How does Kalshi make money? From a published fee schedule you can read in about a minute, and that is the only charge Kalshi itself bills you per trade. But trading there costs you twice, because there is a second charge you cannot read anywhere: a spread baked into the prices themselves, collected by the traders on the other side of your order. You pay both, so both belong on one page. The fee half takes a minute to read and is still widely misdescribed, because the fee is a curve, not a flat rate. The price half is the one nobody had done the work on: as far as we can find, no one has published a measured figure for the spread built into Kalshi's prices, so we measured it ourselves. Across 770 daily weather events, one six-rung ladder each, priced mid-life with our own recorders, the built-in charge came out to a median of 5.0% per ladder. This page walks both halves, and by the end you will know where the five cents hides, who collects it, and why the arithmetic that exposes it looks better on paper than it can ever be in practice.
The Quick Answer
As of November 10, 2026: Kalshi charges a published trading fee of 0.07 × price × (1 − price) per contract on the default fee multiplier, when your order crosses the spread and fills instantly. A resting order that waits to be filled pays a quarter of that rate on the markets Kalshi lists with a maker fee, and nothing on the rest, the daily weather ladders included. The cost that never appears as an itemized fee: on the daily weather ladders we track, the six ask prices sum to a median of 1.0500 across 770 events priced mid-life, a measured 5.0% carried in the prices rather than listed anywhere as a charge. The fee curve most explainers get backwards, the full measurement, and the six-rung arithmetic that makes naive backtests look brilliant are all below.
The Half You Can Read: Kalshi's Fee Schedule
Kalshi's trading fee is a formula, not a percentage of your stake: 0.07 × price × (1 − price) per contract for takers, the orders that cross the spread and fill instantly, on the default fee multiplier (33 series across sports, politics, elections, economics and crypto carry a half or zero multiplier), and 0.0175 × price × (1 − price) for makers, the resting orders that wait for someone else to cross, on the markets that carry a maker fee. Kalshi's own help page puts it as "in some cases, markets will have maker fees associated with them," and its market data shows how few: as of November 10, 2026, 107 of 4,168 sports series, 10 of 896 economics series and 2 of 298 crypto series were listed with one, and none of the 501 climate and weather series, the daily temperature ladders included. Where the maker fee applies, the gap between the two rates is 4x for the same market. On a 45-cent contract it is the difference between 1.73 cents and about 0.43 cents, which is why the order type you choose matters more than most new traders realize. So does Kalshi take a cut of your winnings? Not as a commission on profit. The charge lands per contract when you trade, and it scales with the price of the contract in a way almost nobody expects.
That shape is the most useful thing to know about the schedule. Kalshi's fee peaks at 50 cents and falls to zero at both ends of the price range, because price × (1 − price) is largest on a coin-flip and collapses as a contract approaches certainty. A 95-cent near-certainty and a 5-cent long shot cost the same to trade, and each costs just under a fifth of what a 50-cent contract does.
| Contract Price | Taker fee per contract | Maker fee per contract |
|---|---|---|
| 5c | 0.33c | 0.08c |
| 50c | 1.75c | 0.44c |
| 95c | 0.33c | 0.08c |
Formula values at the peak and the two ends. The maker column applies only on markets Kalshi lists with a maker fee. The full line-by-line schedule, including how orders are actually billed, lives in our breakdown of the fee schedule.
The row worth sitting with is the middle one. Even the most expensive fill on the board, a taker order on a dead coin-flip, costs 1.75 cents per contract, and resting that same order cuts it to under half a cent, or to nothing on a market with no maker fee. If the schedule were the whole cost of trading on Kalshi, the visible price of a trade would look almost trivial. It is not the whole cost, and the rest of it does not appear on any statement.
The Half You Cannot: A Measured 5% Inside The Prices
Here is the audit that the fee schedule invites. A Kalshi daily temperature market is a ladder of six bands for one city and one day, each band a contract that pays $1 if the day's temperature lands in it. (If event contracts are new to you, start with how prediction markets work.) Exactly one band settles yes. Not usually one, but always: in 1,793 daily weather events we tracked, exactly one rung won 100.0% of the time. Six rungs, one winner, which means the average rung carries a 16.7% chance before anyone looks at a forecast.
That structure turns the ladder into a probability distribution you can check. If the ask prices were pure probabilities, the six of them would sum to exactly $1.00: one certain winner, priced in full. They do not. Across 770 events priced mid-life, the six ask prices summed to a median of 1.0500, and the result reproduced independently on 744 live order-book snapshots. A quarter of ladders summed below 1.020. A quarter summed above 1.076.
| Six-Rung Ask Sum | Measured |
|---|---|
| 25th percentile | 1.020 |
| Median | 1.050 |
| 75th percentile | 1.076 |
Sample: 770 events priced mid-life, reproduced independently on 744 live order-book snapshots.
