Polymarket API in Python: 3 Requests, No API Key Needed

Polymarket's market data is public. Three requests return one market's identity and outcome prices, the full order book for one outcome and the fee that market charges a taker, with no API key and no account. Read that way on 20 September 2026, 309 of the 1,000 most-traded open markets charged takers nothing, and 65 sports markets reported a rate of 0.03 where Polymarket's published sports rate is 0.05. The full table is on the Polymarket fee calculator.

Two services do the work. Gamma describes a market: its question, its outcomes, the token ID behind each outcome, whether it is open and what it charges. CLOB is the exchange: it returns the bids and asks for one token at one moment. A price from Gamma is a summary; only the order book says what can be bought or sold, and how much of it.

Download the Python script or open the notebook. Python 3.10 or later is enough, because the script uses only the standard library. It places no orders and never retries on its own. A second script, polymarket_fee_survey.py, repeats the fee count above over as many markets as you ask for.

Download table figures:CSVJSON with sources

A market is addressed by its slug, the last part of its address on polymarket.com. The first command lists the most-traded open markets with their slugs and what each charges. The second saves a snapshot of one of them. You can paste a whole polymarket.com address after --slug instead; the script keeps the last segment.

On Windows, replace python3 with py. The script writes a new folder each time and refuses to overwrite an existing one, so an earlier snapshot is never lost. Open the token IDs in outcomes.csv as text: they are more than 70 digits long, and a spreadsheet that reads them as numbers silently changes them.

python3 polymarket_snapshot.py --list 10
python3 polymarket_snapshot.py --slug another-fed-rate-hike-in-2026

Another Fed rate hike in 2026?
  Yes                      Gamma price 0.865
  No                       Gamma price 0.135
Order book for 'Yes': bid 0.86 (100 shares), ask 0.87 (3,846 shares), spread 0.01; book time 2026-09-20T20:57:45.725000+00:00
Taker fee for 100 shares at the 0.87 ask: $0.5655 (this market's rate is 0.05; an estimate, not a quote)
Research table: 5 rows, 7,178 wallets, kept separate from this market
Saved snapshot.json, outcomes.csv and research.csv to polymarket-example

Gamma returns outcomes, prices and token IDs as three separate lists, and each list arrives as a string of JSON inside the JSON. The script parses all three, checks that they are the same length and only then pairs them by position. If the lengths differ it stops, because a guess here attaches one outcome's price to another.

The first outcome is not always Yes: a sports market lists two team names. The script reads the book for the first outcome under its real label; add --outcome No, or a team name, to choose another. A label that does not match exactly one outcome is refused and the valid labels are printed.

Three identifiers are easy to confuse. The market ID names the listing in Gamma. The condition ID names the question on-chain. The token ID names one outcome of that question, and it is what CLOB's order book is keyed on. The script checks that the book it receives carries both the token it asked for and the market's condition ID before it keeps a single price.

{
  "question": "Another Fed rate hike in 2026?",
  "conditionId": "0x9b1a03b4…9e73b114",
  "outcomes": "[\"Yes\", \"No\"]",
  "outcomePrices": "[\"0.865\", \"0.135\"]",
  "clobTokenIds": "[\"8349889393…8777625\", \"5169973159…7696963\"]"
}

Gamma's price for an outcome is a summary. What can actually be bought is the lowest ask in the book and the size resting at it, and what can be sold is the highest bid. The script finds both by value, because the order of levels in the reply is not a promise, and reports a spread only when both sides exist.

One-sided books are normal. The run below is a settled NFL game read the same evening: the winner has bids at 99.9 cents and nobody left selling. The best ask and the spread are missing, and the script says so instead of writing zero. A zero there would read as a free share.

The book's own timestamp, Gamma's update time and the time of each request are kept as separate fields in snapshot.json. The requests run one after another, so the file describes three nearby moments and is not a single instant. A visible ask and its size do not guarantee a later fill.

Packers vs. Jets
  Packers                  Gamma price 0.9995
  Jets                     Gamma price 0.0005
Order book for 'Packers': bid 0.999 (1,073,704 shares), no asks, no spread without both sides; book time 2026-09-20T20:57:48.973000+00:00
Taker fee for 100 shares: $0 (this market's rate is 0)
Research table: 5 rows, 7,178 wallets, kept separate from this market
Saved snapshot.json, outcomes.csv and research.csv to onesided

Every market's Gamma record carries its own fee settings. feesEnabled says whether a trading fee applies at all. feeSchedule.rate is the coefficient in Polymarket's formula, fee = shares × rate × price × (1 − price), which only the taker pays. Every market in our read reported an exponent of 1, the published curve; the script estimates nothing for any other value.

The record matters because the category does not settle the question. Polymarket publishes 0.05 for sports, yet on 20 September 2026 the day's NFL game markets carried a rate of 0 and season-long winner markets carried 0.03. The script prints the taker fee for 100 shares at the best ask from the market's own rate, and snapshot.json includes a link that opens the fee calculator on the same numbers.

{
  "feesEnabled": true,
  "feeType": "economics_fees",
  "feeSchedule": {
    "exponent": 1,
    "rate": 0.05,
    "takerOnly": true,
    "rebateRate": 0.25
  }
}

def taker_fee(shares, price, rate):
    """Polymarket's published formula, rounded once to five decimal places."""
    return round(shares * rate * price * (1 - price) + 1e-12, 5)

taker_fee(100, 0.87, 0.05)   # 0.5655

The third request downloads the activity table from our Polymarket trader study: the share of wallets in profit by how many trades they closed, across 7,178 wallets in July 2026. It is saved as research.csv beside the market files and is never merged into them. It describes a historical population, not the market you selected.

The export carries its article address, section, observation window, population, sources and a content version. The version changes only when the published table changes, so a stored copy can be checked against the page later. Cite the article and its window when you use a figure.

Research access lists every format: Markdown for each study, CSV and JSON for each table and chart, and read-only tools for AI assistants. These are published research. They are not account data, a complete trade history or an order-routing API.

Every failure ends in one line that names the cause. Nothing is saved on an error, and a request that failed is never repeated automatically.

Download table figures:CSVJSON with sources

error: 'fed-decision-in-october' is an event with 4 markets, not one market. Pass one of its market slugs:
  fed-decreases-interest-rates-by-50-bps-after-october-2025-meeting
  fed-decreases-interest-rates-by-25-bps-after-october-2025-meeting
  no-change-in-fed-interest-rates-after-october-2025-meeting
  fed-increases-interest-rates-by-25-bps-after-october-2025-meeting

A good first project is a dated watchlist. Keep the exact market and token IDs, run the snapshot on a schedule and compare the same token with itself over time. Record a run that failed as a gap. A missing hour drawn as a flat line is the most common way a home-made price history goes wrong.

For more than a handful of markets, read Polymarket's pagination and real-time documentation before raising the request rate, and checkpoint what has been saved so a restart does not begin again from nothing. The Vultax terminal does this continuously across the venue; the script is for the question you want to own end to end.