Fees
What a Polymarket Perps trade actually costs
Polymarket’s fee schedule is four decimal places of almost nothing. It stays almost nothing right up until you remember that the fee is charged on the whole position while the money at risk is a twentieth of it. Then it is a different number entirely.
Short answer
A new Polymarket Perps account pays 0.0400% taker and 0.0125% maker on notional. There are 7 tiers keyed to trailing 30-day volume: the taker rate falls to 0.0200% at the top, and only at the top does the maker rate become a rebate. Your tier is re-evaluated every UTC day, and fees are charged per fill, in pUSD.
The rate is not the number that matters. A taker round trip at the bottom tier is 0.0800% of notional — nothing at 1x, and 1.60% of the margin you posted at 20x. Being liquidated adds a further 0.5% of notional to every fill on the way out.
Fee calculator
Getting in
Getting out
Trading fees only. Funding is charged separately every hour, and being liquidated adds a liquidation fee on every fill.
Polymarket Perps fees: the seven volume tiers
Polymarket publishes 7 fee tiers, keyed to trailing 30-day volume. Everybody starts at the bottom one. The right-hand column is that taker rate charged twice, once in and once out, against the margin a 20x position actually posts.source
| 30-day volume | Taker | Maker | Round trip at 20x |
|---|---|---|---|
| New account | 0.0400% | 0.0125% | 1.60% |
| $1M+ | 0.0370% | 0.0100% | 1.48% |
| $5M+ | 0.0350% | 0.0080% | 1.40% |
| $25M+ | 0.0300% | 0.0050% | 1.20% |
| $100M+ | 0.0270% | 0.0020% | 1.08% |
| $500M+ | 0.0250% | 0.0000% | 1.00% |
| $1B+ | 0.0200% | -0.0050% rebate | 0.80% |
Read the taker column and the schedule looks generous: the whole ladder spans 0.0200% of notional between a first-day account and a firm doing $1B a month. Read the maker column and something else is going on.
How a fee is worked out
One line, and it means literally what it says.source
Fee = abs(Price × Quantity) × Rate- Per fill, not per order. An order that fills in four pieces is charged four times. The total is the same on a fixed notional, but it means a large market order walking the book is billed on every level it eats.
- On notional, not on margin. Price times quantity is the position’s full value. What you posted to open it never appears in the formula.
- Absolute value. The sign of the position is irrelevant. Shorts pay exactly what longs pay, opening and closing.
- Settled in pUSD. The same collateral asset the account holds, so a fee is a straight debit against equity rather than a separate balance to keep topped up.
Your tier is set every UTC day rather than trade by trade. Volume you do today cannot make today’s trades cheaper — it can only move you up the ladder for tomorrow. And because the window is trailing 30 days, the ladder works in both directions: stop trading for a month and you slide back down it.source
If you signed up through somebody’s code, 20% of the trading fees you pay is paid to the referrer, weekly. It does not change what you pay.source What a code does now that it is not the way in.
Fees against your margin
The fee is a percentage of notional. Your margin is notional divided by leverage. So the fee, as a share of the money you actually put up, is the fee rate multiplied by your leverage.
A fee charged on notional and paid out of margin is a fee multiplied by your leverage.
| Leverage | Taker in, taker out | Maker in, maker out |
|---|---|---|
| 1x | 0.080% | 0.025% |
| 2x | 0.160% | 0.050% |
| 5x | 0.400% | 0.125% |
| 10x | 0.800% | 0.250% |
| 20x | 1.600% | 0.500% |
In money, on the position the calculator opens with: $5,000 of notional at 20x means you posted $250. Taking liquidity both ways at the bottom tier costs $2 to get in and $2 to get out. That is $4 — which is nothing, and is also 1.60% of your money, gone before the market has moved a tick.
It compounds with the thing leverage already does to you. At 20x a 1% move in the underlying is 20% of your margin, so the round trip is roughly the first 0.080% of favourable movement, taken off the top. Small, but it is the reason a strategy that is right slightly more often than it is wrong can still lose money at high frequency. The rest of the mechanics are on the main Perps page.
Getting the maker rate
At the bottom tier the taker rate is 3.2 times the maker rate, so the cheapest available improvement is not trading up a tier — it is resting on the book instead of crossing it. On our $5,000 position that is $1.25 instead of $4, a saving of $2.75 for doing nothing but waiting.
