Polymarket fees in 2026: what copying a wallet actually costs

For most of its life Polymarket charged no trading fees, and half the copy-trading content on the internet still assumes it doesn't. That stopped being true in 2026. The international exchange rolled out a category-based taker-fee schedule (Fee Structure V2, effective March 30, 2026, with sports raised from 0.03 to 0.05 in July), and the separate CFTC-regulated Polymarket US exchange turned on fees exchange-wide from July 1, 2026. If you copy trades, this is not a footnote: a copy-bot is structurally a taker on every fill, so it pays the fee every time — twice per round trip — on top of the bot's own charges, slippage, and latency.

This guide is the current schedule, the mechanic behind it, and the arithmetic of what it does to a copied edge. Polymarket publishes the authoritative rates at polymarket.com/fees and in its fee docs — check them before relying on any number here, because the schedule has already changed once this year.

How the fee is computed

On the international exchange, only takers pay — makers are never charged. The taker fee on a fill is:

fee = C × feeRate × p × (1 − p)

where C is the number of shares, p is the price, and feeRate is the category rate. Two properties of that formula matter more than the rate itself:

1. It's symmetric around 50¢. A trade at 30¢ costs the same dollar fee as a trade at 70¢, and the per-share fee peaks exactly at 50¢ — the most-contested prices are the most expensive to cross.
2. It shrinks toward the extremes. Near 1¢ or 99¢ the fee approaches zero, so late, near-resolved fills are cheap and mid-market fills are dear.

A worked example from Polymarket's own docs: 100 shares of a crypto market at 50¢ — $50 of notional — costs $1.75 in taker fees (100 × 0.07 × 0.5 × 0.5). That's 3.5% of the dollars you put down, on entry alone.

The category rates

Rates as published July 2026 — say "taker fees on most categories," not "fees on all trades," because geopolitics is currently exempt and the schedule includes rebates. Sports at 0.05 is the number that matters for the biggest slice of Polymarket volume (sports is the platform's largest single category), and it's the rate an NFL- or MLB-focused copy runs into on every fill.

Polymarket US has its own schedule

The CFTC-regulated Polymarket US exchange — a separate venue from the on-chain exchange CopyGrade scores — charges fees exchange-wide effective 12 AM ET, July 1, 2026: the same p × (1 − p) shape with a single taker theta of 0.06 (maximum $1.50 per 100 contracts at 50¢), a maker rebate (−0.0125 — makers are paid, not charged), and volume-based taker rebate tiers. No category is permanently exempt there. The authoritative page is docs.polymarket.us/fees.

Wallet-level copy trading happens on the international exchange — that's where trade histories are public and on-chain — so the category schedule above is the one that hits a copier's fills. The US schedule matters if you also trade the US app directly.

What this does to a copied edge

Copying stacks four costs on top of the leader's result, and the platform fee is now the floor rather than zero:

1. Platform taker fee, twice. Enter as a taker, exit as a taker. A sports round trip opened at 50¢ pays 1.25¢ per share on entry (0.05 × 0.25); the exit leg depends on the exit price — closing at 70¢ adds about 1.05¢ per share (0.05 × 0.21). Call it roughly 2–2.5¢ per share for a mid-price round trip, against a 50¢ entry.
2. The bot's own fee. Execution bots commonly charge around 1% per side — which on its own exceeds the realistic edge of most wallets.
3. Slippage. You cross the spread the leader may have earned as a maker.
4. Latency. You enter after the leader, at a worse price — the haircut we model explicitly.

The order matters: the leader's headline return was earned at their prices, often as a maker, with no bot fee. Your copy pays every one of these. That's why headline return overstates what a copier keeps by roughly 20–40%, and why in our July 2026 snapshot the median fee-adjusted edge across 1,649 active wallets was −2.7%.

CopyGrade's realistic edge — the number on every Copy Verdict — already nets out the modeled fee schedule, slippage, and copy latency, so a wallet's grade reflects the world above, not the fee-free one. The Copy Simulator lets you replay a wallet's actual fills under your own fee and latency assumptions and watch where the return goes.

The short version

• Polymarket is no longer fee-free: taker-only, category-based fees on the international exchange (since March 2026); exchange-wide fees with a maker rebate on Polymarket US (since July 1, 2026).
• The fee peaks at 50¢ and vanishes toward the extremes — mid-price copying is the expensive kind.
• Copiers are takers by construction. Fees, bot charges, slippage, and latency stack — evaluate a wallet on its post-fee edge, read like a quant, or let the Copy Score do that arithmetic for you.