Prediction Market Statistics 2026: Kalshi vs Polymarket Volume

Combined monthly global trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket rose from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center analysis published in May 2026. The two venues have since become the reference points for an asset class that spent a decade as an academic curiosity.

Prediction markets are exchange platforms that specialize in offering event contracts, which carry a binary payoff structure tied to the occurrence or non-occurrence of a specific event. The prediction market statistics below cover venue volume, category mix, published fee schedules, and the federal-state jurisdiction fight now working through the courts, with the pricing and settlement mechanics set out separately in how prediction markets work.

Key Takeaways

• Combined monthly volume on the two leading venues climbed from under $5 billion in September 2025 to roughly $24 billion in April 2026.
• Sports carried roughly 87% of Kalshi’s $39.7 billion in trailing-year volume as of February 2026, which makes the venue closer to a sportsbook competitor than an election market.
• Polymarket’s trailing-year figure of $36.2 billion sits within $3.5 billion of Kalshi’s, so the headline gap between the two venues is narrow.
• Kalshi charges no settlement fee and no membership fee, and caps card deposits at 2%, which moves the cost question onto per-trade pricing.
• The CFTC sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois on April 2, 2026 to defend federal jurisdiction over event contracts.
• Polymarket paid $112 million for the CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse QCEX to re-enter the United States.

Editor’s Choice

• Kalshi trailing-year traded volume: $39.7 billion as of February 2026; roughly 87% of it is sports.
• Polymarket trailing-year traded volume: $36.2 billion.
• Combined monthly volume, April 2026: about $24 billion.
• Polymarket predictions placed in the first half of 2025: about $6 billion.
• Kalshi’s top-tier perpetual futures taker fee: 2.6 basis points.
• Kalshi trading fee at the 50-cent midpoint: $1.75 per 100 contracts.

Combined Prediction Market Trading Volume

• Combined monthly global volume across Kalshi and Polymarket reached about $24 billion in April 2026.
• The same measure stood at less than $5 billion in September 2025, seven months earlier.
• Kalshi traded $39.7 billion in the year to February 2026, roughly 87% of it on sports.
• Polymarket traded $36.2 billion over the same trailing year.
• Polymarket users placed about $6 billion in predictions during the first half of 2025, before the venue’s US re-entry closed.
• The CFTC has regulated event contracts for decades, having first recognized them in 1992 with the Iowa Electronic Markets at the University of Iowa.

About This Data

Figures here are compiled from nine sources captured in September 2026: eight primary or official (CFTC releases, agency filings, company announcements and published exchange fee schedules) and one research analysis. Publication dates span July 2025 to July 2026. Only figures stated directly by a regulator, an exchange, or a named research body are qualified. Numbers are updated when those sources publish new editions.

Source: Pew Research Center, May 2026; Congressional Research Service, February 2026; Polymarket, July 2025

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What It Costs to Trade an Event Contract on Kalshi

• Kalshi’s published taker fee applies a 0.07 coefficient to the contract price multiplied by one minus that price, so the charge scales with the contract’s implied uncertainty rather than its notional size.
• Resting orders that are later filled draw the maker fee, which uses a lower 0.0175 coefficient.
• At a price of $0.50, a hundred contracts cost $1.75 in trading fees.
• At $0.10 or $0.90, the same hundred contracts cost $0.63.
• Kalshi charges no settlement fee, no membership fee, and no fee on ACH deposits or withdrawals.
• Card deposits carry a maximum fee of 2%.

The shape of that schedule is the part worth sitting with. Because the formula multiplies price by one minus price, the fee per contract reaches its maximum at the 50-cent midpoint and falls away toward both ends of the range. A trader pays 2.8 times as much per hundred contracts on a true coin-flip market. The same trade costs far less once the crowd has priced the outcome near either end of the range, per the exchange’s own published fee schedule.

