Kalshi Fee Schedule: The 129 Markets That Cost More To Trade

The Kalshi fee schedule is not one schedule. Audit the exchange's own published documents and its live market catalog, as I did for this page, and you find five different fee treatments running at once: a standard formula that covers 12,537 of the 12,699 series Kalshi's market data lists, 129 series that charge an extra fee the rest of the board never pays, 18 series billed at half the standard rate, 14 that charge nothing at all, and a single hybrid series that mixes two of those treatments. Most of the traders posting angry fee screenshots are not wrong that they paid more than they expected. They are standing on a specific square of a board they were never shown, and this page maps the whole board. One housekeeping note: Kalshi groups its markets into series, ticker families like the one covering every NFL game, and the counts here are series-level, the same unit the fee schedule itself uses.

I will name every group, quote the schedule's own math, and flag the one place where Kalshi's published PDF and its live exchange data disagree, because that disagreement is exactly why a screenshot argument about fees never resolves.

The Quick Answer

Kalshi's standard trading fee is 7% of price x (1 - price) per contract, rounded up to the next cent per order, charged only when your order takes a resting one. On top of that baseline, 129 series, including nearly every major sports market plus CPI, Fed, and jobs-report markets, also charge maker fees on resting orders at a quarter of the taker rate; 18 MLB-derivative series run at half rate, and 14 long-horizon political and macro markets charge zero. The full audit, the round-up penalty on small orders, and the document-versus-exchange mismatch are below.

The Fee Complaints Start With A Screenshot

Spend an afternoon in the Kalshi subreddit and the fee anger is easy to find. One trader posted a thread titled "Kalshi charged $10 transaction fee for every transaction": "I'm using Google pay + Chase credit card to deposit money into Kalshi and just found out today that I got charged a $10 transaction fee for every Kalshi deposit. I reached out to Chase and they said it's because Kalshi uses cash advance which had a $10 flat transaction fee." Another, in a thread about a parlay payout, asked the winner: "How much from this payout did you get after withdrawal fees?" A third went further: "Kalshi makes money on fees and the bots... make money on the spread."

Three complaints, three different fees, and only one of them is actually Kalshi's trading fee. That first $10 charge came from the card issuer treating the deposit as a cash advance, a real cost, but not a line on any Kalshi schedule; the exchange's own published card fee tops out far lower, and I will quote it below. The withdrawal question has a clean documented answer too. The frustration is real in every case. The diagnosis is usually wrong, and the cure is reading the schedule the way an auditor would, which is what the rest of this page does.

What The Kalshi Fee Schedule Actually Says

Kalshi publishes its fee math in a standing fee schedule PDF and keeps a per-series list on its fee schedule page. For this audit the live series catalog was fetched from Kalshi's public market-data API on August 11, 2026, while both fee documents were read from their most recent archived snapshots, against a schedule marked effective February 5, 2026. The core formula, quoted in full:

fees = round up(0.07 x C x P x (1-P))

where P is the contract price in dollars, C is the contract count, and "round up = rounds to the next cent." Two structural rules matter as much as the formula. First, the schedule states that "trading fees are only charged for orders that are immediately matched with orders sitting on the orderbook," so a resting limit order that waits for a fill pays no taker fee. Second, the fee scales with P x (1-P), which peaks when a market is a coin flip and collapses toward both ends of the board.

Here is that curve from the schedule's own general table, per 100 contracts:

Contract Price	Fee per 100 contracts	Fee as % of cash outlay
$0.01	$0.07	7.0%
$0.05	$0.34	6.8%
$0.10	$0.63	6.3%
$0.25	$1.32	5.3%
$0.50	$1.75	3.5%
$0.75	$1.32	1.8%
$0.95	$0.34	0.4%
$0.99	$0.07	0.1%

The row worth staring at is the 50-cent one. A coin-flip market charges $1.75 per 100 contracts, 25 times the fee on a 99-cent contract, and coin-flip markets are precisely where casual traders spend their time. That is the engine behind most "insane fees" screenshots: the complainer is trading the exact price band where the formula charges its maximum, then comparing it to a friend's near-certain favorite that cost pennies. Both paid the published rate. Measured against cash outlay instead, the percentages flip, and cheap longshots quietly pay the highest rate on the board, a cousin of the pattern covered in the favorite-longshot bias on Kalshi. If you want the full conversion of these fees into sportsbook-style prices, the Kalshi fees explainer and the guide to reading Kalshi prices as American odds do that math line by line.

