Kalshi vs Polymarket Rules 2026: 48 Hours
Kalshi vs Polymarket rules read off 1,160 live game contracts: Kalshi expires 48 hours after kick-off, and Polymarket set no deadline at all on 184 of 200.
Affiliate disclosure: contains affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We have no commercial relationship with Kalshi. 18+ only — see BeGambleAware.org. Last updated 2 November 2026.
Key takeaways
- On Kalshi vs Polymarket rules, the postponement clock is the whole difference. All 960 open Kalshi game contracts we read give the game 48 hours from its scheduled start, and 184 of 200 matched Polymarket markets set no deadline at all — they stay open until the game is played, whenever that is.
- Polymarket is running two postponement rules at once. All 15 NBA games on 2 November carried the open-ended wording; all 16 on 4 and 5 November carried a hard calendar deadline instead. Same venue, same league, two rules, decided by which night you trade.
- A cancelled game pays three different amounts. Kalshi settles at "the last fair price as determined by the Exchange in its sole discretion". Polymarket pays 50-50 on all 95 US-league markets, nothing on all 70 soccer team markets, and the full dollar on all 35 soccer draw markets.
- Kalshi's market rules never mention overtime — not once in 702 NFL, NBA, NHL and college football contracts. Polymarket states it in all 95, and adds the shootout rule in all 36 NHL markets. Kalshi's answer is real, but it is in a PDF.
- The two venues settle off different scoreboards. Kalshi's six soccer series name ESPN and Fox Sports as settlement sources; Polymarket names the league's own site, then Flashscore, then Sofascore.
On this page
Nobody reads the resolution rules until a game does not happen, and by then the money has moved. The two venues quote the same fixtures within half a cent of each other, so the price is not where they differ — the difference is what the contract does when the fixture breaks, and it is worth 30c or more a share on one postponed night. So we pulled the rules text off every live game contract on both exchanges: 960 Kalshi markets across 11 league series, 200 matched Polymarket markets across 130 games, plus the four contract-terms documents Kalshi settles under. They disagree on the deadline, on the payout, on who reads the scoreboard, and Polymarket disagrees with itself.
What we read, and where each venue keeps its rules
Both exchanges publish rules per market, and they are not the same kind of document. Kalshi's market object carries a short rules_primary and rules_secondary; the binding text sits in a separate contract-terms PDF linked from the series, not the market. Polymarket puts everything in one description field, around 900 to 1,400 characters, and repeats it on every market in the event.
That asymmetry matters before any clause does: a Kalshi market page shows two sentences, while the document they summarise runs to pages and holds the thresholds that decide the edge cases. We read both layers.
The sample. Every open market in Kalshi's eleven league game series on 2 November 2026 — NFL, NBA, NHL, college football, the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, the Champions League and MLS — giving 960 contracts on 437 fixtures. Each fixture was paired to its Polymarket event by date and both team codes, resolving 130 games and 200 Polymarket markets in 10 leagues. A twelfth Kalshi series, college basketball, was read as a check: all 200 of its open markets carry the same 48-hour wording.
The postponement window: 48 hours against no deadline
This is the clause that decides everything else, and the venues are not close.
Rules text read 2 November 2026. The Kalshi expiration figure compares each contract's expiration_time with the kick-off Polymarket lists for the same fixture; the four exceptions are all college football games where the two venues list different kick-off times.
Kalshi's written rule and Kalshi's data agree, which is rarer than it should be: the contract's latest expiration lands exactly 48.00 hours after kick-off on 196 of 200 matched fixtures. The clock is real and in the payload.
Polymarket's listed end date is no help here — it sits at kick-off on 199 of 200 markets, and we have timed 16,924 of them closing late. Its majority wording has no clock. "If the game is postponed, this market will remain open until the game has been completed" means a market on a game pushed to next month stays open for a month, with your stake in it. There is no settlement to take and no fair price to collect — only the makeup game. Where Polymarket does set a deadline it is a calendar date rather than a duration, so the effective window stretches with tip-off time: a 7:00 PM ET game got 53.0 hours and a 10:30 PM ET game got 49.5. Both are longer than Kalshi's, by 1.5 to 5.0 hours.
Polymarket is running two postponement rules at once
This was not what we set out to find. The 16 markets with a calendar deadline are not scattered across leagues — they are all NBA, and they split the league clean down the middle by date.
