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 defendant in both of the 2026 appellate decisions that split over whether sports event contracts are swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act. See the category page for what those decisions actually held; neither 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 or Ohio 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.

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 is documented twice and not identically. The gloss under each formula defines the round-up as taking the fee plus the position cost to a centicent; the schedule's own worked table rounds up to the next whole cent, and the figures above are that table's.
• 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.

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: there is no bond, no dispute window and no third-party vote. If Kalshi's markets team reads the source differently from you, that is the answer.

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

• There is no appeal from a resolution. No bond, no dispute window, no vote. The exchange decides, and the only route is a support conversation.
• 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; 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.
• 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.

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.