A Worked Example: The Round-Up Penalty On Small Orders

The formula's quietest clause is "round up," and it lands hardest on small orders. Work one example end to end. Buy 100 contracts at 50 cents: the raw fee is 0.07 x 100 x 0.5 x 0.5 = $1.75 exactly, or 3.5% of your $50 outlay, matching the table above. Now buy 1 contract at 50 cents: the raw fee is 1.75 cents, which rounds up to 2 cents, and 2 cents on a 50-cent contract is 4% of your outlay. At coin-flip prices the rounding bump is modest, half a point, but it is charged per order, and it grows as prices fall.

Push it to the cheap end and the penalty gets absurd. One contract at 5 cents carries a raw fee of about a third of a cent, rounds up to a full cent, and that single cent is 20% of your 5-cent outlay, versus 6.8% for someone buying the same market 100 contracts at a time: nearly triple the rate for the identical formula applied to the identical price. The small-order trader simply donates the rounding gap on every fill, which is one reason splitting one order into many small ones is the most expensive habit on the exchange.

The 129 Series That Charge Maker Fees

Now the part of the Kalshi fee schedule almost nobody reads. The PDF adds a second formula for designated markets:

Maker fees: fees = round up(0.0175 x C x P x (1-P))

charged on resting orders when they eventually fill, at a quarter of the taker rate, roughly 44 cents per 100 contracts at 50 cents, about 0.9% of the cash outlay. The same document commits to a refund rule worth quoting: "Users who pay more in maker fees as a result of rounding will be reimbursed in the first week of the following month if their reimbursement exceeds $10."

Which markets? Kalshi's PDF points to the fee schedule page, but that page loads its non-standard table dynamically, so I pulled the answer from Kalshi's own public market-data API, which tags every series with a fee type and multiplier. Of 12,699 listed series, 129 carry maker fees, and the list reads like a tour of the most popular products on the exchange: 106 are sports series, including NFL, NBA, NHL, and college football game, spread, and total markets, tennis matches, Premier League and Champions League games, the Super Bowl, March Madness, and F1 races. Ten are headline economics series, CPI, the Fed decision, jobs numbers, GDP, unemployment, even egg and gas prices. The rest are Emmys and Super Bowl halftime-headliner markets, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 yearly ranges, an IPO board, a year-end AI-model market, and a pair of bitcoin-milestone boards.

Read that list against the standard schedule and the pattern is unmistakable: the busiest series on the exchange are the ones where resting orders pay. For traders whose cost-cutting strategy is posting limit orders, the maker-versus-taker playbook still works, but in these 129 series the discount is smaller than advertised, since the "free" side of the book costs a quarter rate instead of nothing. That is the honest answer to which Kalshi markets have higher fees: not an elevated headline formula, but an extra fee lane the quiet markets never charge.

The Markets That Cost Less, And The 14 That Cost Nothing

The schedule bends the other way too, and this side gets no screenshots at all. Eighteen series run at a 0.5 fee multiplier, half the standard rate, and every one of them is an MLB derivative: first-5-innings winners, spreads and totals, home run markets, strikeouts, hits, stolen bases, team totals, and run-in-first-inning markets. The flagship baseball game series is the catalog's one hybrid, charging maker fees but at that same half multiplier. If you trade player-prop-style markets on Kalshi, day-to-day baseball is measurably the cheapest corner of the exchange right now, though the scope matters: the World Series, pennant, and series-winner futures sit in the full-rate maker-fee group above, so the discount belongs to the daily markets, not the sport wholesale. It is worth lining those contract prices up against the sportsbook side of the same games on the live MLB odds screen before deciding which venue gets your order.

Then there are the 14 series where the multiplier is zero: no trading fee in either direction. Almost all are long-horizon political and macro curiosities, whether Iran becomes a democracy, Greenland changes hands, the Department of Education is eliminated, annual GDP, end-of-year bitcoin and ether ranges, tech layoffs. Fee-free sounds like a gift until you remember why an exchange can afford it: these are thin, slow markets where the real cost of entry is the bid-ask spread, not the fee line. The trader quoted earlier who split Kalshi's take into "fees" and "the spread" had the accounting exactly right, and in the zero-fee series the second column is doing all the work.

