Limit orders vs buying the ask on Kalshi

ThinBlimp guide · facts checked October 17, 2026 · measured on real games · nothing here is advice

Every market has two prices at any moment: the bid, the most anyone will pay right now, and the ask, the least anyone will sell for. How you buy decides which one you pay, and whether you pay a fee.

Buying the ask

Buying the ask makes you a taker. You accept the seller's price and your order fills immediately. You pay the ask plus Kalshi's taker fee.

On a book that shows bid 36¢ and ask 37¢, 100 contracts at the 37¢ ask carry a $1.64 taker fee, 1.64¢ a contract, so your real price is 38.64¢.

Resting a limit order

A limit order below the ask makes you a maker. You name your price, say 35¢, and your order sits in the book until a seller decides to sell to you. Kalshi charges resting orders nothing on most markets; a few series charge makers a small fee, which the order ticket shows.

Same contract, about 3.6¢ cheaper, if it fills. On Kalshi's order ticket, ticking Submit as resting order only guarantees you're the maker: if your price would buy instantly, Kalshi rejects the order instead of filling it as a taker.

Where to rest depends on the spread. In a busy market the spread is about a cent, so the bid and one cent under the ask are the same price. In a wide market (bid 61¢, ask 67¢) one cent under the ask makes you the new best bid, so a seller reaches your order before anyone waiting at the old bid.

If it never fills

Nothing is spent. Kalshi sets the money aside while the order is open and releases it when you cancel, or when the market closes with the order still open. The cost of an unfilled order is the bet you didn't get: if the price never comes down and your side wins, you missed the profit.

What a week of real games showed

We replayed Kalshi's public trade tape for 216 NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA games played October 10–17, placing a simulated resting bid every two minutes of play and checking it against the trades that actually happened. Measured against the final result, per contract:

Bids at the market filled 52% to 97% of the time within five minutes, depending on the sport. The ranges reflect your place in line: a trade at your price fills you only if the orders ahead of yours are used up.

Two cautions came out of the same data:

• Bids below the market get picked off. In hockey, a bid three cents under the market lost 3.79¢ a contract, more than buying the ask. Those orders fill when a goal goes against you. Baseball showed the same thing deeper in the book.
• The fills you get lean toward bad news. Before games, resting orders placed under the fair price filled 28% of the time, and the ones that filled won only 40.6% of the time at an average price of 46.6¢. The market came to them most often when something had gone wrong.

So resting gets you the same contract cheaper, and it is not a strategy by itself. It is a way to pay less for a bet you already wanted. One week of games is a small sample; we are measuring more.

Practical habits

• Cancel at game start if you only want the pregame price. Game markets stay open in play, and a bad first quarter can fill a resting bid at exactly the wrong moment.
• Don't sit deep during scoring sports. Join the bid in hockey and baseball rather than resting several cents below it.
• Check the fee on the ticket. It shows the real fee for that market, rounded up to the cent.

The break-even calculator shows what a fill at any price needs to win, with and without the taker fee. For what a price means in the first place, see what 55¢ means.

Questions