Polymarket taker rebates: how the tier system works

Polymarket's Taker Rebate Program went live on Thursday, May 28, 2026. It returns part of the taker fee you already paid, every day, in pUSD. There are 6 tiers from Bronze to Obsidian, and your tier is set by your Weighted Volume over the last 30 days. The rebate runs from 3% at Bronze to 50% at Obsidian.

The percentage applies to fees, not to volume. Obsidian's 50% means half your taker fees come back, not half your notional. On Crypto that turns the published 0.07 taker rate into an effective 0.035. A 100-share Crypto trade at 50¢ costs $1.75 in fees at no tier and $0.88 at Obsidian.

Rebates accrue live as you trade and pay out once a day at midnight UTC, straight to your account. You need at least $1 of accrued rebate before a payout is issued. Payment is in pUSD, Polymarket's ERC-20 collateral token on Polygon, backed by USDC and enforced onchain by the wrap and unwrap contracts. Only taker fills earn Weighted Volume. Resting orders that get filled are paid by the separate Maker Rebates Program.

The formula is Weighted Volume = Trade Size × (1 - Entry Price) × Category Weight × Bonuses. Trade Size is shares multiplied by the price you paid, in dollars. The (1 - Entry Price) term is the upside per share: a share bought at 40¢ can win 60¢, so its upside is 0.60. Category Weight is one of the weights listed below. Bonuses are extra multipliers Polymarket can run on selected categories or events.

Polymarket's own example: you buy 1,000 shares of a Politics market at 40¢ and the order fills immediately, which makes you the taker. Trade Size is $400, upside per share is 0.60, and the Politics weight is 1.3. Weighted Volume earned is 400 × 0.60 × 1.3, or $312.

The weights are Sports 1.0; Politics, Finance, Mentions, and Tech 1.3; Economics, Culture, Weather, and Other 1.7; Crypto 2.3; Geopolitics 0. Polymarket sets these and says they can change.

One thing the docs do not spell out: the formula is written entirely in buy-side terms, naming the price you bought at. A sell of YES is economically a buy of NO at the complementary price, and the fee curve is symmetric around 50¢, so the arithmetic below holds either way. Polymarket does not document sell handling explicitly.

The two formulas share their moving parts. Polymarket's taker fee is C × feeRate × p × (1 - p), where C is shares and p is price. Trade Size is C × p, so Weighted Volume expands to C × p × (1 - p) × Weight. Divide one by the other and C, p, and (1 - p) all cancel. What is left is Weighted Volume = fee paid × (Category Weight / taker fee rate).

Tier progress is therefore a straight linear function of the fees you hand over. Inside a single category, every dollar of taker fee buys exactly the same amount of Weighted Volume, whatever price you entered at and however large the order was. There is no cheap price point and no efficient order size. Tier progress tracks the fee bill.

Polymarket's second worked example shows this. It presents two $50 Crypto trades: one at 50¢ earning $57.50 of Weighted Volume, one at 5¢ earning $109.25. The page files this under 'why price matters' and leaves out the cost.

The 5¢ trade is 1,000 shares and pays $3.33 in fees. The 50¢ trade is 100 shares and pays $1.75. That is 1.9 times the Weighted Volume for 1.9 times the fee. Both trades return 32.86 units of Weighted Volume per dollar of fee, and so does every other Crypto trade at any price.

Category is the only input that changes the exchange rate. Dividing each weight by its taker fee rate gives the Weighted Volume you get per dollar of fee: Economics, Culture, Weather, and Other pay 34.0; Crypto pays 32.9; Politics, Finance, Mentions, and Tech pay 32.5; Sports pays 20.0.

The first 3 groups sit within 5% of each other. Sports sits 40% below all of them, and the gap comes from the weight. Sports and the Economics group are charged the identical 0.05 taker fee rate, and Sports carries a 1.0 weight against their 1.7. Same fee, 70% less tier progress. Against Crypto the shortfall is 64%, meaning a sports taker pays $1.64 in fees for every $1.00 a crypto taker pays to reach the same tier.

Sports is still worth trading. Do not let tier progress decide where a marginal trade goes, because sports buys the least progress per dollar of fee. Geopolitics is a different case entirely: those markets are fee-free, they earn zero Weighted Volume, and they pay no rebate, so the program cannot see them in either direction.

Invert the relation and every threshold becomes a fee bill you have to run up inside one rolling 30-day window. On Crypto: Bronze costs about $61, Silver $609, Gold $6,087, Platinum $30,435, Diamond $121,739, and Obsidian $304,348.

On Sports the same 6 thresholds cost $100, $1,000, $10,000, $50,000, $200,000, and $500,000, because the exchange rate is 20 instead of 32.9. The Politics group runs a shade above the Crypto column at $62, $615, $6,154, $30,769, $123,077, and $307,692. The Economics group runs a shade below at $59, $588, $5,882, $29,412, $117,647, and $294,118.

Translated into flow, $6,087 of Crypto fees is roughly $174,000 of taker notional in 30 days if you trade near 50¢. Hold that pace at Gold and the 18% rebate returns about $1,096 a month. The tier is a discount on money you were already spending. It is not a prize, and chasing one you would not otherwise reach means paying full fees for a month to buy a smaller rebate later.

