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Polymarket Fees Explained: What You Actually Pay Per Trade

Polymarket charges fees on every trade. Here's exactly what you pay, when you pay it, and how to keep costs low.

Before you trade on Polymarket, you need to understand the fee structure. It's not complicated, but it affects your returns more than most traders realize — especially if you're trading frequently.

How Polymarket Fees Work

Polymarket charges fees on every trade executed through its order book (CLOB — Central Limit Order Book). The fee depends on whether you're a maker or a taker.

Taker fee: 2% — You're a taker when you place a market order that immediately matches with an existing order. You're taking liquidity from the book.

Maker fee: 0% — You're a maker when you place a limit order that sits on the book and gets filled later. Makers provide liquidity and pay no fee.

What This Means in Practice

If you buy YES at $0.60 and the market resolves YES at $1.00, your gross return is $0.40 per share. But if you used a market order, you paid 2% on the trade value — reducing your net return.

On small trades, this is negligible. On larger positions or high-frequency trading, it compounds quickly.

The simplest way to reduce fees: use limit orders instead of market orders when you're not in a hurry. You pay 0% as a maker and can often get a slightly better fill price too.

Do Copy Trading Bots Pay Fees?

Yes. When PolyCop executes a trade on your behalf, it pays the standard Polymarket fee on that transaction. There's no fee waiver for bots.

However, PolyCop's zero-block execution means your copy trades fill at the same price as the wallet you're copying — you're not entering late and buying a worse price. The fee is the same, but the entry is identical.

For context: the profitable wallets tracked by PolyCop are generating positive returns after fees. Their verified PNL is net of all trading costs.

Check the leaderboard to see verified net returns: polycop.fun/leaderboard

Fees vs. Sportsbooks: The Comparison

Traditional sportsbooks embed their margin in the odds — typically 5-10% per bet, sometimes more. Polymarket's 2% taker fee is lower than the vig on most sportsbook markets.

For sharp bettors moving from sportsbooks to prediction markets, Polymarket's fee structure is almost always better on a like-for-like basis — especially on markets with tight spreads.

Start trading on polymarket.com and copy top wallets automatically with PolyCop Bot.