How Polymarket Makes Money: $46.6 Million in Taker Fees in Four Months

Polymarket makes its money from a fee on the taker, the side of a trade that fills an order already resting in the book. Until January 2026 it charged nothing: its own documentation said in September 2025 that it did not charge "any type of trading fees". Fees started on 5 January on 15-minute crypto markets and by 30 March covered almost every category.

Between 1 January and 28 April 2026, takers on Polymarket's international exchange paid $46.6 million. $28.4 million of it fell in the last 28 days, once the fee reached sports, politics and the rest of the catalogue. Makers pay nothing, and part of every taker fee goes back to them as rebates.

No month of 2025 carried a fee. January 2026 brought $2.6 million, all of it from markets on the 15-minute crypto schedule; February $5.3 million; March $10.3 million; and April, to 11:00 UTC on the 28th, $28.4 million.

Most of the growth was coverage. The share of trading that paid a fee went from 12.0% in January to 65.7% in April. The fee on that volume held between 0.67% and 0.72% of the dollars traded until March, then rose to 1.16% in April under the new category rates.

Download chart figures:CSVJSON with sourcesSVG chart

Crypto paid two thirds of it, $31.3 million. Its short up-or-down markets carried the steepest curve of the early schedule, 1.56% of the trade at a 50% price, from the first week of January. Sports paid $14.4 million, and by April it had nearly caught up: $13.3 million against crypto's $14.1 million that month.

Politics traded $1.75 billion in the period and paid $14K. Its fee started on 30 March and applied only to markets created after that date, and most of the big political markets were older. For the same two reasons, a late start and older markets, 73% of sports volume in the period paid no fee.

Download table figures:CSVJSON with sources

Download chart figures:CSVJSON with sourcesSVG chart

Since April 2026 the fee is C × rate × p × (1 − p): the shares traded, times the category's rate, times the price, times one minus the price. It is largest at 50¢ and shrinks toward either end. At the rates read on 25 September 2026, a taker who buys 100 shares at 50¢ in a sports market pays $1.25. Because the fee falls more slowly than the price, it is a larger share of the stake on long shots: at 10¢ a crypto taker pays 6.3% of what they spend. The Vultax fee calculator prices any trade.

A new rate applied only to markets created after it took effect, so each market carries its own schedule and older markets kept theirs.

Download table figures:CSVJSON with sources

A fee raises the bar a trade has to clear. Buying one share at price p costs p plus the fee, rate × p × (1 − p), so the share has to win more often than its price says just to come out even: p × (1 + rate × (1 − p)). At the rates read on 25 September 2026, a sports share bought at 50¢ has to win 51.25% of the time, not 50%. A crypto share bought at 10¢ has to win 10.63% of the time, and one bought at 90¢, 90.63%.

Counted in points, the fee bites hardest in the middle. rate × p × (1 − p) is largest at 50¢: 1.25 points for sports and 1.75 for crypto. Counted against the money spent, it bites hardest on long shots, because the stake shrinks faster than the fee. The fee is rate × (1 − p) of the stake: 6.3% at 10¢ in crypto and 0.7% at 90¢.

That is why the same schedule feels light to someone buying favourites and heavy to someone buying cheap contracts. A trader who buys 5¢ crypto long shots pays 6.65% of the stake on every fill, before any spread.

Download chart figures:CSVJSON with sources

Two trades written out show where a fee goes. 100 sports shares at 50¢ cost $50.00 and carry a fee of 100 × 0.05 × 0.50 × 0.50 = $1.25, $51.25 in all. The maker on the other side gets 15% of the fee back, $0.19, and Polymarket keeps $1.06.

100 crypto shares at 10¢ cost $10.00 and carry a fee of 100 × 0.07 × 0.10 × 0.90 = $0.63, $10.63 in all. 20% of the fee, $0.13, goes to the maker and $0.50 stays with Polymarket. Both use the rates read on 25 September 2026 and the rebate shares Polymarket documents; the rebates it actually pays out are not published.

Makers pay nothing and receive part of the taker's fee as a rebate: 20% in crypto markets and 25% elsewhere on the April schedule, and 15% in sports since July. On those documented shares, $36.5 million of the $46.6 million stayed with Polymarket; the rebate payouts themselves are not published. Apps that route orders can add a builder fee of their own on top, and that fee goes to the builder.

Polymarket US is a separate exchange, registered with the CFTC, which Polymarket entered by buying QCEX for $112 million in July 2025. Its fee has risen in steps: a taker fee of 1 basis point of premium, raised to 10 in January 2026, then a price-weighted formula whose taker coefficient went from 0.06 to 0.0695 in September 2026, according to its filings with the CFTC. Its trading is not in the figures above.

Data is another line. ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, agreed to invest up to $2 billion and to distribute Polymarket's event data, and in February 2026 launched a Polymarket signals and sentiment product for institutions. Polymarket's partnerships with X and Dow Jones put its prices in front of their audiences without disclosed financial terms, and on 3 September 2026 it opened a perpetual-futures exchange for users outside the U.S. The company told CNBC in June 2026 that its annualized revenue was "well above $1 billion".

Only the first line below can be measured from public data, and this study measures it to 28 April 2026. The others are announced, filed with a regulator or launched, with no revenue published for any of them.

Download table figures:CSVJSON with sources

The trades are the public Polymarket-v1 dataset by Boka Qin and Rui Yang: 714,691,643 fills on Polymarket's international exchange from 1 January 2025 to 11:00 UTC on 28 April 2026, when the exchange moved to new contracts. For each fill Vultax applied the fee Polymarket charged at the time: the market's own fee type, the formula and rate in force on the fill's date, including the 30–31 March switchover, and only where the maker's order carried a fee, which marks a fee-enabled market.

The estimate was checked against the fees Polymarket's contracts actually collected on-chain, the taker's fee net of the fee module's refund, in seven windows between 20 January and 27 April 2026: $727,813 estimated against $724,786 collected, 0.4% apart and within 2.3% in every window.

The dataset's fee_usdc column is not a fee. It records the maker order's fee field, which Polymarket refunds in the same transaction; in the seven windows it came to between 9 and 26 times what takers paid. Polymarket US and trading after 28 April are not in these numbers.