Where The Document And The Exchange Disagree

Here is the finding that justifies the audit habit. The February 2026 PDF still carries a dedicated table for S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 markets at 0.035 x C x P x (1-P), half the general rate, listing the INX and NASDAQ100 ticker families explicitly. The live API tells a different story today: it reports those index series at the standard multiplier, with the yearly-range versions among the 129 maker-fee series, and the only half-rate series anywhere in the catalog are the MLB markets above, which the PDF's discount table never mentions. Meanwhile the fee schedule page, as of its most recent archived snapshot, shows "No upcoming fee changes scheduled."

I am not going to tell you which document wins, because the point is that you should not have to arbitrate. Fees change when the exchange says they change, per-series treatment moves, and the printed PDF and the live catalog can drift out of step in both directions. The discipline that survives all of it: before sizing up in any series, check that series' fee treatment on the exchange itself rather than assuming the general formula, the same way you would check a market's fine print before trusting a settlement assumption.

The Fees That Are Not Trading Fees

Back to the trader who got charged $10 per deposit, because the schedule fully resolves that mystery. Kalshi's published non-trading fees, quoted from the PDF: "There is no settlement fee." "There is no membership fee." ACH deposits and withdrawals carry no Kalshi fee in either direction, which also answers the "withdrawal fees" question from the parlay thread, at least on the exchange's side of the ledger. Card deposits are the exception: "Kalshi charges a maximum fee of 2% on card deposits." Crypto deposits can carry third-party processor charges, disclosed at transaction time, and wire withdrawals are not supported below $500,000.

So a $10 flat charge per deposit appears nowhere in the schedule. It came from the card issuer coding the deposit as a cash advance, an off-schedule cost that stacks on top of Kalshi's 2% card fee and dwarfs it on small deposits. The practical rule falls straight out of the audit: fund by ACH, where the schedule's number is zero, and never judge the exchange's fees by a bank statement line the exchange did not write.

What The Whole Board Means For Your Price

Put the five schedules back together and the map looks like this: the standard 7% formula covers 98.7% of listed series, the 129 series where volume actually lives add a maker-fee lane, baseball derivatives trade at half rate, and a handful of political curiosities trade free but wide. The angry screenshots almost always come from the first two groups at mid-board prices, the exact coordinates where the published math charges its most, compounded by per-order round-ups on small fills.

None of that makes the exchange a bad price. It makes it a price you have to compute, all-in, before comparing venues, the same discipline as removing the vig from a sportsbook line before calling it the market's opinion. A 50-cent contract plus 1.75 cents of fee has an implied break-even you can put directly next to a de-vigged sportsbook number for the same event, and sometimes the book side wins that comparison, which you can see for yourself on the free expert picks board where the lines being beaten are listed with the reasoning. For anyone still building that foundation, how prediction markets work covers the basics this page assumed. For everyone already trading, the takeaway from this audit is one sentence long: the fee schedule is five schedules, your series is in one of them, and knowing which one is worth more than any screenshot.

FAQ

Does Kalshi take a cut of winnings when a market settles? No. The published schedule states "there is no settlement fee," so a winning contract pays the full $1. Trading fees are charged when a taken order fills, not at settlement.

Which Kalshi markets have the highest fees? No series charges above the 7% formula today, but 129 series, including most major sports, CPI, Fed, and jobs markets, add maker fees on resting orders at a quarter of the taker rate, so their all-in cost runs higher than the quiet markets where resting orders are free.

Why did my small order pay a higher fee rate? Fees round up to the next cent per order. One contract at 50 cents rounds a 1.75-cent fee to 2 cents, a 4% hit versus 3.5% on a 100-contract order at the same price, and the gap widens fast at cheaper prices, where a single rounded cent can be 20% of a 5-cent contract.

Are any Kalshi markets fee-free? Yes. The live catalog lists 14 series at a zero fee multiplier, mostly long-horizon political and macro markets. The cost of trading them shows up in the bid-ask spread instead of the fee line.