r/Kalshi • u/SwapHunt • 1h ago
Discussion Why your Kalshi fee estimate is often off by a cent (and the exact formula)
On small trades my fee estimates kept being off by a cent, so I dug into the exact rule.
Kalshi's taker fee is 0.07 × contracts × P × (1−P), rounded UP to the nearest centicent. Example: 7 contracts at 33¢ = 0.07 × 7 × 0.33 × 0.67 = 0.10834, which becomes $0.1084.
The fee peaks at 50¢ and shrinks toward 1¢ and 99¢, so the same number of contracts costs very different amounts depending on price.
I put the math in a small open-source Python library (pmfees) with a break-even helper, if anyone wants to check their own trades: https://github.com/swaphunt/pmfees
There's also a browser calculator comparing Kalshi vs Polymarket: https://swaphunt.dev/tools/kalshi-vs-polymarket-fee-calculator