Polymarket Fees for Copy Traders: What You Actually Pay

Copying a trader on Polymarket costs money in three places: Polymarket's own fee, the fee your copy tool adds, and the slightly worse price a copy gets after the original trade. In the worked example below, Polymarket's fee is about twice the tool's.

What does Polymarket itself charge?

A taker fee on most markets, set market by market. Makers pay nothing, and geopolitics markets carry no fee.

A taker is the side of a trade that takes a price already sitting in the order book. A maker is the side that posted it. A copy that has to fill quickly is almost always a taker.

Polymarket's documentation gives the formula: shares traded, times the fee rate, times the price, times one minus the price. The rate depends on the market's category.

These are the documented rates. Each market carries its own fee setting, and Polymarket can lower it to zero for a while, which it calls a fee holiday. On 23 October 2026 most politics, economics, finance and tech markets were fee-free, and so were NBA game markets. Crypto markets were charged 0.07, and NFL and college football markets 0.03. Check a market's fee before you size a strategy around it.

Because the price is multiplied by one minus the price, the fee on a given number of shares is largest at 50¢ and shrinks toward both ends. For 100 shares on a sports market it is $1.25 at 50¢ and $0.45 at 10¢.

Counted per dollar you put in, cheaper shares pay more. The fee comes to the rate times one minus the price, so at 10¢ it takes 4.5% of a sports stake and at 90¢ it takes 0.5%.

The fee applies to each trade you take. If you sell before the market resolves, that sale is a second trade.

Polymarket charges nothing to deposit or withdraw USDC. A card processor or an exchange you use on the way may charge its own fee. Takers can earn part of the fee back through Polymarket's Taker Rebate Program, from 3% at the first tier up to 50%.

What is a builder fee?

A fee the app may add on top: up to 1% of the trade's value on taker orders and 0.5% on maker orders.

Apps that place orders for their users are called builders. Polymarket lets a builder attach its own fee to every order it routes. The default is 0%, and the ceilings are 1% for takers and 0.5% for makers.

A builder can change its rate once in seven days, and the change takes effect three days later. Builder profiles and their fee rates are public, so you can look up what an app charges before you use it. Our guide to the Builders Program has the details.

What does a copy tool add on top?

Copy tools charge in one of three ways, and some combine them.

A per-trade fee looks small and grows with activity, and you pay it on losing trades too. A subscription works the other way round: heavy on a small account, light on a large one.

A $49 plan costs the same as a 0.5% fee at $9,800 of trades a month, and the same as a 1% fee at $4,900.

What does the price gap cost?

In our own fills, a median of 0.3¢ per share.

A copy is placed after the trader you follow has bought, and by then the price may have moved a little. The gap never shows up as a line on a statement, which makes it easy to forget.

We measured it on our own live trades. Across 955 live fills in the 60 days to 1 October 2026, we paid a median of 0.3¢ per share more than the whale did. On a 60¢ share that is 0.5% of the price.

Polymarket's documentation warns that large orders can move the price, so in a thin market the gap can be wider than this.

How do you add it all up?

Take a month in which you copy $5,000 of trades on sports markets charged at 0.05, at an average price of 60¢, and hold each position until it resolves.

Here the platform fee is the largest cost, and it is the same whichever tool you use. The gap and the tool fee are where tools differ. On politics markets at 80¢ the platform fee would be $40 at the documented rate, and nothing while those markets are fee-free.

The fee is charged on every share you take, so each trade you skip, and each position you hold to resolution instead of selling, saves it. Cheap stakes pay the most per dollar, so shares near 10¢ need a larger edge (the expected profit per trade) just to cover it.

What does Whalidate charge?

We are a builder on Polymarket, and our builder fee is 0% for takers and makers. No plan takes a share of your profit.

The price is a plan: Starter at $49 a month, Pro at $149 and Elite at $349, with a live budget of up to $5,000, $25,000 and $50,000. Polymarket's own taker fee still applies to live trades on markets that have one, and it goes to Polymarket.

Paper trading is free and has no time limit, so you can see what a wallet's trades would have earned before any money is in. Paper results carry no fees and no price gap, so the costs above come on top. Below about $1,500 of trades a month, the $49 plan alone is over 3% of what you trade, so paper is the better place to start. The pricing page has the current plans, and we compare ourselves with one other tool in Whalidate vs Polycopy.