Bookmakers have a word for the amount above 100%: the overround, the same thing sportsbook bettors call the vig when it is built into a two-sided line. (How an exchange's version differs from a sportsbook's is its own subject, covered in an exchange is not a sportsbook.) In plain terms, when you buy a 30-cent rung at the ask, you are paying a shade more than the ladder's own arithmetic says the outcome is worth, and the surcharge across all six rungs runs about a nickel per dollar of payout, which is roughly 4.8% of the money you actually put up. That 5% is the house edge, and it is in the prices rather than on your statement.
One precision matters here: the five percent is not a second Kalshi fee. Kalshi the company banks the fee schedule above; the nickel goes to whoever is resting on the other side of your order, the makers standing on the ladder all day, as payment for being there the moment you want to trade now. Every venue with a bid and an ask works this way. What is unusual is not that the spread exists but that, as far as we can find, nobody had measured it here before. From your side of the screen, though, the accounting is cold comfort: both charges come out of your price.
What Moved Since Aug. 11
Little moved, with one exception. The spot check's median held at 1.06 for a seventh pull running, and the six asks summed above a dollar on 329 of 350 ladders, to exactly a dollar on nine, and below a dollar on twelve. The twelfth, Denver on Nov. 5, is the first ladder under a dollar since Oct. 21. We re-ran the check on Kalshi's public hourly price history for the 350 daily high-temperature ladders dated Sept. 20 through Nov. 8 in New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Austin, Denver and Philadelphia, reading each ladder's six ask prices at the halfway hour of its life, in the hours ending 5 to 7 a.m. Eastern.
| Six-rung ask sum | Sept. 20 to Nov. 8 ladders (350) |
|---|---|
| Lowest | 0.95 |
| 25th percentile | 1.04 |
| Median | 1.06 |
| 75th percentile | 1.08 |
| Highest | 1.62 |
Halfway-hour reads from Kalshi's hourly price history, pulled Sept. 27, Oct. 3, Oct. 6, Oct. 10, Oct. 17, Oct. 20, Oct. 23, Oct. 26, Oct. 29, Nov. 1, Nov. 4 and Nov. 10, 2026. Where a rung posted no price in its halfway hour, its last earlier hourly close stands in; 40 ladders borrowed at least one such close, and 18 of them borrowed on half or more of their six rungs. A spot check on a smaller, different sample than the 770 events above, read from hourly candle closes rather than our recorders. The Nov. 9 ladders in all seven cities had closed on schedule but not settled at the Nov. 10 pull and are left out; the Nov. 3 ladders, left out of the previous pull for the same reason, have since settled and are counted.
The recent reads still run a touch higher than the headline figure: a median of 1.06 against the 1.0500 measured across 770 events. The two samples come from different sources, different hours and different seasons, so the 1.0500 stays the figure this page stands on. The 42 ladders added since the Nov. 4 pull, dated Nov. 3 through Nov. 8, came in at a median of 1.05, from 0.99 in Denver on Nov. 5 to 1.22 in New York the same morning, with none sitting exactly on a dollar. Denver's 0.99 ended a run: 98 ladders dated Oct. 22 through Nov. 4 had come in at or above a dollar, four of them exactly on it, and the fifteenth day broke the streak by a single cent. The Oct. 19-21 stretch that put four of 21 ladders under a dollar was followed by two weeks with none and then this one; this page declined to call the first stretch a trend, and one cent in 126 ladders does not argue the other way either. The lightest fee among the new 42 fell on Chicago on Nov. 4, its 69-to-70 rung asked at 93 cents against a 92-cent bid with the other five rungs at 1, 1, 1, 1 and 7: about 1.2 cents in formula taker fees across all six fills, well under the 2.0 cents Austin's lopsided Oct. 30 ladder cost two pulls ago. Chicago's next ladder made the other point about lopsided pricing: on Nov. 5 its 54-or-below rung asked 90 cents against an 89-cent bid, the fee on the six fills came to about 1.7 cents, and the rung that won was the 55-to-56 band asked at 11. The fee curve from the top of this page is at its lightest when the probability is piled on one rung instead of spread across them, and the curve says nothing about whether that rung wins. Twelve of the 350 ladders have summed under a dollar, about one in 29. Across twelve pulls the spot check's median has slid from 1.08 when the check began to 1.06, and never under the recorder figure.
