Kalshi review

Kalshi is the best regulated prediction market a US trader can open today, and we rate it 4.2 out of 5. You deposit dollars, buy contracts that pay $1.00 if an event happens, and withdraw to a card or a bank with no fee. The exchange and its clearinghouse both answer to the CFTC. The weak spots are slow support, deposit holds that surprise new users and thin order books outside the big markets.

We watch every Kalshi market and every Kalshi trade all day, because Rivo is a terminal built on top of it. This review covers what the product is like to use with real money: what you can trade, what a trade costs, how fast money moves, where your balance sits, the app, the order book, support and the complaints people post.

Kalshi ratings at a glance

Who Kalshi is for

• US traders who want dollars. No wallet, no stablecoin, no bridge. A debit card or a bank account is enough.
• Sports traders who want an exit. You can sell a position at the market price any time before the result.
• Macro and news traders. Fed decisions, CPI, payrolls, elections and weather all trade on one account.
• Traders who want to follow winners. Kalshi shows some traders by profile, so their trades can be tracked and scored.
• Bot builders. Kalshi issues API keys to retail accounts, and a key can place orders without being able to withdraw.

Kalshi suits you less if you need a phone number to call when something stalls, or if you plan to trade one or two contracts at a time. Both points are covered below.

What you can trade on Kalshi

Every market is a yes or no question with a rule that names the source of the answer. A Yes contract pays $1.00 if the answer is yes and nothing if it isn't. The price between 1 and 99 cents is the market's estimate of the chance.

Kalshi has also added perpetual futures on a separate margin account. US accounts that have passed identity checks apply for access through a short questionnaire. Perpetuals are a different product with different risks, and this review covers the event contracts.

The mechanics of prices, settlement and selling early sit in how does Kalshi work. Combos get their own guide in Kalshi parlays explained.

Kalshi fees with a worked example

Kalshi charges when a trade fills and never when a market settles. The taker fee is 0.07 x contracts x price x (1 - price), rounded up to the next cent. It peaks at 1.75 cents a contract at a 50 cent price and shrinks toward zero at 1 and 99 cents. A limit order that rests on the book pays nothing on most markets and a quarter of the taker fee on the busiest series.

Take one trade and follow the money. You buy 200 Yes contracts at 35 cents.

The math: 0.07 x 200 x 0.35 x 0.65 = 3.185, rounded up to $3.19 to enter. 0.07 x 200 x 0.55 x 0.45 = 3.465, rounded up to $3.47 to exit. Held to a win, the fee takes 2.5% of your profit. Traded in and out as a taker, the two fees take 16.7% of a $40 gross profit.

• Our verdict on fees: fair for anyone who holds positions, expensive for anyone who scalps as a taker.
• The habit that fixes it: post limit orders. The same ticket that takes the offer can rest a bid.
• The trap: rounding. One contract at 5 cents pays a 1 cent fee, which is 20% of the stake. Trade in tens and hundreds, not ones.

Every price from 1 to 99 cents, the maker-fee series and the rounding rules are in Kalshi fees explained.

Deposits and withdrawals and how fast money moves

Kalshi takes money seven ways and charges nothing to send it back. The minimum deposit is $10, or $1,000 by wire.

Three rules decide how fast you get paid:

• Winnings leave first. A hold covers only the amount you deposited. Settled profit above your deposits is withdrawable right away.
• Same way in and out is fastest. Withdrawing a card or bank deposit by a different method can add up to two days after it settles.
• Only cash leaves. Money in an open position has to be sold or settled first.

A small detail we like: the withdrawal screen shows the exact time each deposit becomes withdrawable. Read that screen before you plan around a date.

Accounts outside the US deposit by debit card, crypto or wire and withdraw by debit card or crypto. American Express is not accepted. Step by step for every method in how to withdraw from Kalshi.

Our verdict on money movement: strong. A free debit card payout within hours is as good as it gets for a regulated exchange. Fund by bank transfer to skip the card fee, and expect your first deposit to sit until it settles.

Interest on your balance

Kalshi pays a variable 3.50% on cash and on the value of open positions for US accounts holding at least $250. Interest accrues daily, pays monthly, and Kalshi asks for your Social Security number once you earn more than $10 of it in a year.

This matters more than it sounds. A $2,000 balance earns about $70 a year. A long-dated position, such as an election contract held for months, keeps earning while it waits.

Regulation and safety of funds

Kalshi runs under two CFTC registrations. The exchange, KalshiEX, is a designated contract market and runs the order book. The clearinghouse, Kalshi Klear, is a registered derivatives clearing organization and holds the money behind every contract.

• Every contract is paid in full. The buyer and the seller together post the whole $1.00 before the trade exists, so a winner never waits on a loser to pay.
• Customer money sits apart. Klear holds it at a US bank, outside Kalshi's operating accounts.
• Kalshi never trades against you as the house. It earns the fee whichever side wins, so a winning account is a good customer.
• The limit: Kalshi's clearing agreement says FDIC insurance may not extend to you, and futures accounts carry no SIPC coverage.

The legal fight you read about is a different question. Several states argue that sports contracts fall under state gambling law, and courts have ruled both ways. Those cases decide which markets you can see from which state. They don't decide whether Kalshi pays. Check your state on the prediction market location checker, and read the custody detail in is Kalshi legit.

The Kalshi app and website

One account works in the phone app and on kalshi.com, with the same balance and the same order book.

