Kalshi

What it is

Kalshi is a CFTC-designated contract market for event contracts, settling in US dollars. It is the oldest regulated venue in this category and the most documented: nearly everything on this card was read out of its own rulebook, fee schedule, member agreement or public API rather than off a marketing page.

The regulatory shape. KalshiEX LLC received its Order of Designation as a designated contract market on 3 November 2020, announced by the CFTC the following day. Clearing moved in-house in 2024 — Kalshi Klear LLC was granted registration as a derivatives clearing organization, announced 29 August 2024, permitted to clear fully collateralised positions in swaps. Before that, contracts traded on KalshiEX cleared through MIAXdx.

The mechanism is a peer-to-peer order book, and Kalshi says so in as many words — you are always trading against another member of the platform, not against the exchange. A bid for Yes at a price is mechanically an offer of No at one minus that price, which is why the API's order-book endpoint returns yes-bids and no-bids and nothing else.

Listings are broad. Aggregating the category field over 200 live open events on 19 September 2026 gives economics 57, sports 55, entertainment 22, elections 18, politics 15, science and technology 14, climate and weather 8, financials 5, and single-figure counts for health, companies, world and social. The exchange runs four shards — a default one, combos, crypto and commodities, and a tennis-baseball-basketball one.

Kalshi is also the plaintiff in all three of the 2026 appellate decisions — Third, Ninth and Sixth Circuits — that split over whether sports event contracts are swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act. See the category page for what those decisions actually held; none of them has changed Kalshi's own terms.

Availability

US residents — served, with no state carve-out in Kalshi's own documents. This is a finding worth stating plainly, because state lists circulate widely. The member agreement's Restricted Jurisdictions clause names countries and US-sanctioned territories and no US state. The signup requirements are being 18 or older and passing a document verification if requested. A sweep of every document in Kalshi's own public regulatory-notices store turned up no state-restriction notice at all. Where a reader has seen Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio or Tennessee named, the source is that state regulator's own order, not Kalshi — and a state order is a live document that the exchange may be contesting.

Ohio and Tennessee, after the Sixth Circuit. On 25 September 2026 the Sixth Circuit, in Nos. 26-3196 and 26-5235, held that Kalshi had not shown its sports-event contracts are swaps, and that even if they were, the Commodity Exchange Act would not preempt Ohio's or Tennessee's laws. Both states' regulators had sent Kalshi cease-and-desist letters. In Ohio no injunction protected Kalshi while the appeal ran — the district court and a motions panel both refused one — and the decision affirmed that refusal. In Tennessee it vacated the injunction a district court had entered against the state's officials; under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 41 that takes effect when the court's mandate issues, and Kalshi's petition for rehearing en banc, filed 9 October 2026, holds the mandate back. Kalshi's own documents, re-read on 23 October 2026, still name neither state: the member agreement as last modified on 1 October 2026, the help centre, and every regulatory notice posted since 25 September. Kalshi publishes no page listing where its sports contracts are offered, and whether the app turns away a user located in Ohio or Tennessee can only be seen from there — kalshi.com does not load directly from the network this card was checked on, and was read through a reader proxy.

Outside the US — served, since March 2026, with 55 named exceptions. Kalshi's help centre, dated 20 March 2026, says you can trade from many countries subject to the member agreement. The agreement was amended by an Exchange Notice effective 22 June 2026 adding a representation and warranty on jurisdiction, and the restricted list now runs to 55 jurisdictions. Among them, the ones a reader is most likely to be in: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Switzerland, India, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan and South Korea are not on it.

What the restriction consists of, precisely. It is a representation and warranty made by you at signup, not a documented IP block — the clause reads that you represent, warrant and covenant that you are not domiciled in, organized in, or located in a prohibited jurisdiction. It also says the restrictions "apply solely to the trading of Event Contracts and do not, in and of themselves, prohibit membership on, or non-trading access to, the Platform". So the restriction bites on trading and not on reading, and the agreement may be amended unilaterally by Kalshi on notice.

The money rail is a second, separate restriction. International users fund by debit card (Visa or Mastercard), by wire with a $1,000 minimum, or by crypto. ACH, PayPal and Venmo are not available to international users, and international withdrawals are debit card or crypto only. That is a different fact from eligibility and it is the one people discover after depositing.