All 31 matched NBA game markets, read within one eight-minute window on 2 November 2026. The split is by game date, not by team, venue or price.
The newer template is better written. It closes the hole the old one leaves — a game abandoned at half-time with no official result had no clause of its own — and it gives the holder a date instead of an open-ended wait. It is also, on this evidence, only on games from 4 November onwards, and only in basketball.
Both are live at once, so the rule on tonight's market is not the rule on Wednesday's, and only that market's own description tells you which you hold. We found no announcement of the change, and neither competing guide to this question mentions the newer wording.
What a cancelled game actually pays you
Here is where the money is. A cancelled fixture is not a void and not a refund on either venue, and the three outcomes are genuinely different products.
Quoted from each market's own rules text on 2 November 2026. The last two rows are different clauses: cancellation and missing data are handled separately in Polymarket's soccer wording.
Kalshi's phrase is identical across all four of its game contracts: "the last fair price as determined by the Exchange in its sole discretion", and the game documents never say how it is computed. A different Kalshi contract — the ACHIEVEMENTS terms, for season awards — does spell out a ladder: the last traded price before cancellation, and failing that an Outcome Review Committee determination from market data, historical trades and external sources. For games you have the phrase, not the method.
Polymarket's 50-50 is worse for favourites and better for longshots, and the gap is large. On 2 November its Knicks contract against Chicago was 83c and the Celtics against Milwaukee 85.5c. Cancel either game and both holders collect 50c: a 33c and a 35.5c loss on a position that was never wrong. A 15c longshot gains 35c the same way. Kalshi's discretionary price is at least aimed at the position you held.
The soccer draw gets paid in full and both teams get nothing
The soccer rows above are not a rounding difference, and this is the finding we double-checked hardest. Polymarket splits a soccer match into three separate Yes/No markets, and its cancellation clause is written per market rather than per event:
Team market: "If the game is canceled entirely, with no make-up game, this market will resolve "No"."
Draw market: "If the game is canceled entirely, with no make-up game, this market will resolve to "Yes"."
Read literally — and the wording leaves little room not to — a cancelled match is 100c on the draw and zero on both teams. All 70 team markets and all 35 draw markets carried their respective clause, across six competitions.
Newcastle against Everton on 2 November shows the stakes, because the two venues priced it almost identically. Kalshi quoted Newcastle 44c, Everton 29c and the tie 28c; Polymarket's asks were 45c, 29c and 27c. Same match, same prices, and if it were called off: Kalshi settles all three at a fair price, while Polymarket turns the 27c draw into a dollar and both team positions into nothing. There is a logic to it — no match played means no team won — but it is not neutral, and it is not what the US-league markets on the same venue do.
Overtime, shootouts and the 90-minute line
On the question most traders actually ask, the venues agree on substance and differ completely on where they tell you.
Counts are of market rules text, not of outcomes. Kalshi's contract-terms documents do define the overtime scope; the figure above is about what the market itself says.
Kalshi's football terms are explicit once opened: "all overtime periods are included in determining the winner". The basketball terms define the full game as "regulation time and any officially designated overtime periods", and add that a quarter or half never includes overtime unless stated. Correct, thorough, and nowhere on the market.
The soccer agreement is the useful part of this section. Both venues cut the match at 90 minutes plus stoppage, so a Champions League tie settled on penalties settles as a draw on both exchanges — the same answer, 258 Kalshi contracts and 105 Polymarket markets deep. If you have been assuming a knockout winner market, neither venue is selling you one here.
Who decides the score
Two exchanges can read the same final result off different scoreboards, and in soccer they do.
Kalshi sources from the settlement_sources field on each series; Polymarket from the resolutionSource field on each market. Both read 2 November 2026.
Kalshi's six soccer series name ESPN first and Fox Sports second in the field its own API serves, while the SOCCERGAMEWIN contract terms rank "the official website and official communications of the organizer" — FIFA, UEFA, the Premier League, La Liga and the rest — above everything. The document and the payload are not in the same order, and the document controls.
Polymarket is the more legible here, with one named URL per league and a fallback ladder ending in a 24-hour deadline. Kalshi's hierarchies go deeper — six ranked sources for basketball, eight for football, down to the official broadcaster — but only one of the two is readable in a minute, and neither choice visibly slows settlement: we timed 15,382 Kalshi resolutions separately. One rough edge is worth naming: the contract_terms_url on Kalshi's NHL game series points at HOCKEYWINNINGINPERIOD.pdf, whose stated Underlying is "the number of goals recorded during [a time period] of [a] hockey game" — a goals contract, not the game-winner contract the 102 live markets are.
