How to make money on Kalshi

Yes, traders make money on Kalshi. Kalshi is an exchange, not a sportsbook. You trade against other people, Kalshi takes a fee on the fill, and whoever priced the event better keeps the difference. There are six ways traders get paid, and four costs that decide whether an edge survives.

This page starts with the live count of how many tracked Kalshi traders sit in profit, then covers each way to make money with its math, then the costs, then Polymarket, then a plan you can run from start to finish.

How many Kalshi traders are in profit

Here is the live count from Rivo's own record of settled Kalshi bets:

How to read the block:

• Traders counted. Every Kalshi trader Rivo tracks who has at least 10 settled bets on record. Ten is the floor because a record shorter than that says more about luck than skill.
• Share in profit. The part of that group whose settled bets add up to a gain. This is the honest answer to "can you make money on Kalshi", measured on real positions that already paid out or expired.
• Share of profit held by the top tenth. How much of all the profit sits with the best 10% of traders. The higher this reads, the more the money gathers with a small group, and the more it pays to know who is in it.

Two notes on the sample. Rivo records Kalshi traders whose trades are public, so the count covers named traders, not every account on the exchange. And the figures move as markets settle, which is why this page reads them live instead of printing a number that ages.

The takeaway holds whatever the block shows today: profit on Kalshi is earned by specific traders using specific habits. The Kalshi leaderboard names them, and the rest of this page covers the habits.

Six ways to make money on Kalshi

1. Price an event better than the market

A Kalshi price is a probability. A Yes contract at 40 cents says the market gives the event a 40% chance. If the real chance is 50%, each contract is worth 50 cents and you bought it for 40. Do that across a hundred markets and the 10 cent gap is your income, less fees.

The work is the estimate. Traders who profit this way pick one area and learn it deeper than the crowd: one league, weather in a handful of cities, the monthly inflation release, a single Fed meeting. The record backs the habit. Win rates differ sharply from one kind of market to the next, as shown in whale win rates by category and where whales win the most.

• Write your estimate down before you look at the price.
• Buy only when the gap beats the fee with room to spare.
• Skip markets you have no view on. Passing costs nothing.

2. Copy traders with a winning record

Copy trading borrows someone else's estimate. Many Kalshi traders are public by name, and Rivo records every trade it sees them make and scores each position when the market settles. A profile shows the profit curve, the win rate against the odds paid, results by bet size and by kind of market, and every open position.

What separates a trader worth copying from a lucky one:

• Enough settled bets. A hot week proves nothing. Look for a record that spans months.
• A win rate ahead of the prices paid. Winning 70% of bets bought at 80 cents loses money. Winning 55% of bets bought at 45 cents makes it.
• A specialty. Copy a trader in the kind of market where their record is strong, and filter the rest out.
• Sizes you can follow. A trader's largest bets are not always their best, a point covered in does bet size predict success.

The trap is price. The trader bought at 52 cents, the market moved, and you pay 58. Their edge was real at 52 and gone at 58. A copy bot with an entry price band solves this by skipping any fill outside the band. The full list of traps is in five mistakes copy traders make.

3. Trade the price move before settlement

You can sell any Kalshi position before the market settles. Buy 100 Yes at 40 cents, sell at 60 cents after good news, and the gross profit is $20 without waiting for the result.

This is the most fee-sensitive way to trade. Entry and exit are both fills, so a taker pays twice: $1.68 in and $1.68 out on that example, leaving $16.64. The same trade held to a winning settlement pays one fee and nets $58.32. Swing trading works when the move is large and the exit rests as a limit order. It bleeds when the target is a 2 or 3 cent move near 50 cents, where two taker fees take about 3.5 cents a contract.

Live games and short crypto windows move fastest. A price alert on a market tells you when it crosses a level or moves several points inside an hour, so you can act on the move instead of watching for it.