By the numbers: Kalshi’s trading fee peaks at $1.75 per hundred contracts at the 50-cent price point and drops to $0.63 at both $0.10 and $0.90, per the exchange’s July 2026 schedule. The cost of expressing a view is highest precisely where the market has reached no consensus.

Recent Developments

• July 2026: On July 24, 2026, the CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight issued an advisory reminding designated contract markets about proper procedures for submitting self-certifications of an event contract series.
• July 2026: Kalshi’s current published fee schedule took effect on July 7, 2026.
• May 2026: Kalshi submitted the BTCPERP contract to the CFTC for review and approval under Commission Regulation 40.3 on May 28, 2026.
• April 2026: On April 2, 2026, the CFTC filed lawsuits challenging the actions of Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois against CFTC-registered designated contract markets.
• February 2026: The Congressional Research Service put Kalshi’s trailing-year volume at $39.7 billion, roughly 87% of it sports, and Polymarket’s at $36.2 billion.
• July 2025: Polymarket closed its acquisition of QCEX for $112 million on July 21, 2025, and announced an official partnership with X.

Kalshi vs Polymarket: The Volume Split

• The two venues sit $3.5 billion apart on trailing-year traded volume.
• Kalshi’s total reflects a book where roughly 87% of the $39.7 billion traded in the past year was on sports.
• Strip the sports book out and Kalshi’s remaining volume amounts to roughly $5.2 billion.
• Such percentages are lower for the $36.2 billion traded in the last year on Polymarket, per the Congressional Research Service, which publishes no split.
• Both venues operate against a field of hundreds of different operational prediction markets.

That derived cut reframes the rivalry. On headline volume, the two venues look like near-equals, but strip out sports and Kalshi’s book shrinks to a small fraction of its own total. How much of Polymarket’s volume is non-sports is not disclosed, so the two cannot be compared on that basis directly. Readers tracking where the non-sports liquidity actually sits will find the venue rosters in our roundup of prediction market platforms.

Source: Congressional Research Service, February 2026

Prediction Market Fees Compared Across Venues

• Through Interactive Brokers, ForecastEx forecast contracts carry $0.00 per contract in commission plus a $0.01 per contract exchange fee.
• Kalshi event contracts routed the same way cost $0.01 per contract plus a $0.01 exchange fee.
• CME event contracts match Kalshi at $0.01 per contract plus a $0.01 exchange fee.
• Users accessing Kalshi via a third-party Futures Commission Merchant may be charged fees that vary from the exchange’s own schedule, so brokered access prices differently from direct access.

All in, that puts a ForecastEx contract at $0.01 against $0.02 for a Kalshi or CME contract through the same broker, a gap the published schedule never states as a comparison. Volume figures for the wider listed-derivatives venue sit in our CME Group data.

Kalshi’s Volume-Tiered Perpetual Futures Fees

• Kalshi’s perpetual futures taker fee opens at 12.0 basis points for Tier 0, covering traders with $0 of 30-day trailing volume.
• Tier 3 traders, at $1 million and above in trailing volume, pay 6.0 basis points.
• Tier 5 sits at 4.0 basis points from $10 million.
• Tier 7 reaches 3.2 basis points from $100 million.
• The top published tier charges 2.6 basis points, 4.6 times cheaper than the entry rate.

What Traders Bet On: Sports and Event Categories

• Sports dominates the larger venue, taking roughly 87% of Kalshi’s $39.7 billion trailing-year volume as of February 2026.
• Event contracts across both venues settle against outcomes including elections, sporting events, and economic indicators.
• Contract pricing carries information rather than just exposure, since the price of a contract reflects the market’s collective estimate of how likely an event is to occur.

The category concentration is the most commonly missed fact about the sector. Coverage that frames Kalshi around elections is describing a minority of its volume. Readers weighing this against conventional speculative flows will find that context in our retail investing data.