The rebate scales the published rate directly. Crypto starts at 0.07 and lands at 0.0679 at Bronze, 0.0644 at Silver, 0.0574 at Gold, 0.0476 at Platinum, 0.0392 at Diamond, and 0.0350 at Obsidian. Sports runs 0.05 down to 0.025. Finance, Politics, Mentions, and Tech run 0.04 down to 0.02.

In dollars per 100 shares at 50¢, where the fee curve peaks: Crypto falls from $1.75 to $1.44 at Gold and $0.88 at Obsidian. Sports falls from $1.25 to $0.63. Finance, Politics, Mentions, and Tech fall from $1.00 to $0.50. Away from 50¢ every figure shrinks with the p × (1 - p) curve, and the rebate percentage stays the same.

Size the effect on a round trip, since crossing the spread twice pays the fee twice. A 100-share Crypto position entered and exited near 50¢ costs $3.50 with no tier and $1.75 at Obsidian. Against $50 of committed capital that is 7% falling to 3.5%. Halving the fee is worth having, and it is still a cost your edge has to clear before the trade makes money.

Rebates are forward-only with no backfill. The day you reach Gold, the 18% turns on for trades from that moment onward. Every trade in the window that qualified you paid the old rate. The month you climb is always the most expensive month at that volume, and the tier only pays for itself if you keep trading afterward.

Tiers decay. Your position is recalculated every day at midnight UTC on a rolling 30 days, and it moves down after what Polymarket calls a short grace period once your Weighted Volume drops below the threshold. The docs do not publish the length of that grace period. Holding Obsidian is a standing commitment to roughly $304,000 a month in Crypto taker fees, indefinitely.

2 exclusions matter. Third-party integrations trading through omnibus wallets are not eligible for the program at all. Geopolitical and world events markets are fee-free, so they earn no Weighted Volume and pay no rebate. Polymarket also reserves the right to adjust or remove rebates and tier status for wash trading, self-matching, or other inauthentic trading, and to change rates, thresholds, weights, and bonus multipliers at any time without notice.

There is also no public endpoint for your taker tier. The CLOB API exposes GET /rebates/current, and its own tag reads Maker rebate endpoints and it takes a maker address. Your taker tier shows on your Polymarket profile and on the leaderboards. If you want it in a spreadsheet, you have to compute Weighted Volume from your own fills. 0xinsider.com/learn/polymarket-api lists what each Polymarket API does return.

The first time you reach each tier, Polymarket credits a one-time pUSD bonus: $10 for Bronze, $50 for Silver, $250 for Gold, $1,500 for Platinum, $7,500 for Diamond, and $25,000 for Obsidian.

Set each bonus against the Crypto fee bill of the month that earned it and it is a small share of the cost. Bronze returns 16% of that month's fees, Silver 8%, Gold 4%, Platinum 5%, Diamond 6%, and Obsidian 8%. No bonus at any tier covers the fees you paid to reach it.

The recurring rebate is the part worth planning around. A Gold trader holding pace on Crypto collects about $1,096 a month, which clears the one-time $250 inside the first week. Treat the level-up payment as a rounding item and judge the tier on the rebate stream behind it.

Makers are never charged a fee on Polymarket. Half a fee is more than no fee, so even Obsidian, the largest rebate any taker can get, is worse than resting an order that fills.

The same 100 shares of Crypto at 50¢ cost a taker $1.75 with no tier, $0.88 at Obsidian, and a maker $0.00. The maker also draws from the fee-curve weighted rebate pool, which is 20% of collected fees on Crypto, 15% on Sports, and 25% on Finance, Politics, Economics, Culture, Weather, Tech, Mentions, and Other / General. Both sides of the book get paid out of the same fee, and only one side pays it.

What you are buying as a taker is execution certainty. A resting order might never fill, and a market order fills now. The Taker Rebate Program lowers the price of immediacy without removing it. For the maker side of the same fee pool, see 0xinsider.com/learn/liquidity-rewards, and for the underlying fee curve and per-category rates, see 0xinsider.com/learn/polymarket-fees-explained.

Any program that pays for taker volume creates a reason to generate taker volume that has nothing to do with a view on the outcome. Polymarket names the abusive version and reserves the right to claw back tier status for wash trading and self-matching. The legal version is quieter and more common: a trader who was going to take liquidity anyway routes more of it through fee-enabled categories, sizes up, and trades more often than their edge alone would justify.

That is a reason to be careful reading volume as conviction. In a raw feed, a wallet churning size at 50¢ to build Weighted Volume looks identical to a wallet acting on information. Both print large, both cross the spread, both show up in the daily totals.

0xinsider grades wallets on realized profit and loss across resolved markets rather than on turnover, which is the measure a rebate program cannot inflate. 0xinsider.com/leaderboard ranks traders by money made. 0xinsider.com/whale-alerts lists large Polymarket trades with the wallet's track record attached, live with Pro and 24 hours behind without it, so a big print from a high-turnover, low-profit account reads differently from the same size posted by a wallet that has been right across a thousand settled markets.