4. Make markets with resting orders

A market maker rests a bid and an offer and earns the gap when both fill. Buy 100 at 48 cents, sell 100 at 52 cents, and you made $4 without an opinion on the outcome.

• The fee favors you. On most Kalshi series a resting order pays no fee. On the maker-fee series (the biggest sports, index, economics and crypto markets) it pays a quarter of the taker rate: $0.44 per 100 contracts at 50 cents.
• Kalshi pays for liquidity. Its Liquidity Incentive Program rewards resting orders near the best price on markets that show a reward schedule, for eligible US members. Rewards are credits, and Kalshi can change or end the program.
• The risk is one-sided fills. When news breaks, informed traders hit your stale quote first. You end up holding the losing side at the old price.

Market making suits traders who can watch a market or quote by API. For everyone else the lesson still applies in a smaller form: enter with a limit order and let the price come to you.

5. Earn interest on your balance

Kalshi pays interest to eligible US accounts holding $250 or more. Its help center lists a variable 3.50% rate that accrues daily on your cash and on the value of your open positions, and pays monthly. Money waiting for the next trade earns while it waits, and so does a position you plan to hold for months. Kalshi needs your Social Security number on file to pay more than $10 of interest in a year, and the interest is taxable. See Kalshi taxes.

6. Automate it with a bot

A bot does not create an edge. It collects one you already found, on every trade, at any hour, at the size you set. On Kalshi that matters because the best entries last minutes.

Rivo's bot builder makes three kinds:

• Copy a trader. The bot takes the trader's new positions at your size.
• Run a signal. The bot takes incoming trades that match your criteria: category, size, entry price, market or a list of traders.
• Watch a market. The bot applies a price rule to one market or a repeating series and records the trades the rule made.

Each runs as alerts, on paper or live. A live Kalshi bot places orders through your own API key inside a per-trade and a daily limit. The walkthrough is in how to build a Kalshi trading bot.

The costs that decide whether an edge survives

A good estimate is half the job. The other half is keeping it. Four costs take the most from Kalshi traders, and all four are within your control.

Fees at each price

The taker fee is 0.07 x contracts x price x (1 - price), rounded up to the cent. Turn it into probability points and you get the edge you need before a trade pays anything.

A trader who thinks a 50 cent market should be 52 has a 2 point edge and gives 1.75 of it to the fee as a taker. The same trader resting a limit order keeps all of it on most series. Every price and the rounding rules are in Kalshi fees explained.

Slippage

The price on the screen is the best offer, and it only covers the contracts resting there. A larger order walks up the book: the first 200 contracts fill at 50 cents, the next 300 at 52, the rest at 55. Your average is the price you paid, and on a thin market it can sit several cents above the quote. That gap is slippage, and it comes straight out of your edge.

• Check the depth at each level before you size an order.
• Use a limit order with a ceiling instead of taking whatever the book offers.
• Split a large order or trade a deeper market.

The full math is in Kalshi slippage explained. Rivo's order ticket walks the live book level by level and shows the average fill, the fee and the total before you click Buy. A live bot sizes down to the depth inside your slippage limit.

Entry price discipline

The price you pay sets how often you must win. The table shows a $100 stake at each price, before fees.

At 95 cents one loss erases nineteen wins. Late buys of a near-certain side feel safe and pay almost nothing, and the fee takes its largest share of profit there. That is why Rivo's follow alerts start at entries of 85 cents or less, and why a bot's entry price band caps the price its own order may reach.

• Set a maximum entry price for every idea before you open the ticket.
• When the market runs past it, let the trade go.
• Judge a trader by their win rate against the prices they paid, never by win rate alone.

Position sizing

Losing streaks happen to every profitable trader. Size decides whether you are still trading when the streak ends. The table shows what is left of a bankroll after ten losses in a row, staking a fixed share of what remains each time.

