Kalshi's own trading fee is a formula, not a flat rate: about 7% of a contract's price times one minus that price, rounded up to the next cent on the order. That number peaks on a contract trading right around 50 cents, a genuine coin-flip market, and falls fast as the price moves toward either extreme. It's a real cost, and usually not the biggest one. The bid-ask spread, what it actually takes to get filled, tends to matter more, especially on a thinner contract. Most readers here aren't opening a direct Kalshi.com account; a licensed broker with its own seat on the exchange routes the order instead, and that broker adds a second, separate layer on top: its own funding method and execution spread, different broker to broker. Check the current fee schedule directly before sizing a position around any of this; it changes.
What Kalshi Itself Actually Charges
The formula is public: multiply 0.07 by the contract's price and by one minus that price, multiply again by the number of contracts, then round the total up to the next whole cent. Run that on a 100-contract order and the shape becomes obvious fast. At a 50-cent price, right in the middle, it works out to $1.75 for the order. At a 95-cent price, near-certain either way, the same 100 contracts cost about $0.34. Same trade size, more than five times the fee, purely because of where the price sat. That's the design in one comparison: Kalshi charges more where the outcome is genuinely uncertain and less where the market's mostly already decided.
There's also a maker/taker distinction: a resting limit order that adds liquidity to the book is typically charged less than a market order that takes it immediately. The exact discount isn't consistent across every source describing it, which is itself a reason to check the current schedule rather than trust a secondhand number, this page included.
The Spread Usually Costs More Than the Fee
The fee above is the part Kalshi publishes and the part every explainer quotes. The spread, the gap between the best price a buyer's offering and the best price a seller will accept, doesn't show up as a line item anywhere, and for a lot of positions it's the bigger cost of the two. A closely watched election contract or a same-day Fed decision usually trades with a tight spread, because enough people are quoting both sides at once. A niche culture contract three weeks out, or a weather market nobody's paying attention to, can trade a lot wider, and that gap comes straight out of your entry and exit price whether or not you ever notice it as a separate charge.
What a Broker Adds on Top
None of the above assumes you're trading with a direct Kalshi.com account. Most readers here aren't, because Kalshi doesn't currently reach every country directly, and a licensed broker with its own seat on the exchange routes the order instead, MadMarket through Edge or BetInAsia through BLACK. That relationship isn't free either. On top of Kalshi's own fee and spread, the broker adds its own layer: a funding cost that depends on how you move money in (crypto tends to be cheaper than a card or bank rail), plus its own execution spread. Neither broker publishes one flat number for this, so check the account terms directly rather than assume a figure that isn't actually published anywhere. It's not a hidden catch, just an extra, real step between you and the exchange, one that carries its own small cost, the same as any brokerage relationship does.
The Three Cost Layers, Side by Side
A quick summary of where the cost actually comes from, roughly in order of how visible it is:
| Cost layer | What it actually is | Rough scale |
|---|---|---|
| Kalshi's own trading fee | 7% of price times (1 minus price), per order, rounded up to the next cent. The one layer with a published formula. | About $1.75 on a 100-contract order at 50 cents, about $0.34 at 95 cents |
| The bid-ask spread | The gap between the best buy price and the best sell price on that specific contract | Tight on high-volume markets, wider on thin or niche ones, not published as a single number |
| The broker's own layer | Funding method plus execution spread, set by whichever broker routes the order | Varies by broker and funding method; check the account terms directly |
Kalshi's fee schedule is a live, periodically updated document, not a fixed one, and the same goes for how a broker prices its own layer. Confirm current numbers before sizing a position around anything above.
None of this makes much sense without seeing how a Kalshi price gets set in the first place, since the fee formula above is built directly around that price. How Kalshi actually prices a market covers that mechanic on its own, worth reading before treating anything here as the full cost picture. For the wider tour of what's tradable on the exchange, sports through weather, head back to the Kalshi markets hub. Both sit under the Forecast Access homepage, which maps the access question and the markets question side by side.