Start with the top row, the cheapest ladder in the sample, unchanged since the Oct. 23 pull. Denver's Oct. 20 ladder summed to 0.95 in the hour ending 6 a.m. Eastern: the 72-to-73 rung, the one that went on to win, asked 56 cents against a 55-cent bid, the 70-to-71 rung asked 22, the 74-to-75 rung asked 10, and the other three asked 3, 2 and 2. Buy all six at those asks for 95 cents, if those six closing asks had all stood at once, which hourly closes cannot confirm, and one of them pays $1 whatever the thermometer does, a 5-cent gift on paper. It is still the only ladder in the spot check where the formula taker fee, 0.07 × price × (1 − price) per contract, did not eat the whole gift: on those six fills it comes to about 4.1 cents, which leaves just under a cent, on paper, for anyone who got all six filled at once. Getting all six filled at once is the hard part in any case, and hourly closes say nothing about how many contracts stood at each ask.
The fee did eat the other eleven sub-dollar ladders: on gaps of one to four cents, the six-rung taker fee ran about 3.6 to 5.2 cents, roughly one and a quarter to a bit over five times the paper gift, the closest call among them Denver's Sept. 29 ladder, the previous low at 0.96, a 4-cent gap against a 5.1-cent fee. The newest of the eleven is Denver on Nov. 5 at 0.99 in the hour ending 6 a.m. Eastern: the 58-to-59 rung that went on to win asked 55 cents against a 54-cent bid, the 56-to-57 rung asked 25, the 60-to-61 rung 13, and the other three 2, 2 and 2, a penny of paper gift against about 4.3 cents of formula taker fees. Before it, the most recent were Philadelphia on Oct. 21 at 0.99, then Austin and New York on Oct. 19 at 0.99 and 0.98. Denver is still the one city to land under a dollar more than twice, now four times, and it is also one of the two thinnest books of the seven: a median of about 41,000 contracts traded per ladder over its life, with Philadelphia at about 39,000 the only book thinner and Austin at about 55,000 not far behind, while the other four books run from about 80,000 in Chicago to about 298,000 in Los Angeles. The sub-dollar ladders are spread almost as evenly: Denver's four against two each for New York, Philadelphia and Austin and one each for Chicago and Los Angeles. A thin book is the natural place for six asks to sum under a dollar for an hour, since a long shot stuck at a one-cent ask and a top rung nobody is lifting both pull the sum down, but Denver's own sub-dollar ladders split on it: the Sept. 29 and Oct. 20 ladders traded more contracts than its median, and the Oct. 11 and Nov. 5 ladders, at about 39,000 and 37,000, traded fewer. Thinness is the suspect, not the verdict, and 350 ladders cannot convict it. Nine more sat at exactly $1.00, no markup above a dollar for that hour, the newest of them Austin on Nov. 2, which asked 2, 7, 32, 46, 11 and 2 cents in the hour ending 6 a.m. Eastern, the 86-to-87 rung that went on to win at 46 against a 45-cent bid, and cost about 4.7 cents in formula taker fees across the six fills. Denver on Oct. 25 asked 14, 23, 27, 24, 6 and 6 cents in the hour ending 6 a.m. Eastern, a penny above the bid on every rung, with the 58-to-59 rung that went on to win asked at 27. No rung on it was priced above 27 cents, which makes it the flattest ladder in the sample, and here the fee curve from the top of this page comes back around: a fee that peaks at 50 cents and falls toward both ends is at its heaviest when the probability is spread across the rungs instead of piled on one, so the formula taker fee on those six fills comes to about 5.5 cents, the most on any of the nine dollar ladders and more than on any of the twelve that summed under one, and nearly three times what Austin's lopsided Oct. 30 ladder cost. Miami on Oct. 26 asked 1, 4, 34, 48, 12 and 1 cents in the hour ending 5 a.m., again a penny above the bid on every rung, the 83-to-84 rung that went on to win at 48 against a 47-cent bid and the two one-cent long shots at the minimum ask against no bid at all; the fee on those six fills was about 4.5 cents. Chicago's Oct. 23 dollar ladder cost about 3.4 cents. On all nine, buying the whole ladder at the ask returned exactly the dollar it cost, before a fee that ran 3.4 to 5.5 cents. Every other ladder summed above a dollar. Some of that excess is the one-cent minimum ask on rungs nobody is bidding for; the rest is the price of immediacy, and we did not separate the two.