The clauses only one venue has
Reading both rulebooks end to end, the asymmetry is not that one is stricter. It is that Kalshi has thought about more ways a game can go wrong.
Kalshi rows other than the last two come from the FOOTBALLGAMEWIN, BASKETBALLGAMEWIN and SOCCERGAMEWIN contract terms. "No clause" means the market description is silent, not that the case would go unhandled.
The minimum-play thresholds are the ones to know. An NBA game stopped at 40 minutes does not settle on the score at Kalshi: it needs 48 minutes of play, or a league declaration, before the official record binds, and football needs 55. On Polymarket an abandoned game turns on whether the league ever publishes an official result — the test the newer NBA template now makes explicit.
The dispute rows are not comparable mechanisms: Kalshi reviews internally, while Polymarket's $250 bond buys a challenge in the UMA oracle process, identical on all 200 markets. Both venues refuse post-settlement corrections in near-identical words, which is the one place the two rulebooks read as if they were written by the same hand. If a league revises a score after your market resolves, neither exchange reopens it.
What to check before you take a position
1. On Polymarket, read the postponement sentence on that market. Two versions are live. One gives you a date; one gives you an open-ended wait.
2. If you hold a heavy favourite, price the cancellation. An 85c position collects 50c on a cancelled Polymarket game. That is a 35c tail on a bet you did not lose.
3. In soccer, note which side of the three-way you are on. On Polymarket a cancelled match pays the draw and zeroes both teams.
4. On Kalshi, open the contract-terms PDF, not the rules box. Overtime, minimum play and forfeits are only in the document — and check it is the right document.
5. Never assume a knockout winner. Soccer is 90 minutes plus stoppage on both venues; penalties settle as a draw.
None of this favours one exchange. It is a reason to read the one clause that differs on the fixture in front of you, which takes twenty seconds once you know where to look.
Read the rules box before the price
Both venues quote these fixtures within half a cent of each other, and a single postponed night is worth 30c a share more on one of them than the other. The clause is in the market description, and it is two sentences long.
Visit Polymarket.com →Affiliate link to Polymarket; we have no commercial relationship with Kalshi. 18+ only. Polymarket restricts access from the United States, Canada and other listed jurisdictions. Prediction markets carry a substantial risk of loss. Nothing here is financial advice.
My verdict on Kalshi vs Polymarket rules
Kalshi has the better rulebook and Polymarket has the better rules box. Kalshi's 48 hours is a real, uniform, machine-readable deadline that matches its own expiration timestamps on 196 of 200 contracts, and its contract terms answer questions Polymarket's descriptions never raise. The cost is that almost none of that is on the page you trade from.
Polymarket tells you about overtime and shootouts in the market itself, names one scoreboard per league, and publishes what happens when the data does not arrive. The cost is a 50-50 that punishes favourites, a soccer clause that pays the draw in full on a cancellation, and — right now — two different postponement rules running side by side with no notice of the change. We have measured these two venues on 626 matched prices and 357 matched order books, and the rules are the first place they genuinely diverge.
Related guides
- Kalshi vs Polymarket Liquidity 2026: 357 Books — the depth behind the quote on the same matched fixtures.
- Kalshi vs Polymarket Odds 2026: 626 Prices — why the prices agree to half a cent and the fee decides.
- Polymarket Resolution 2026: When UMA Decides — what happens after a resolution is proposed and challenged.
- Kalshi Payout Time 2026: 15,382 Timed — how long settlement actually takes once the rules are satisfied.
- Polymarket End Date 2026: 88% Close Late — why the listed end date is not when trading stops.
- Kalshi Fees by Market 2026: 195 Exceptions — the per-series fee data, deliberately absent from this piece.
Kalshi vs Polymarket rules FAQ
What happens to a Kalshi market if a game is postponed?
It stays open if the game starts within 48 hours of its original start time, then settles on the official result. All 960 open game contracts say so, and each one's latest expiration sits exactly 48 hours after kick-off. Miss the window and it settles at "the last fair price as determined by the Exchange in its sole discretion".
Does Polymarket have a postponement deadline?
