Kalshi’s Parlay Maker Fee Has Already Brought in $26 Million in Four Weeks

A Fee on Makers, a Cost for Takers

According to a report by Ingame’s Daniel O’Boyle, Kalshi’s parlay maker fees now routinely top $1 million a day on weekends. On Sept. 12, the prediction market collected $1.7 million from this revenue source, which is more than its average daily fee revenue from takers and makers combined in August 2025—a little more than a year ago. Parlays are now the majority of Kalshi’s maker-fee revenue, with total maker fees passing $2.5 million on that mid-September day. The figures don’t account for the rebates and liquidity rewards Kalshi pays to market makers that meet its requirements.

When the parlay fees first surfaced in August, the reports traced to a trader’s post on X rather than to Kalshi itself, and the exchange’s fee schedule listed no combo series and no scheduled changes. Kalshi’s public API now records a new fee type, applied to three combo series between 09:01 and 09:05 UTC on Aug. 20.

The online fee schedule has since added a row for combos, excluding uncorrelated NFL parlays, with maker fees at 50% of the taker fee. The downloadable PDF version is still dated July 7 and makes no mention of combos. The only maker-fee formula it sets out charges a quarter of the taker rate, half what combo makers now pay.

The extra revenue has pushed Kalshi’s fee take back toward its World Cup peak. In the seven days ending Sept. 15, the exchange averaged $12.3 million a day in fees, against $12.9 million in the week ending July 7. Without parlay maker fees, the recent figure would have been just under $11 million.

How Kalshi Parlays Work

Kalshi prices parlays through a request-for-quote system, where traders ask for a price on a combination, and market makers respond within seconds with an offer. Takers generally pay more than the true probability, which is what made fee-free market making on parlays lucrative. The cited analysis suggests the cost is being split between market makers and parlay bettors.

On uncorrelated non-NFL combos, where a fair price can be calculated from the individual legs, the average daily markup that makers charged ran at about 0.55% in the two weeks before the fee and about 3.1% from Aug. 20 through Sept. 16, according to the data Ingame published with its report. Makers have also made $24 million in profit after fees since the change, less than in any of the three preceding four-week periods.

None of this has slowed demand. Kalshi first cleared $1 billion in daily parlay volume on Aug. 29, then broke that record three more times, reaching $1.49 billion on Sept. 13, the first NFL Sunday of the season. That figure counts both sides of every trade, and makers put up most of the money on long-odds parlays. On the taker side alone, a record $68.4 million was staked on parlays that day, a little over 11% of Kalshi’s total taker volume. Since parlays launched in September 2025, takers have lost more than $380 million before fees and $620 million after them.

Uncorrelated NFL parlays remain exempt from maker fees, which keeps Kalshi’s highest-profile product cheapest for market makers during football season, when it competes most directly with the sportsbooks. It also competes with Polymarket US, which opened parlays to all app users the same day Kalshi’s fee took effect, according to Ingame. The Polymarket US fee schedule, revised on Sept. 17, pays market makers a rebate on trades exchange-wide rather than charging them.