KYC is mandatory and specific. A valid driver's licence or passport, photographed live through the app — an upload from the camera roll or a picture of a screen is rejected. Name and date of birth must match the ID exactly; no commercial addresses and no PO boxes. Kalshi's help centre adds that the CFTC may require further documents, naming proof of address, employment information and source of funds.

Pricing

No membership fee and no settlement fee. Kalshi takes a cut of a fill, on a formula rather than a flat rate.

• Taker fee — round up(M × 0.07 × contracts × price × (1 − price)), price in dollars, where M is a per-series multiplier that defaults to 1. At 100 contracts that is $0.07 at 1 cent, $0.63 at 10 cents, $1.75 at 50 cents and $0.63 at 90 cents. It is symmetric about the midpoint, so the same fee applies to a 90-cent and a 10-cent contract.
• Maker fee — round up(M × 0.0175 × contracts × price × (1 − price)), where the maker multiplier defaults to 0. So it is charged only on the series the schedule lists as carrying maker fees, and only when the resting order eventually executes; cancelling a resting order costs nothing. That variant is rare: reading fee_type across every series the exchange publishes on 19 September 2026 finds it on 160 of 11,078, or 1.4%. This card's maker field therefore reads as nothing charged, which is the case on the other 98.6% — where it does apply, the coefficient above works out to 0.44% of a dollar of payout at 50 cents, printed on Kalshi's fee page as $0.02 to $0.44 per 100 contracts across the price range.
• Rounding depends on how you are a member. The schedule's gloss under each formula takes the fee plus the position cost to a centicent, while its worked table rounds up to the next whole cent; Kalshi's API documentation, on a page titled "Fee Rounding" (read in the Internet Archive's capture of 9 August 2026, because docs.kalshi.com did not answer from here), says which applies to whom. The trade fee is rounded up to $0.0001, and the exchange then charges a rounding fee that brings the balance back to the member's own precision: $0.0001 for a direct member of the exchange and $0.01 for a non-direct member, one who comes through a broker or FCM. Overpaid rounding accumulates across the fills of one order and is rebated a whole cent at a time. So an account opened at Kalshi pays 1.75 cents on one taker contract at 50 cents, not 2; the worked table's whole-cent figures match the non-direct case.
• The schedule is written for self-clearing members. Kalshi's own self-certification of 12 July 2026, amending the fee schedule for some request-for-quote trades, says the schedule "is applied uniformly to all self-clearing members". Every broker card here that prints Kalshi's exchange fee prints a flat $0.01 a contract per side instead — Robinhood's schedule in those words for KalshiEX products, Public's as "set by KalshiEx LLC" — and no Kalshi document read for this card states that figure.
• The rate varies by series, not by category. The schedule carries a table of 155 non-standard series. Some of them add maker fees at the coefficient above; some — several crypto and political series among them — are set to a multiplier of 0 and carry no fee on either side. Combination markets, excluding uncorrelated NFL combos, carry maker fees at half the taker rate, $0.04 to $0.88 per 100 contracts. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 yearly-range series sit in that table at a multiplier of 1, which is the standard rate and not a discount.
• Perpetual futures are priced separately, on a volume-tiered schedule in basis points inside the same document: taker 12.0 bps falling to 2.6 bps, maker 5.0 bps falling to 0.6 bps, by 30-day trailing volume. That is a different product from an event contract, and none of the fields above describe it.
• Money movement — ACH deposits and withdrawals are free. Debit card deposits carry a fee of up to 2%. Wire transfers carry no Kalshi fee, and wire withdrawals are documented as not currently supported below $500,000. Crypto carries third-party processor fees, disclosed before the transaction. Kalshi also reserves the right to charge between 0% and 2% on all rails. Customers coming through an FCM may be charged different fees by that FCM.