Usually not. 184 of the 200 markets we read say the market "will remain open until the game has been completed", with no limit. The 16 exceptions were all NBA games on 4 and 5 November, which set a calendar deadline of 11:59 PM ET two days after the scheduled date.
Do I get a refund if the game is cancelled?
No, on either venue. Kalshi settles at a fair price it determines, which can be above or below what you paid. Polymarket resolves 50-50 on US-league games, so an 85c favourite collects 50c. Neither returns your stake.
What happens to a cancelled soccer match on Polymarket?
The two team markets resolve "No" and the draw market resolves "Yes". All 70 team markets and all 35 draw markets in our sample carry that wording, across six competitions. A cancelled match therefore pays the draw in full and zeroes both teams.
Does overtime count on Kalshi and Polymarket?
Yes on both, for full-game markets. Polymarket states it in all 95 US-league markets and adds the NHL shootout rule in all 36. Kalshi's market rules never mention it — 0 of 702 — but its football terms include all overtime periods and its basketball terms define the full game as regulation plus any designated overtime.
How do soccer markets handle extra time and penalties?
Both exclude them: Kalshi says "90 minutes plus stoppage time (does not include extra time or penalties)" on 258 of 258 soccer contracts, and Polymarket limits all 105 of its soccer markets to the first 90 minutes plus stoppage. A knockout tie decided on penalties settles as a draw on both.
Who decides the final score?
Polymarket names one URL per league and falls back to Flashscore, then Sofascore, then credible reporting, with a 24-hour deadline. Kalshi publishes a ranked list in its contract terms — six sources for basketball, eight for football. Note that its six soccer series list ESPN and Fox Sports in the API while the soccer contract terms rank the competition organiser first.
What if a game is abandoned at half-time?
Kalshi needs a minimum of real play before the record binds: 48 minutes for an NBA game, 40 for college basketball, 55 for football. Below that, or without a league declaration, it settles at the last fair price. Polymarket's older wording has no threshold; its newer NBA template resolves 50-50 if the game is "abandoned with no official result" by its deadline.
Method and sources
Sample. All open markets in Kalshi's eleven league game series on 2 November 2026 — 960 contracts on 437 fixtures — read from the public markets endpoint with their rules_primary and rules_secondary text. Each fixture was paired to a Polymarket event by date and both team codes, resolving 130 games and 200 Polymarket moneyline and draw markets across 10 leagues: 36 NHL, 31 NBA, 30 Serie A, 21 EPL, 21 MLS, 17 college football, 15 Champions League, 12 La Liga, 11 NFL and 6 Ligue 1. Bundesliga paired on no fixture and is absent from the Polymarket figures.
Documents. Kalshi's binding terms came from the contract_terms_url on each series: FOOTBALLGAMEWIN (NFL and college football), BASKETBALLGAMEWIN (NBA), SOCCERGAMEWIN (all six soccer competitions) and, as linked on the NHL series, HOCKEYWINNINGINPERIOD. Settlement sources came from the settlement_sources field on each series, and Polymarket's from each market's resolutionSource.
Counting. Clause counts match the clause's own wording in the rules text and are reported as a share of markets read, not of outcomes observed. No game in the sample was postponed or cancelled; every figure describes what the contracts say would happen, not what did.
Four caveats. These are the rules as published on one afternoon; Polymarket demonstrably changes its templates without notice, so re-read the market rather than this article. This covers polymarket.com, not the separate US app, whose windows differ. Kalshi's exchange rulebook sits above the per-contract terms and we quote the contract terms, not the rulebook. And a clause is not a prediction: how a venue applies its own discretion is only visible when a game actually falls over. Nothing here is financial advice.
- Kalshi: FOOTBALLGAMEWIN contract terms — the 48-hour window, the 55-minute threshold, the home/away reversal clause, and "all overtime periods are included".
- Kalshi: BASKETBALLGAMEWIN contract terms — the 48-minute and 40-minute minimums, the overtime definition, and the six ranked Source Agencies.
- Kalshi: SOCCERGAMEWIN contract terms — the organiser-first source hierarchy, the draw iteration and the extra-time scope.
- Kalshi docs: Get series — defines the
settlement_sourcesandcontract_terms_urlfields this study read. - Polymarket: how prediction markets are resolved — the venue's own account of resolution, where the docs site now redirects.
- ThinBlimp: postponed games — the only other page comparing the two venues on this question, read 2 November 2026; it predates the newer Polymarket template.