Stake 1% to 2% a trade and a bad run is a dent. Stake 10% and the same run needs your bankroll to almost triple before you are level. Add a daily limit so a busy day cannot spend the month, and a loss limit that stops everything at a number you chose while calm.

How to make money on Polymarket

The same six ways work on Polymarket, with three differences that favor research. Here is the live count for Polymarket from the same record:

Read it the same way: traders with at least 10 settled bets, the share of them in profit, and the share of all profit held by the top tenth.

• Every wallet is public. A Polymarket wallet's whole history is on chain, so a winning trader can be studied position by position. Start on the Polymarket leaderboard or paste an address into the wallet tracker.
• Makers get paid. Resting orders pay no fee on either Polymarket product and earn a rebate, so the limit order habit pays even more here. Rates are in Polymarket fees explained.
• Some markets are free to take. Geopolitics markets on polymarket.com carry no taker fee, and politics and sports run below the Kalshi rate.

Polymarket US and polymarket.com are separate products with separate accounts, balances and order books. Where you live decides which one you can open. The access map shows it by state and country, and Kalshi vs Polymarket compares the venues side by side.

A step by step plan

This is the order we would follow with a new bankroll. Each step runs in Rivo, and your money stays in your own Kalshi account the whole time.

1. Research traders. Open the Kalshi leaderboard and sort by profit, then by return. Pick the board for the kind of market you know. Open a profile and read the profit curve, the win rate against the odds paid and the results by category.
2. Test at your stake. Run the backtest on a trader or a signal with the amount you plan to trade. A trader's backtest replays their settled bets at your size. A signal's backtest splits its matches into a training period and a holdout period and flags a signal that only worked in one. See prediction market backtesting.
3. Set the entry price band. Cap the entry at a price where the payoff still covers the losses, using the table above.
4. Run it on paper. Start the bot in Paper mode, or place paper orders by hand from the same ticket. Paper uses the venue's live prices and no money. Give it enough trades to compare against the backtest. The method is in paper trading a bot before going live.
5. Go live with limits. Connect your own Kalshi API key, then set a per-trade amount, a daily limit and a loss limit. The key places orders and cannot withdraw.
6. Mirror the exits. Turn on "Sell when the trader sells" so the bot leaves a position when the trader does.
7. Review every week. Read the bot's trades and its skips with their reasons. Raise size only after the live record matches the paper record.

Ready to start? Build a bot from a trader, a signal or a market.

Kalshi tips from the record

• Specialize. One kind of market, learned well.
• Rest your orders. A limit order removes the fee on most series and removes slippage on all of them.
• Trade ten contracts or more. Rounding takes a large share of a tiny order.
• Enter early. The payoff is in the middle of the price range, before the outcome is obvious.
• Hold winners to settlement when you still like them. Settlement carries no fee.
• Fund by bank transfer. A card deposit can cost up to 2% before your first trade.
• Keep idle cash on the venue. A balance of $250 or more earns interest.
• Track everything. A record you can read is how you find out which of your ideas pay.

Where Rivo fits

Rivo is the prediction market terminal for Kalshi, Polymarket, Polymarket US and Gemini. It ingests every market and every trade, and it costs $9 a week or $15 a month. Rivo never holds your money.

• Leaderboards and profiles. Every tracked trader's record on settled markets, by period and by kind of market.
• Alerts. Follow a trader and get their new positions in the app, on your phone and on Telegram. Add trader alerts and price alerts on the markets you watch.
• The bot builder. Copy a trader, run a signal or watch a market, with a backtest before it runs.
• Paper trading. By hand or by bot, at live prices, with no venue account needed.
• Live bots on Kalshi. Through your own API key, with per-trade and daily limits, a loss limit and "Sell when the trader sells".
• One order ticket and one portfolio. The exact fee and average fill before every order, and your positions, orders and copy history on each venue.

New to the exchange? Read how does Kalshi work first. Weighing a deposit? Is Kalshi legit covers the regulation and the complaints.

Frequently asked questions