What was read, and when. kalshi.com refuses non-browser clients, so the schedule was opened on 20 September 2026 through a reader proxy rather than directly. The document that answers is titled "Fee Schedule for July 2026 — 7.7.26 Update" and every page of it carries the footer "Last updated and effective: July 7, 2026". Kalshi's own fee-schedule page, read the same day, lists no upcoming fee changes. A re-read on 24 October 2026 failed: kalshi.com did not answer from here, and every Internet Archive capture of the PDF since August is Vercel's checkpoint page rather than the document, so the 7 July schedule above is the last one read. Kalshi's public regulatory-notices bucket holds two later filings that touch event-contract fees: the 12 July amendment above, re-pricing some request-for-quote trades in KXMVE so that the side accepting a quote pays the taker rate and the quoter the maker rate, effective no earlier than 24 July; and an Event Contracts Taker Rebate Program filed on 14 October, from no earlier than 27 October, paying a tiered monthly rebate of taker fees to the most active self-clearing members, with brokers, FCMs and their customers excluded. The prediction market fee calculator applies these formulas, rounded as for a direct member, to your own price and size, beside the same trade on the other venues.

Markets & resolution

Kalshi resolves, as the exchange. Its own help page puts it as the markets team reviewing each market and determining the outcome when the resolution criteria are met, and adds the warning that matters — a market remaining open or undetermined is in no way an indication that the criteria have or have not been met.

Against what, is published as data. Each market's rules summary names an outcome verification source, described as an authoritative point of reference. More usefully, every event carries a machine-readable settlement_sources array through the public API, each entry a name and a URL. Live examples on 19 September 2026 include NATO's own site for the next Secretary General, a specific NASA GISS data file plus NCEI for a warming market, and democrats.org for the next DNC chair. Some markets name several news outlets and require agreement between them.

That combination — the exchange decides, and the source is a public field rather than a sentence in a PDF — is the most checkable resolution arrangement in this category. What it does not give you is an appeal you can start: there is no bond, no dispute window and no vote outside the exchange. The one second look at an outcome, below, is opened by Kalshi or not at all.

The timetable, as read on 9 October 2026. It is set in three layers. The contract terms fix the outer edge: every set read for this card — CONTROL, NFLGAME and SOCCERGAMEWIN — stops trading at expiration and says the Settlement Date "shall be no later than the day after the Expiration Date, unless the Market Outcome is under review pursuant to Rule 7.1". Expiration itself moves. Under Rule 7.2(c) of the rulebook (v1.29, the copy in Kalshi's public document store, last modified 17 August 2026) it comes forward when the outcome occurs early — the sports terms apply it when a game ends, and the CONTROL terms add their own accelerated resolution on four of eight decision-desk calls — and under Rule 7.2(b) it goes back when an event is rescheduled or a source's data are late, each change announced on Kalshi's website. Rule 13.1(d) has every Market Outcome posted on the website by 11:59 pm ET on the day it is determined. The help centre gives the practice inside those limits: determination takes "anywhere from one hour to more than twelve hours" after close and turns on when the source agency's data arrive (Market Outcomes, 17 March 2026), and most markets settle within a few hours of the outcome being known, "often within about 3 hours" (Market FAQs, 12 April 2026). Combos go through a separate review after their legs resolve and take longer.

The Market Outcome Review Process, Rule 7.1. Before settlement Kalshi may open it "at its sole discretion", weighing circumstances with "a material impact on the reliability or transparency of the Underlying". The outcome then passes from the markets team to the Outcome Review Committee — under Rule 2.7(e) a standing committee of three appointed by the Regulatory Oversight Committee, at least two of them Public Directors — which "shall review all relevant evidence and determine a final Market Outcome within a 24 hour period" (Rule 7.1(b)). Kalshi posts that the outcome is under review; settlement happens on the day the committee decides, the result goes up by 11:59 pm ET that day, and the committee's determinations "are final" (Rules 7.1(a) and (c), 13.1(d)). The same committee makes the "binding determination of fair allocation" when a contract cannot be read and the last traded price is missing or unfair (Rule 6.3(c)), and sets the price when the subject of a contract dies before expiration (Rule 6.3(e)); there the rulebook adds "not subject to review". One cross-reference is out of step: the CONTROL terms send the review process to Rule 6.3(c), which in v1.29 is the fallback-payout rule; the process itself is Rule 7.1, and Rule 6.3(f) points there.