Philadelphia's Oct. 8 ladder still runs the widest: 1.62 in the hour ending 5 a.m. Eastern, and it is also the clearest case of a borrowed read. Five of its six rungs posted no hourly close in that hour, so their closes from the hour ending 4 a.m. stand in, bid and ask alike: 60 cents on the 79-to-80 rung against a 47-cent bid, 50 on the 77-to-78 rung against 30. The 81-or-above rung, the one rung with a fresh price, asked 45 against 15. Three rungs with 13 to 30 cents of daylight between bid and ask where anyone who needed a fill had to pay up, and those three asks alone summed to $1.55 before the three long shots were counted. Philadelphia posted another wide ladder on Oct. 15, 1.24 off closes borrowed from the hour ending 4 a.m. on all six rungs, its 72-to-73 rung asking 89 cents against a 76-cent bid and its 74-to-75 rung 25 against 20, two asks that summed to $1.14 before the four long shots were counted.
Miami's Oct. 29 ladder, the widest of the Nov. 1 pull, is cut from the same cloth. It summed to 1.20 in the hour ending 5 a.m., and not one of its six rungs posted a close in that hour, so every price, bid and ask, is the close from the hour ending 4 a.m.: 75 cents on the 87-to-88 rung that went on to win, against a 65-cent bid, 25 on the 85-to-86 rung against 15, 13 on the 89-to-90 rung against 11, and 4, 2 and 1 on the rest. New York and Philadelphia went blank in the same hour the same morning and read 1.16 and 1.17 off their own closes from the hour ending 4 a.m., Philadelphia's 69-to-70 rung, the winner, asked at 50 against a 32-cent bid at its last close. That pattern held again this pull: all 18 ladders that borrowed on half or more of their rungs are reads from the hour ending 5 a.m. on a Thursday, in the three books whose halfway hour usually ends then, New York, Miami and Philadelphia, on six of the seven Thursdays from Sept. 24 through Nov. 5, with Oct. 22 the lone exception. Those 18 ran a median of 1.16 against 1.06 for the other 332, and seven of the eight widest ladders in the sample are among them, the three widest all Philadelphia. Some of that width is staleness rather than immediacy, since a borrowed close is the last price anyone posted, not a price standing at the read, and we cannot separate the two. The one ladder among the eight widest that owes nothing to borrowing is still Miami on Oct. 22: 1.21 in its own 5 a.m. hour with a bid and an ask posted on all six rungs, the 82-to-83 rung asked 44 cents against a 37-cent bid, the 84-to-85 rung 45 against 42, the four long shots asked 7, 12, 9 and 4 against bids of 2, 5, 5 and 2, and the 80-to-81 rung, the 12-cent one among them, was the one that won. It was not a thin day either: about 163,000 contracts traded over its life, against Miami's median of about 146,000. The widest ladder added at the Nov. 10 pull is the newest Thursday read: New York on Nov. 5 summed to 1.22 in the hour ending 5 a.m., with five of its six rungs borrowed from the hour ending 4 a.m., the 69-or-below rung asked 50 cents against a 42-cent bid, the 70-to-71 rung 45 against 40, and the 72-to-73 rung that went on to win 22 against 15; only the 78-or-above long shot, asked at a cent against no bid, posted a fresh close. Philadelphia went blank on all six rungs in the same hour the same morning and Miami on three, and they read 1.09 and 1.12, Miami's 84-to-85 rung, the winner, asked at 25 against a 15-cent bid at its last close. The widest fresh read among the 42 is Denver on Nov. 7 at 1.11, a close on every rung: the 63-to-64 rung asked 54 cents against a 53-cent bid, the 65-to-66 rung that went on to win asked 43 against 40, and the other four 2, 2, 8 and 2 against bids of 0, 1, 6 and 1, three cents of daylight on the winner and a penny or two everywhere else.
The hour of the read is what most of the wide ladders have in common, but the width is not a property of the city, and Miami's Oct. 22 ladder shows it is not only a property of staleness either: 21 cents of width with every rung freshly priced in the ordinary 5 a.m. hour. The same Philadelphia that posted the 1.62 sat at 0.98 on Oct. 5, at exactly a dollar on Oct. 16 and at 0.99 on Oct. 21, all three read in the hour ending 5 a.m., and Miami itself was back to 1.05 on Oct. 23 and Oct. 24, sat at exactly a dollar on Oct. 26, read 1.06 on Oct. 30, the morning after its 1.20, was down to 1.02 on Nov. 2, the morning after its 1.10, and read 1.06 on Nov. 6, the morning after its borrowed 1.12, which is the point: the spread is a price for immediacy, and it is not a constant. All 350 ladders had settled by the Nov. 10 pull, each with exactly one winning rung. A spread that shows up 329 times in 350 is built into how these ladders trade, and the 21 that came in at or under a dollar are the reason to read the next piece of arithmetic closely.
