimate a specific trade.

Yes — only takers pay. Post passive (maker) limit orders instead of crossing the spread and you pay no fee at all; makers even earn a rebate. Some categories, such as geopolitics, are fee-free entirely. The fee calculator shows the exact cost for any trade.

Decoded on-chain from the OrderFilled events of Polymarket’s CTF Exchange (V1) and CLOB V2 contracts on Polygon — the same fee value the contract charges, denominated to USD per era. No third-party aggregator.