What a member can do, and when. Nothing in the rulebook lets a member open that review. The help centre documents three routes, all aimed at a market that has not yet settled: a Request to Settle option on each market, which asks for chosen strikes to be settled and queues the request for the markets team (24 March 2026); the in-app support chat, to be used once an event ended more than about 12 hours ago, any determination time in the rules has passed and the market is still pending (Market FAQs); and the Market Bug Bounty form, for a rules contradiction, a wrong date or an ambiguity "that could mislead traders or affect settlement", rewarded at $25 to $1,000+ at Kalshi's discretion and accepted through that form only (21 April 2026). The same FAQ says markets "are not re-settled because an event appears to have concluded while trading was still available". After settlement the documents give no internal route back: the rulebook's arbitration chapter (Rule 10.1) covers claims by a Participant against a Participant, a defined term that lists members and their customers and not the exchange, and Rule 11.3(b) bars any action against Kalshi brought more than two years after the act complained of.

Settlement is fully collateralised and cleared through Kalshi Klear. Only net positions settle, after netting. Settlement fees are zero for a simple yes-or-no determination and may apply for sub-cent scalar settlement.

Integrations

The API is the most complete in the category and it has its own card — Kalshi API — along with the Python client, kalshi-python. Public market data answers unauthenticated requests; trading does not.

What is there: REST and WebSocket, a FIX protocol session for institutional order flow, first-party Python and TypeScript SDKs, a demo environment with separate credentials for testing against without risking a dollar, RFQ and block trades, subaccounts, historical data endpoints, and a separate margin and perpetual-futures surface. Market-data feeds come from CF Benchmarks and Pyth.

Web, iOS and Android are all first-party. Tax documents are issued electronically at year end and trade history is downloadable with every transaction itemised; a profit-and-loss statement is updated on the first of each month.

Limitations

• No member can open a review of a resolution. The second look — the Outcome Review Committee under Rule 7.1, 24 hours, final — is opened only by Kalshi and only before settlement. A member has a Request to Settle button, a support chat and the bug-bounty form; once a market has settled, Kalshi's documents describe no internal appeal.
• The fee schedule is only reachable sideways. kalshi.com serves a challenge page to anything that is not a browser, so the PDF here was read through a reader proxy. The copy that answered on 20 September 2026 is dated 7 July 2026, and a re-read on 24 October could reach neither the live PDF nor an archived copy of it; check the live one before trading size.
• 55 jurisdictions are restricted and the list moves unilaterally. The member agreement can be amended by Kalshi on notice, and the June 2026 notice added four countries to the list the February 2026 agreement carried — India, Ireland, New Zealand and Portugal.
• International funding is a narrower rail than eligibility. Being allowed to trade does not mean ACH will work, and for most non-US users it will not.
• The jurisdiction test is a warranty you sign, not a documented technical block. That places the consequence of getting it wrong on you.
• The insider bar is wider than the federal one. Rule 5.17 bars trading by anyone holding material non-public information about a contract's underlying, with no duty element, by any employee of the contract's source agency whatever they know, and by anyone with any influence on the outcome. Insider-trading rules on event contracts sets it beside the statute and the 2026 cases.
• Kalshi now also runs perpetual futures, with a separate fee schedule and a separate API surface. It is no longer only an event exchange.
• Nobody here has funded an account. Everything above is read from Kalshi's own member agreement, fee schedule, help centre, regulatory notices and public API, and from CFTC orders, on 19 and 20 September 2026; the Ohio and Tennessee paragraph was added from the Sixth Circuit's opinion and docket and a re-read of Kalshi's documents on 23 October 2026, and the rounding and broker-fee lines from Kalshi's API documentation and regulatory notices on 24 October.

Alternatives

Polymarket is the direct comparison on volume and listings, and the comparison that requires the most care — its US product and its international product are different venues with different resolution authorities. Robinhood Prediction Markets reaches Kalshi's contracts through a broker rather than directly, which changes the fee and the platform but not the exchange. ForecastEx lists no sports at all and pays interest on collateral while a position is open. PredictIt is the older US venue with much narrower listings.