How the CFTC Regulates Event Contracts

• Event contracts have been regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and have traditionally been constrained in their scope and volume.
• The agency’s position is that it has “exclusive jurisdiction” over derivatives markets, including event contracts on registered designated contract markets.
• On that reading, sports event contracts are not subject to state or tribal regulation.
• The growth in the sector traces to policy as much as demand, since recent changes driven by litigation and the CFTC’s regulatory posture have led to the growth of prediction markets.
• Congress broadened the agency’s remit in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, expressly granting the CFTC comprehensive authority over any such contract based on a commodity, which is broadly defined in statute.
• Federal oversight of the category dates back further still, to 1992, when the CFTC allowed the Iowa Electronic Markets to run contracts pegged to events such as presidential elections and corporate earnings.

Enforcement volumes and case patterns across the agency’s wider crypto remit are tracked in our SEC and CFTC regulation statistics.

Polymarket’s US Re-Entry Through QCEX

• Polymarket closed the acquisition of the holding company of a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange, QCX, LLC, and clearinghouse, QC Clearing LLC, collectively QCEX, for $112 million.
• The company framed the deal as a significant step toward expanding access to its platform in the United States.
• Trading volume preceding the deal ran to about $6 billion in predictions during the first half of 2025.
• The same announcement disclosed an official partnership with X.
• Polymarket is the largest prediction market globally and has become synonymous with understanding the probability of current events, said Shayne Coplan, Founder and CEO of Polymarket.

Kalshi as a CFTC Designated Contract Market

• The CFTC issued an Order for Approval to KalshiEX, LLC, a designated contract market, for the listing of the BTCPERP Contract.
• BTCPERP is a perpetual contract that references the spot price of bitcoin, listed as a futures contract.
• Kalshi filed it pursuant to Commission Regulation 40.3 for Commission review and approval on May 28, 2026.
• The Commission issued the Order under Section 5c(c)(4) of the Commodity Exchange Act after determining the contract complied with the Act and its regulations.

That approval matters beyond Kalshi’s own product line, because it puts a perpetual bitcoin instrument inside a designated contract market rather than an offshore venue. Comparable volume and structure data for the wider market sit in our crypto derivatives statistics.

The 2025-26 CFTC Timeline for Event Contracts

• The arc opens with Polymarket’s $112 million QCEX purchase in July 2025, which bought a licensed route back into the United States.
• It runs through three federal complaints against states in April 2026.
• Kalshi’s BTCPERP filing landed on May 28, 2026, a perpetual contract that references the spot price of bitcoin listed as a futures contract.
• The sequence closes with the self-certification advisory of July 24, 2026.

Read in sequence, those milestones form a legalize-then-tighten arc. The same agency that cleared Polymarket’s route back into the United States and approved a novel Kalshi contract spent 2026 both suing states to protect its turf and warning its own registrants that their paperwork had grown too loose.

The tightening is specific. The advisory addresses concerns about the practice of submitting broad, template-style certifications that combine many potential event contract variations into a single certification.

Why it matters: The CFTC’s July 2026 advisory warns that template-style certifications limit the agency’s ability to judge whether an exchange has adequately evaluated the settlement methodology, data sources, and core-principles compliance for each event contract. Venues that scaled listings fastest now face the most paperwork risk.

State-Level Pushback and the Jurisdiction Fight

• Several states dispute the federal position, and several states have challenged these conclusions in court.
• The CFTC responded by filing three separate complaints in federal district court against the states of Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois, all dated April 2, 2026.
• The Department of Justice joined, with the cases captioned as United States, et al. v. Arizona, et al.; United States et al. v. Connecticut, et al.; United States et al. v. Illinois, et al.
• Connecticut and Illinois had issued cease-and-desist letters to CFTC-regulated designated contract markets to stop listing sports-related event contracts within their states.
• Arizona went further and brought criminal charges against a CFTC registrant for complying with CFTC statute and regulations.
• The agency is seeking a declaration that the CEA’s exclusive jurisdiction provision, 7 U.S.C. section 2(a)(1), preempts application of state laws as applied to CFTC-regulated event contracts, plus a permanent injunction.

