Polymarket.US Ends Maker Rebates for Small Traders

Daniel Carr, MSW

Oct 13

3 min read

Polymarket US has filed a new fee schedule with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that effectively eliminates its standard maker rebate for small retail traders. Beginning October 19, 2026, a trader must generate at least $10 million in maker volume during the previous month before receiving any standard maker rebate. Below that threshold, the rebate is zero. For retail traders who built small market making operations around repeatedly earning fractions of a cent on passive orders, the economics change immediately.

The change was filed by QCX LLC, operating as Polymarket US, with the CFTC on October 2 under Regulation 40.6(a). The CFTC docket identifies the filing as an "Amendment to Maker Rebate" and lists it under the agency's 10 Day Review process. This is an exchange self certification, not a rule imposed on Polymarket by the CFTC. Polymarket chose the new structure and filed it with its regulator.

The Filing Creates a $10 Million Wall

The current Polymarket US maker rebate uses a coefficient of negative 0.0125 in the exchange's fee formula, which works out to roughly 18 percent of the standard taker fee at the same price and contract quantity. Under the October 2 filing, that universal rebate disappears. Makers with at least $10 million in prior month volume receive a coefficient of negative 0.0035, approximately 5 percent of the standard taker fee, while the higher tiers rise to negative 0.0070 at $50 million and negative 0.0104 at $200 million. A trader producing $9.9 million in monthly maker volume receives none of those standard rebates.

The scale of that threshold is difficult to reconcile with a small retail operation. Reaching $10 million in a 30 day month requires roughly $333,000 in maker volume every day. The $50 million tier requires about $1.67 million per day, while $200 million implies approximately $6.67 million per day. These are not milestones designed around someone building a small automated trading business with a few hundred or few thousand dollars of capital.

Small Rebates Were the Business Model

Maker rebates can look insignificant when examined one contract at a time. That misses how small market making businesses work. A trader might earn only a tiny spread and a tiny rebate on each successful fill, but repeat that process hundreds or thousands of times while managing the trades that move against them. Removing a fraction of a cent from each transaction can destroy a strategy whose entire expected profit was already measured in fractions of a cent.

This is particularly relevant on fast prediction markets where competition quickly compresses spreads. A small maker does not have the capital, infrastructure, or diversification available to a professional liquidity firm. The rebate gave that trader another source of expected value for placing capital on the book before another trader decided to take it. Under the new filing, the exchange still benefits from that resting liquidity, but the small maker receives no standard rebate for providing it.

Polymarket Says the Tiers Reward Liquidity

The logic presented around Polymarket US's new volume based rebate structure is that larger incentives should follow larger trading volume. Polymarket argues in its related CFTC filings that objective volume tiers encourage trading activity, deepen liquidity, improve price discovery, and spread the fixed costs of operating a regulated market across greater volume. The thresholds are published in advance and apply according to measured trading volume rather than trader identity. From an exchange perspective, concentrating incentives on the participants producing the most volume has a straightforward economic rationale.

The consequence is still a substantial structural advantage for the largest makers. A professional operation above the threshold can quote a market knowing that each filled maker order earns an additional rebate, while a smaller trader quoting the same market starts with zero. The larger operation can use that rebate to tolerate tighter spreads and compete more aggressively for fills. Scale therefore produces an advantage before either trader has made a correct or incorrect market decision.

This Could End a Real Retail Small Business Model

Polymarket US is not introducing a maker fee. A retail trader can still place passive orders without paying the exchange for those maker fills. What disappears is a small stream of revenue that made extremely narrow market making strategies viable. For someone earning $10 or $20 a day from an automated rebate strategy, describing the lost income as small does not make the business irrelevant.

There is an irony in setting the first maker rebate threshold at $10 million per month. Maker rebates exist to encourage participants to put orders on the book and provide liquidity. Small traders were doing exactly that, only at smaller scale. Under the new CFTC filing, Polymarket US will continue rewarding liquidity once the person supplying it is already operating at a volume that most retail traders could never realistically reach.