Maker fee

The taker fee is the number venues advertise. The maker fee is the one a reader who posts limit orders actually pays, and it is the less standardised of the two: on the venue cards in this catalogue it runs from a payment to you to a charge equal to the taker's.

How it works

A maker is the order that was waiting. It went into the book at a price nobody was yet willing to meet, and it trades only when somebody else arrives and takes it. The fee attaches to that fill, not to the posting. Limitless states the consequence directly: you sign an order carrying fee terms, and you pay nothing if it rests in the book. On every venue card here, an order that rests and is then cancelled costs nothing at all.

What the maker then pays varies more than the taker rate does. Reading economics.fees_maker off the venue cards, each expressed as the charge on one contract at 50 cents as a share of its dollar payout:

Three shapes of "free"

A zero, a None and a rebate are three different arrangements. Kalshi's zero is a schedule with a slot for a maker charge that is switched off by default: its card finds the maker variant on 160 of 11,078 series on 19 September 2026, and combination markets other than uncorrelated NFL combos carry maker fees at half the taker rate. Polymarket's None is a schedule with no maker charge, where the rebate is funded out of taker fees and paid daily rather than at the fill. The zeros on Limitless, Myriad and Futuur hide the same kind of rebate, because the field records what a maker is charged, not what it is paid. Polymarket US's negative number is a per-trade coefficient. Its fee schedule puts the rebate at $0.31 on 100 contracts at 50 cents and $0.11 at 10 or 90 cents, rounded to the cent with banker's rounding and applied at the point of trade.

Where there is no maker side

Two venue arrangements here do not distinguish at all. ForecastEx's fee schedule charges $0.01 per contract to both the Yes and the No side of each executed transaction, independent of how the contract resolves. Robinhood, routing to more than one exchange, publishes one commission whether your order rests or takes. On both, posting a limit order is a price decision and not a fee decision.

Why it matters here

"Limit order" does not mean "maker". A limit order priced at or through the best price on the other side matches on arrival and is charged as a taker. Only the part that is left over and rests becomes a maker order. Code that sets a price one tick too aggressive pays the taker rate on every fill while its author believes it is making.

A zero on the card is a default, not a promise for your series. On Kalshi the maker charge is switched on series by series, and an order resting in a combination market pays maker fees that a reader of the headline schedule would not expect. Read the series, not the venue.

A rebate is not a discount on the taker fee. It is paid to the resting side, and only when the resting side fills. On Polymarket US it arrives in the trade; on Polymarket and Limitless it is paid daily, out of taker fees. An order that never fills earns nothing, and a comparison that nets a maker rebate against a taker fee is adding the two halves of different trades.

Filling is not always good news for a maker. A resting order fills precisely when someone else decides the price has moved through it, so the fills a maker gets are skewed towards the ones a better-informed trader wanted. A zero or negative maker fee pays you for standing there; it does not tell you whether standing there was a good price. That is a property of the book rather than of any schedule; where liquidity comes from has the measurements of how deep the books here actually are.

Where there is no maker side, stop optimising for one. On ForecastEx and through Robinhood, patient orders cost the same fee as impatient ones. The saving from resting, on those two, is only the spread you did not cross. What a trade actually costs adds that to the fee on both legs.