• Quick orders. Pick Yes or No, type a dollar amount, confirm. The panel shows the current price or a close estimate, and the fee sits behind the info icon next to "You're buying".
• Limit orders. Set your price. A large order that exceeds what is offered fills partly and rests the remainder on the book.
• Auto sell. Attach a take-profit price to a position and Kalshi sells when the market reaches it.
• Portfolio. Cash, open positions and resting orders on one screen, with documents for tax season.
• Leaderboard and profiles. Kalshi ranks traders and shows the ones who make their trades public.
• Rules tab. Every market states its source and its edge cases. Read it before any market built on a person or a statistic.

Our verdict on the app: order entry is fast and clear. It is built to place a trade in a few taps. Research is where it runs out: the app shows you a price and a chart, not who is buying or how those buyers have done before.

Order types and liquidity

Through the API a limit order can also be good till cancelled, immediate or cancel, or fill or kill, which is what bots and terminals use.

Liquidity follows attention. A game on a Sunday, a Fed decision or a CPI release carries thousands of contracts within a cent or two of the best price. A city temperature market or a small culture market can show a wide gap between the bid and the offer. Size your order to the book, not to your bankroll.

Here is what walking a book looks like. The offer shows 300 contracts at 42 cents, 500 at 43 and 1,200 at 44. A quick order for 1,000 contracts takes all 300 at 42, all 500 at 43 and 200 at 44. You pay $429.00, an average of 42.9 cents, and the last 200 contracts cost two cents more than the price you saw. A limit order at 43 cents would fill 800 and rest the other 200 as a bid.

Customer support

Support is the weakest part of Kalshi. The channels are chat inside the app or website and email as the fallback. Kalshi offers no phone or text support and says only that response times vary with volume.

• Open the menu, choose Get help, then Chat with support, while logged in.
• Give the full story in one message: what happened, a screenshot, your account email and your full name.
• Don't email while a chat is open. Kalshi says a second thread slows the first.
• The help center answers most money questions faster than an agent does.

The complaints people post and what causes them

Kalshi scores low on consumer review sites, and Reddit threads repeat the same handful of stories. We matched each one to Kalshi's written rules.

What we think: none of these is Kalshi keeping money it owes. Six of the seven go away with three habits: fund by bank transfer early, read the rules tab, and use limit orders. The support complaint is fair, and Kalshi should publish a response time.

What a first week on Kalshi looks like

Most bad first impressions come from doing things in the wrong order. This order works:

1. Day one. Open the account and send a bank transfer. Part of it credits at once, so you can trade while the transfer settles.
2. Day one, first trade. Pick a market that ends this week, read the rules tab, and rest a limit order for ten or more contracts a cent under the offer.
3. Midweek. If the price moves your way, set an auto sell at your target. If the order never filled, you paid nothing to find out.
4. After the first settlement. Withdraw a small amount of winnings to your debit card. You learn the payout flow on $20 and not on $2,000.
5. End of the week. Check the withdrawal screen for the time your deposit clears, and add up what you paid in fees. If fees took more than 3% of what you traded, you are taking too many offers.

Keep your own record of every trade and payout from the start. Kalshi provides tax documents, and profits are taxable income, so talk to a tax professional about how to report them.

Kalshi compared with Polymarket

Kalshi wins on access and payout speed, and it pays interest on your balance. Polymarket wins on politics and sports fees on its international site and on how much of its trading is public. Many traders hold both and buy whichever side is cheaper. Read the Polymarket review and the full Kalshi vs Polymarket comparison.

Trading Kalshi through Rivo

Rivo is the prediction market terminal for Kalshi, Polymarket, Polymarket US and Gemini. It costs $9 a week or $15 a month. Rivo is not an exchange: your money stays in your Kalshi account, and Kalshi charges its normal fees.

Rivo ingests every market and every trade on the venues it covers. For a Kalshi trader that fills the gap the app leaves: knowing who is buying and whether they have been right.

• Trader research. The Kalshi leaderboard ranks named traders by profit on settled markets, by day, week, month and kind of market. Every profile shows the profit curve, the win rate against the odds paid and the open positions.
• Alerts. Follow a trader and get a message when they open a position, with their record in that kind of market. Watch a market and get a message on a large trade, a price level or a fast move. See Kalshi alerts and price alerts.
• Bots. Copy a trader, run a signal or watch one market's price. Read the backtest at your size, run the bot on paper, then go live. A live Kalshi bot places orders through your own Kalshi API key, inside the per-trade and daily limits you set, and the key has no withdrawal rights. See the prediction market trading bot page or build a bot.
• Paper trading. Every order ticket has a Paper mode that prices your order against the live Kalshi book, fee included, with no money at risk.
• One order ticket. The ticket walks the live book level by level and runs Kalshi's own fee formula, so you see the average fill, the fee and the total before you buy. Limit orders are on the same ticket.
• One portfolio. Positions, open orders and balances for every connected account sit on one page.

The pairing works like this: Kalshi is where the trade happens, and Rivo is where you decide which trade to make.

Our verdict on Kalshi

• Open an account if you live in the US and want to trade sports, economics, politics or crypto outcomes in dollars on a regulated exchange.
• Fund it by bank transfer a few days before you need the money, and withdraw by debit card.
• Trade with limit orders in sizes of ten contracts or more.
• Read the rules tab on every market built on a person or a number.
• Keep trading money there and savings in a bank. The interest is a perk on a trading balance.

Kalshi earns its 4.2. It is safe, it is cheap for patient traders and it pays fast. Faster support would make it a 4.5.

Frequently asked questions