What is the minimum deposit on Polymarket?

Two different floors, often confused for one

The question "what is the minimum on Polymarket" has two answers, because two unrelated systems each impose a floor. The first is the deposit floor, applied by the bridge that moves money onto the platform. It exists because bridging a small amount of value across a chain costs more in network fees than the transfer is worth, so each chain carries its own threshold. The second is the order floor, applied by the central limit order book when a position is opened. It exists to keep tiny residual orders from cluttering the book.

They are denominated differently, which is the detail most published answers drop. The deposit floor is a dollar figure. The order floor is a share count, and a share is a claim on one dollar priced anywhere between nearly nothing and nearly a dollar, so the same 5-share floor can cost 20 cents in one market and 4 dollars in another on the same afternoon. Clearing one floor says nothing about clearing the other.

Three official sources, three different deposit minimums

On July 27, 2026 we read all three places Polymarket publishes a deposit minimum and found that no two of them agree. The bridge exposes a public endpoint at bridge.polymarket.com/supported-assets, which returned 221 assets across 13 chains, each carrying a minCheckoutUsd field. The developer documentation on the same domain prints a hand-maintained table of the same thing. The help center deposit article gives two figures as examples. The table below sets them side by side.

The Ethereum row is the clearest case: 5 dollars, 7 dollars, and 20 dollars for the same chain on the same day. The chain lists diverge too. The documentation table names Katana, Lighter, Abstract, and Ethereal, none of which the live endpoint returned, while the endpoint returned Ink and a chain labelled Robinhood that the table does not mention.

Polymarket effectively settles which one to trust in its own documentation, which carries a note telling developers that supported assets change over time and to call the endpoint for the current list before initiating a deposit. That makes the endpoint the live figure and the table a snapshot that has drifted. The help center numbers read as illustrative examples rather than a specification. The practical consequence is that any page quoting a flat Polymarket minimum without naming a chain and a date, and several of the pages currently ranking for this question do exactly that, is quoting one slice of a moving target.

What the 221 supported assets actually look like

Reading the endpoint response in full on July 27, 2026, the 221 entries carried only three distinct minimums. One hundred and forty assets sat at 2 dollars, spread across Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, HyperEVM, Monad, Ink, and Robinhood. Seventy-eight sat at 5 dollars, and every one of those was an Ethereum-mainnet asset, which is what you would expect given that Ethereum gas costs more than an equivalent transfer on a rollup. Three sat at 7 dollars: Bitcoin on two token entries and USDT on Tron.

The minimum is a property of the chain rather than the token in every case we saw, so all 35 BNB Smart Chain assets shared one figure and all 78 Ethereum assets shared another. Whichever asset arrives, the bridge converts it to pUSD on Polygon, the collateral the order book settles in. That conversion is covered in more detail in what currency does Polymarket use, which explains how pUSD relates to USDC and to ordinary dollars.

A deposit that falls under the floor is not described as lost. Polymarket's help center states that such deposits remain pending until the cumulative amount meets the required minimum, so a second transfer on the same chain clears the first.

The order minimum: 5 shares on every open market we checked

The second floor is easier to state and harder to intuit. We enumerated every open market the public Gamma API would return on July 27, 2026, filtered to those with an order book enabled and accepting orders, and were left with 2,086 markets. Every one of them reported an orderMinSize of 5 shares. There were no exceptions in the sample and no per-category variation. Tick size, by contrast, did vary: 2,001 of the 2,086 priced in one-cent increments and 85 priced in tenth-of-a-cent increments, a split explored in what is tick size on Polymarket.

Because the floor counts shares, its cash cost is the share price multiplied by five, and share prices span the full range from a fraction of a cent to just under a dollar. Across the 2,084 of those markets carrying a readable price, the smallest allowed order ranged from a quarter of a cent to 4.998 dollars, with a median of 2.50 dollars. Two hundred and ninety-seven of them, about one in seven, had a minimum order costing less than a dollar, and 123 came in under 25 cents. The bound at the top is structural: five shares can never cost more than five dollars, because a share cannot trade above a dollar.

The pattern in that table is worth naming plainly, because it is a mechanical consequence of the pricing rather than a feature anyone designed. Contracts priced near a coin flip carry the most expensive minimum order, around 2.50 dollars, and contracts priced at either extreme carry the cheapest. It cuts both ways: a 4 cent outcome has a 20 cent minimum and a 96 cent outcome has a 4.80 dollar one, and those are the two sides of the same market. Nothing about a cheap minimum makes a contract more likely to pay, which is the reading error the arithmetic invites and which the favorite-longshot bias documents at length.

Every floor and ceiling in one table

Three separate systems apply limits, and a reader who has cleared one may still be stopped by another. The card route is the one Polymarket documents least, because it does not run it: card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and bank transfers go through MoonPay, a third-party on-ramp whose own Polymarket announcement lists the payment methods without publishing a minimum. That figure appears at checkout alongside the processor's spread and fee, and it is not the same number as the bridge floor.

At the other end there is no platform ceiling on the order book. Polymarket's help center states that, by design, the Polymarket orderbook does not have trading size limits, and adds that large orders may move the price depending on the liquidity available. That shifts the real constraint from a rule to a market condition: the resting depth in the individual book, which is a different figure from the headline liquidity number and is covered in what is a Polymarket order book.

What the minimum does not tell you

A low floor is a statement about access, not about cost. Three other charges sit between a deposit and a settled position, and none of them scales down to nothing just because the order was small. The bid-ask spread is paid on any size, including the smallest allowed one. The taker fee introduced through 2026 applies to orders that remove liquidity from the book, sized by category, and is set out in Polymarket fees explained. Network fees apply on the way in and, depending on the chain, on the way out, which is the reason the floors exist at all.

On a 5-share order those fixed costs are proportionally large. A one cent spread on a five share position is five cents of friction against a position that may have cost 20 cents, which is a far heavier proportional drag than the same spread on a thousand-share position. The floors describe what the system will accept, not what a small position costs to run.

Money moving the other way runs on its own clock and its own rules, covered in how long Polymarket takes to pay out. The glossary defines each term as this desk uses it, and the methodology page sets out where our figures come from and how often they refresh.

How we checked these numbers

Every original figure on this page came from two public Polymarket endpoints, read once on July 27, 2026, and can be reproduced by anyone. The deposit minimums came from a single unauthenticated request to the bridge supported-assets endpoint, tallying the minCheckoutUsd field across all 221 returned assets and grouping by chain. The order minimums came from paging the Gamma markets endpoint for open markets, keeping those with an order book enabled and accepting orders, and reading orderMinSize, orderPriceMinTickSize, and the current outcome price on each. The Gamma endpoint stops paging past roughly 2,100 records, so 2,086 markets is the enumerable universe rather than a claim about every market Polymarket lists.

The quoted figures attributed to Polymarket's documentation table and help center are theirs, read the same day. All of these are platform parameters that Polymarket can change without notice, and the divergence documented above is itself evidence of how often they move. Anyone relying on a specific figure would want to read the endpoint again rather than trust a date-stamped page, including this one.

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