Polymarket Liquidity Rewards: $150,000 a Day, and Not Where the Trading Is

Polymarket pays traders to keep its order books full. Vultax read every reward listed by its public API late on 13 September 2026: liquidity rewards on 17,866 markets worth $149,859 a day, paid daily to makers whose resting orders sit near the midpoint.

The money does not go where trading is heaviest. Finance and weather markets took 27.3% of daily rewards on 5.9% of the day's volume, while esports took 0.6% of rewards on 5.5% of volume. Rewards sit on markets that trade little on their own, and the typical reward is small and shared among everyone quoting: the median rewarded market offered $3 a day in total.

Vultax read Polymarket's order-book current-rewards endpoint at 23:57 UTC on 13 September 2026. It lists each rewarded market's daily rate, maximum qualifying spread and minimum order size. The markets were matched to every open event on Polymarket's Gamma API, read between 00:01 and 00:03 UTC on 14 September, for tags, 24-hour volume and quoted spread. Categories are Vultax's grouping of Polymarket's tags; a market with several tags takes the first of esports, crypto, sports, politics, geopolitics, economy, finance, tech, weather and science, and up-or-down crypto markets are counted on their own.

Polymarket's rewards reach about one open market in ten: 17,860 of 185,959 markets open for trading carried one. Most are small. The median rewarded market offered $3 a day in total, 79% offered $5 or less, and 882 offered $50 or more. The largest on the day were a market on whether the Clarity Act becomes law in 2026, at $2,502 a day, the two leading September Fed outcomes at about $1,000 each, and two markets on Sweden's next prime minister, for Ulf Kristersson and Magdalena Andersson, at $1,000 each.

Politics and sports took half of the money, well below their three-quarters of the day's trading. Finance and weather took more than a quarter on less than 6% of volume, about $14 to $22 of rewards for every $1,000 traded, against $2 to $3 in politics, sports and crypto and 42 cents in esports.

Polymarket posts a daily amount per market and shares it among qualifying makers by a published score.

Three points follow from the listings themselves.

• A reward is shared, not paid per order - Polymarket splits each market's daily amount by each maker's share of the score, so a $3-a-day market pays $3 in total to everyone quoting it.
• Rewarded markets were not the tight ones - among sports markets with under $1,000 of 24-hour volume, rewarded markets had a median quoted spread of 28.4 cents against 2.0 cents for the rest; in politics, 3.0 cents against 1.0. Read it as where rewards sit, not as their effect.
• Rewards turn over daily - 59% of Polymarket's reward settings, 10,509 of 17,866, had started on 13 September, the day of the reading.

A reward listing shows where Polymarket is paying for liquidity, which is often where a book is thin. The depth study shows what thin means in dollars for esports and NFL books. Vultax's prediction-market desk follows books, spreads and depth.

One reading of Polymarket's reward data on 13–14 September 2026. Polymarket's daily amounts are offers: what makers receive depends on who else quotes and on the $1 minimum. Quoted spreads come from Polymarket's Gamma API and can lag the order book. Polymarket figures cover its international exchange. Nothing here is a recommendation to trade. Challenge a figure at [email protected]; material changes are logged in the changelog.

CSV and JSON downloads are not offered for this study; the earlier input and derived data files have been withdrawn rather than reissued. Contact [email protected] for questions.