A Worked Example: Selling A Whole Ladder
The 5% is not an estimate that depends on a forecast model: you can check it with arithmetic alone. Sell all six rungs of a ladder and exactly one will settle against you, so your return is the sum of the six prices minus the winner's $1 payout, identically, whatever the thermometer does. One premise before the numbers, because it decides which side of the book you are on: selling at those prices means resting your own offers at the ask and waiting for buyers to cross to you. That is why the resting-order fee, not the taker fee, is the one that matters below, and it is also the catch in advance. Hit the six bids for instant fills instead and you are on the paying side of the same spread, with the identity running against you.
On 1,566 complete ladders we measured, a separate and larger sample than the 770 events above, selling all six rungs returned +6.03 cents per ladder, and that figure is gross, before fees. We know that without checking a fee statement, because the identity's residual came out to +0.0000 cents: a clean zero is only possible when no fee has been taken out yet, so the +6.03c figure certifies itself as before-fees. The net belongs beside it, always. As of November 10, 2026, Kalshi lists its daily temperature series without a maker fee, so on these ladders a resting seller's net matches the gross. If these ladders carried the maker fee, the published 0.0175 rate across six rungs would run 1.09 cents, the net would be +4.94 cents per ladder, and quoting the gross alone would overstate the result by 22%. The access constraint belongs beside it too: all six rungs are simultaneously fillable only 12.5% of the time, which in our recorder data worked out to roughly 6.5 fillable baskets a day. That count is a ceiling on how much of the six cents exists to be touched, not a projection of anyone's results. The arithmetic is ironclad; the access to it is not. Six cents is the arithmetic; the 12.5% is whether you ever get to touch it.
Why This Page Is Not Telling You To Sell Ladders
Read that paragraph again and notice what it is: an identity, not a strategy, and this page is not telling you to sell ladders. The identity is precisely why a naive backtest of ladder-selling looks brilliant; the price archives contain the sums, the sums sit reliably above a dollar, and a spreadsheet will happily multiply the six cents by 365. What the archive cannot contain is whether all six of your orders would have filled together, and 87.5% of the time they would not. Liquidity decides whether you can trade at all, and no quote archive records the fills you never got.
There is also the standing shape of risk on the selling side, and it never changes: selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar, so roughly speaking, one loss erases the premiums from about 15 wins. That asymmetry, not any hit rate, is what makes position sizing the whole game. We say all of this as participants rather than spectators: Stokastic trades these markets and holds positions in them, we do not publish performance figures, and our own live log is short, currently negative, and far too small to confirm or refute anything. The current picture stays on our standing hub covering how these markets work, which is rebuilt through the day precisely so this page never has to freeze a number that will go stale.
So Where Does Your Money Actually Go?
Back out to the whole picture, because the two halves now fit together, and only one of them bends. Trade a Kalshi weather ladder as a taker and you pay twice: once to Kalshi, through a published formula that tops out at 1.75 cents on a coin-flip rung, and once to the traders resting on the other side, through the median 5.0% (770 events) built into the six ask prices. Of those two charges, only one is negotiable, and not the one people expect. You cannot argue with the spread, but you can decline to cross it: rest your order instead of taking, and the visible fee falls by 4x, or to zero on a market with no maker fee, these ladders included, while the invisible one flips from a toll you pay into the queue you are standing in. That single choice, repeated, is most of what the fee schedule rewards, and the same make-versus-take decision also runs through our guide to trading NFL markets on Kalshi. None of this is a scandal; a spread is what every market charges for immediacy, and every exchange and sportsbook has its version. The difference now is that its spread is measured, off the same six-rung structure (1,793 events, one winner every time) that makes the average rung a 16.7% base rate, and knowing the size of the toll before you pay it is most of what separates a trader from a customer.
The same toll exists on every sportsbook line you have ever bet, and there it has a name: the vig. The difference is that you can shop it, because the books quote against each other all day, and comparing the same bet across 20+ sportsbooks to see which one charges you least is exactly the job OddsShopper does. Our free expert picks publish the reasoning next to every selection, free, every day. When you want the full price-comparison toolkit, OddsShopper Pro comes with a free week trial, and the code HOUSEEDGE20 takes 20% off your first month if you stay past the week.
Disclosure and fine print.Stokastic trades event markets on Kalshi and holds positions in them; the measurements on this page come from our own recorders, plus Kalshi's public price history for the Sept. 20 to Nov. 8 spot check. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi, though we do carry sign-up offers for some other prediction-market and betting platforms. The risk of loss is real and, on the side we trade, individually large. This page is part of an open research log of a strategy we have not yet proven, and nothing here is trading advice.
Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.
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