Intending to be a maker is not the same as being one. A limit order priced through the spread crosses the book and fills as a taker, at 3.2x the rate, without telling you it has done so.
At the very top tier, -0.0050% on both legs means a $5,000 round trip pays −$0.50 to you rather than costing you anything. That is real, and it is also $1B of 30-day volume away. Post-only, reduce-only and the rest of the order flags.
The fee for being liquidated
The schedule above stops applying the moment your account is flagged for liquidation. From then on, every fill carries an extra rate on top of the normal maker or taker one.source
FillFee = Notional × (MakerOrTakerRate + LiquidationFeeRate)The liquidation fee rate is set per instrument, and all 39 listed markets carry 0.5% of notional. That is 12.5 times the bottom-tier taker fee.source
Back to the worked example. Closing that $5,000 position yourself costs $2. Having it closed for you costs $27 — which against $250 of posted margin is 10.80% of it, charged at precisely the moment there is least of it left. And because it is per fill, a position the engine has to work out in pieces is charged on each one.
There is exactly one free exit on the venue, and you do not get to choose it. Auto-deleveraging skips the order book entirely and charges neither side a fee — not the trader being unwound, not the profitable counterparty whose position is closed to absorb it.source The liquidation calculator shows how far the price has to move to get you there.
Funding is a separate bill
Trading fees are paid to the exchange. Funding is paid to the other side of the market — a straight transfer between longs and shorts, with the protocol taking no cut — and it is settled every hour you stay open.source
Which makes them different shapes of cost. Fees hit twice, on the way in and the way out, however long you hold. Funding hits every hour, whether or not anything happens. On a crypto market sitting exactly at its index price — no premium at all — the fixed interest leg of the formula still charges longs 0.00125% an hour, which on $5,000 of notional is $1.50 a day.
Put the two together and you get the number that decides whether a position is a trade or a rental: at those rates, funding on a resting crypto long matches an entire bottom-tier taker round trip after about 64 hours. Hold for less than a couple of days and fees dominate. Hold for longer and funding does, by a widening margin. How the funding rate is built, and what every market is paying right now.
Slippage is the third cost and the only one nobody publishes a rate for. It depends on the book at the moment you trade, and a taker order on a thin market can pay more in slippage than in fees, several times over.
Questions people ask
How much are Polymarket Perps fees?
A new account pays 0.0400% taker and 0.0125% maker on notional. Both rates fall through 7 tiers as trailing 30-day volume rises, bottoming out at 0.0200% taker and a 0.0050% maker rebate above $1B of 30-day volume. Fees are charged per fill, in pUSD, as abs(price × quantity) × rate.
Does Polymarket pay a maker rebate on Perps?
Only at the very top. The maker rate is negative — an actual rebate of 0.0050% — solely in the $1B+ 30-day volume tier. The tier below it charges makers exactly zero, and the 5 tiers below that all charge a positive maker fee. For almost every account, Polymarket does not pay makers.
How do I make sure I pay the maker rate?
Use a post-only order. It is a good-til-canceled order that the exchange rejects outright if it would cross the book and take liquidity, so it can never quietly fill as a taker at 3.2 times the rate. The trade-off is fill certainty: if the market moves to your price before you rest, the order is rejected rather than filled.
What is the liquidation fee on Polymarket Perps?
While your account is flagged for liquidation, every fill is charged the normal maker or taker rate plus a per-instrument liquidation fee rate. That rate is 0.5% of notional on all 39 listed markets as of the last check — 12.5 times the bottom-tier taker fee — and it applies to each fill the liquidation engine makes, not once per position.
Do you pay a fee if you get auto-deleveraged?
No. Auto-deleveraging bypasses the order book entirely and charges neither side a fee. That is the only free exit on the venue, and you do not get to choose it — ADL happens when the insurance fund cannot safely absorb a liquidated position, and it can close a perfectly healthy position of yours on the other side.
How often do Polymarket Perps fee tiers update?
Tier assignment is recomputed every UTC day, not continuously. Volume you trade today does not make today's trades cheaper — it can only move you up a tier for tomorrow. Tiers are keyed to trailing 30-day volume, so the ladder works both ways: stop trading and you slide back down it.
Is funding a Polymarket trading fee?
No. Funding is a transfer between longs and shorts and the protocol takes no cut of it, whereas trading fees are paid to the exchange. They are billed separately and behave differently: fees hit twice per round trip regardless of how long you hold, and funding hits every hour you stay open.