Does participation in livestock markets improve the welfare levels of smallholder farmers in Zambia? Are there any biases in the distribution of benefits between poor and better off households? To address these questions, we employ propensity score matching and decomposition techniques on nationally representative household survey data collected from smallholder farmers in Zambia. Our findings suggest that, other factors constant, participation in cattle markets raises household income by over 50% on average among cattle selling households. However, decomposition results suggest that poor households derive relatively smaller benefits from participation than their non-poor counterparts due to discrimination which accounts for 80.3% of the inter-group income differential.