Source: CFTC press release 9206-26 and CFTC prediction markets FAQ, April 2026

The CFTC will continue to safeguard its exclusive regulatory authority over these markets and defend market participants against overzealous state regulators, said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig in the agency’s April 2026 announcement.

The Brokerage Channel: ForecastEx and Interactive Brokers

• Interactive Brokers LLC is a CFTC-registered Futures Commission Merchant and a clearing member and affiliate of ForecastEx LLC.
• ForecastEx is a CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market and Derivatives Clearing Organization, which means the venue holds both the trading and clearing licences.
• The broker lists three event-contract venues, ForecastEx, Kalshi and CME, on a single United States pricing page.
• Pricing across that page runs from $0.00 per contract on ForecastEx to $0.01 per contract on Kalshi and CME, each carrying a $0.01 exchange fee.
• Direct exchange access and brokered access price differently, since a third-party Futures Commission Merchant may charge fees that vary from Kalshi’s own schedule, with those fees disclosed before the transaction.

The brokerage route is what turns event contracts from a standalone app category into a line item inside an ordinary margin account. Firm-level scale for that distribution channel is covered in our Interactive Brokers statistics.

Source: Interactive Brokers pricing disclosures, September 2026; CFTC press release 9240-26, 2026; Polymarket, July 2025

What Prediction Market Statistics Still Do Not Disclose

• Traded volume is disclosed: $39.7 billion for Kalshi over the trailing year, roughly 87% of it sports, and $36.2 billion for Polymarket.
• Category mix is disclosed for one venue only, at roughly 87% sports for Kalshi, with Polymarket’s share described as lower and left unquantified.
• Open interest is not disclosed by either venue in any of the nine sources captured for this page.
• Active-trader and unique-account counts are not disclosed either, so no per-user figure appears above.

Volume is the one metric these venues publish consistently, and it is doing a lot of work. Neither Kalshi nor Polymarket discloses open interest. Neither publishes an active-trader or unique-account count in any primary source captured here.

That absence changes how the volume figures should be read. A venue can post $39.7 billion in trailing-year traded volume, roughly 87% of it sports, while concentrating that flow among a small number of high-frequency accounts, and nothing in the published data distinguishes the two cases.

Worth noting: Polymarket’s sports concentration is described by the Congressional Research Service only as lower than Kalshi’s roughly 87%, with no figure attached. The per-venue category split, open interest and trader counts are not disclosed in any primary source captured for this page, so no breakdown of them appears above.

Is Kalshi bigger than Polymarket?

On trailing-year traded volume, yes, but narrowly. Kalshi traded $39.7 billion, roughly 87% of it in sports, against Polymarket’s $36.2 billion in the year to February 2026, a difference of $3.5 billion.

The composition differs far more than the total. Because roughly 87% of Kalshi’s volume was on sports while Polymarket’s sports share is lower, the two venues are close on headline size and quite different on what actually trades.

Are prediction markets legal in the United States?

Event contracts trade lawfully on CFTC-registered designated contract markets, and the agency holds that it has “exclusive jurisdiction” over derivatives markets including those contracts. On the agency’s reading, sports event contracts are not subject to state or tribal regulation.

That position is contested. Several states have challenged these conclusions in court, and the CFTC has sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois to defend it, so the answer varies by state until the courts resolve it. The term itself is defined by what a prediction market is.

Conclusion

Combined monthly volume on Kalshi and Polymarket moved from under $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026, and almost every structural question about the sector is still open underneath that number. The two venues sit $3.5 billion apart on trailing-year volume while running very different books. Brokered fee schedules diverge by a factor of two, and open interest and trader counts remain undisclosed everywhere.

The pattern we have documented across regulatory events elsewhere in crypto holds here: the framework arrives after the volume does, and it arrives unevenly. Traders, researchers, and policy readers watching this sector should expect the state-by-state answer to keep moving until the preemption cases conclude.