Polymarket's Sports taker fee rose from 0.03 to 0.05 and the maker rebate fell from 25% to 15%, narrowing the gap with Kalshi. We run the new numbers.
In July 2026, Polymarket increased the taker fee on its Sports category from a fee rate of 0.03 to 0.05, a 67% jump, and cut the Sports maker rebate from 25% to 15%, a 40% reduction. It is the second sports fee increase of the year: Polymarket had already lifted sports from fee-free to 0.03 back in March 2026. Sports is still one of the cheaper categories on the platform, but the trend is clear, and it points straight at Kalshi.
Polymarket charges takers with a per-category formula:
fee = C × feeRate × p × (1 - p)
Here C is the number of shares traded and p is the share price in dollars. Makers who post resting limit orders are never charged, and a portion of every taker fee is redistributed to those makers through the rebate program. The July change touched only the Sports category. Crypto stays at 0.07, and Finance, Politics, and the rest are unchanged.
The fee rate is the multiplier in that formula, so raising it from 0.03 to 0.05 scales every sports taker fee up by the same 67%. Take a $50 sports position, which is 100 shares at $0.50, the price where this fee peaks:
| Fee rate | Taker fee on 100 shares at $0.50 | |
|---|---|---|
| Old (Mar–Jul 2026) | 0.03 | $0.75 |
| New (Jul 2026) | 0.05 | $1.25 |
That is 100 × 0.05 × 0.50 × 0.50 = $1.25, up from $0.75. The fee is largest at 50 cents and shrinks toward either end, so a contract bought at 90 cents costs far less: 100 × 0.05 × 0.90 × 0.10 = $0.45. To see the exact number on any price and size, run it through the prediction market fee calculator.
The reason this matters is competitive. Polymarket's fee formula is the same shape as Kalshi's, which charges 0.07 × p × (1 - p) per contract on most markets. So the two are directly comparable at last. On that same 100-share position at 50 cents:
Polymarket Sports is still cheaper than Kalshi, by about 29% at the coin-flip price. But in March that gap was much wider (0.03 versus 0.07). Each hike closes the distance. The full cross-platform picture is in our fee comparison and in prediction market fees compared.
The taker fee is only half the change. The Sports maker rebate dropped from 25% to 15% of collected taker fees. Makers still pay zero to trade, and they still earn a cut of what takers pay, but that cut is now 40% smaller on sports. For high-volume liquidity providers who run limit-order strategies on sports books, the rebate is real income, and this trims it.
The practical takeaway has not changed, only sharpened: on Polymarket, posting a limit order instead of crossing the spread eliminates the taker fee entirely and still pays you a rebate. With the taker fee up and the rebate down, the value of being a maker rather than a taker on sports is now the single biggest lever on your net cost. Before you size a sports position, check whether your edge survives the new fee in the prediction market calculator.
The direction is revenue. Polymarket is a company that needs to fund operations and stay competitive with Kalshi, which has taken a large share of regulated US prediction-market volume. Sports is the highest-volume category across the industry, so it is the obvious place to lift fees. Traders should expect the other Polymarket categories to face similar pressure over time, and should treat current fee rates as a moving target rather than a fixed cost. We track every change in our prediction market news feed.