Polymarket Postponed Games 2026: 627 Rules

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If you are holding a position on a game that did not kick off, the only sentence that matters is the one in that market's own rules — and on Polymarket postponed games that sentence was rewritten eleven days ago without an announcement. The old wording let a postponed market sit open for as long as it took, so a 90c favourite eventually got paid on the real result. The new wording gives the game a hard calendar deadline and pays 50-50 if it is missed, which on tonight's board is worth up to 44.5c a share. We read the rules text of 1,091 live Polymarket markets and 834 Kalshi contracts on 6 November 2026, found the exact 24-hour window the change landed in, and tested it for counterexamples. Every guide currently ranking for this question describes the clause that Polymarket stopped using.

What changed in Polymarket's postponed-game rules

Both clauses are short, and the difference is one deadline. Here they are side by side, quoted from two NHL contracts whose games are one day apart.

	Old clause (to 28 Oct)	New clause (from 29 Oct)
If postponed	"this market will remain open until the game has been completed"	no open-ended wait; the deadline below applies
Deadline	none	"does not start by [day], 11:59 PM ET" — two days after the scheduled date
If cancelled	"canceled entirely, with no make-up game" → 50-50	cancelled, missed deadline, or "abandoned with no official result" → 50-50
Result already decided	not addressed	"if this market's outcome was definitively determined … before abandonment, that outcome will stand"

Read the two columns against each other and the change cuts both ways. The deadline is the expensive half: a postponed game that gets rescheduled for next week used to pay you on what actually happened, and now it pays you 50c if the make-up falls outside roughly 48 hours. The last row is a genuine improvement, and it is new — a game abandoned at 100-70 in the fourth quarter now settles on the result rather than being voided.

What it is not is an announcement. There is no blog post, no changelog entry, and no mention in Polymarket's own documentation; the wording simply differs between two markets created a day apart.

627 Polymarket postponed-game rules, counted

We pulled every open game market across the four North American team leagues and read the moneyline contract for each fixture. The split is almost even, and inside each league it is perfectly clean — there is not one date where both clauses appear.

League	Markets	New clause	Old clause	Last old game date
NBA	112	112	0	none left open
NHL	186	62	124	24 Nov 2026
NFL	46	17	29	17 Nov 2026
College football	283	130	153	7 Nov 2026
Total	627	321	306	—

The NBA column is the headline: 112 of 112, the whole board out to 20 November. A week ago basketball was the only league with any new-clause markets at all, which is why this looked like an NBA experiment. It was not.

The right-hand column is the one to diary. Old-clause contracts are a draining backlog, not a policy — they are simply markets that were created before the switch and have not settled yet. College football clears on 7 November, the NFL on 17 November, and the NHL last of all on 24 November. From 25 November 2026, every open contract on these four leagues carries a deadline.

The switch was one moment, and we can bracket it to 24 hours

The clause does not track league, and it does not track game date. It tracks the timestamp on the market object, which means Polymarket flipped a template and let it apply to everything created afterwards.

The NHL proves it, because the NHL board is built in a daily batch at 15:30 UTC. Two consecutive batches sit either side of the change:

Twenty-four hours and eight seconds apart, same league, same season, different rules. Every other league's boundary falls inside the same bracket once you look at creation times rather than fixtures:

League	Last old-clause market created	First new-clause market created
NHL	28 Oct 15:30 UTC	29 Oct 15:30 UTC
NFL	27 Oct 12:00 UTC	30 Oct 12:00 UTC
NBA	none still open	30 Oct 17:59 UTC
College football	26 Oct 22:26 UTC	2 Nov 23:01 UTC

The test that matters is the counterexample, so we ran it: of the 627 contracts, the number carrying the old clause but created after the first new-clause market is zero, and the number carrying the new clause but created before the last old-clause market is also zero. One rule, one timestamp, no exceptions.

This is also a correction to our own earlier read. When we compared the two venues' rulebooks on 2 November, the split looked NBA-only and mid-flight. It was neither: basketball just had the shortest gap between creation and tip-off, so it crossed over first. The lesson is that a clean split by game date can be the shadow of a single instant.

How long the new deadline actually runs

"Two days after the scheduled date" is a calendar rule, not a stopwatch, so the real window depends on what time the game starts. A 1:00 PM kick-off gets nearly three full days; a 10:30 PM tip-off gets barely two. Measured across all 321 new-clause contracts:

League	Markets	Shortest	Median	Longest
NBA	112	49.0h	52.0h	59.0h
NHL	62	50.0h	53.0h	59.0h
NFL	17	51.7h	55.9h	59.0h
College football	130	49.0h	58.0h	60.0h
All	321	49.0h	53.0h	60.0h

Note that the floor is just under 49 hours, never under 48. College football has the loosest windows because Saturday noon starts get until Monday midnight — almost 60 hours. So Polymarket's deadline is always a little longer than Kalshi's, which is the next thing worth measuring rather than assuming.

Kalshi's 48 hours, measured on 834 contracts

Every competing guide states Kalshi's 48-hour rule and none of them counts it, so we did. All 834 open game contracts across Kalshi's seven live game series carry the 48-hour clause — 68 NBA, 96 NHL, 56 NFL, 506 college football, 30 Premier League, 45 MLS and 33 La Liga. Not one exception.

There are two phrasings, and they split exactly by sport rather than by series. The 726 US-team-sport contracts say the market stays open "if the game is postponed but begins within 48 hours of its originally scheduled start time". The 108 soccer contracts say it resolves if the game is "cancelled or rescheduled to over 48 hours away". Same bound, different sentence.

Then we matched fixtures. Thirty-four NBA games are listed on both venues this week, which lets us compare the same event's deadline on each:

Measured on 34 matched NBA fixtures	Shortest	Median	Longest
Kalshi window after tip-off	48.00h	48.00h	48.00h
Polymarket window after tip-off	49.0h	52.0h	56.5h
Extra time Polymarket allows	+1.0h	+4.0h	+8.5h

Kalshi is 48.00 hours on 34 of 34, to the minute, because it measures from the scheduled start rather than from a calendar date. Polymarket now gives between one and eight and a half hours more. That sounds like Polymarket winning, and on the clock it is — but the clock is the smaller half of this comparison.

What 50-50 costs you when the deadline passes

Here is the part none of the competing pages reaches. The two venues do not just set different deadlines; they pay different amounts when the deadline passes. Polymarket resolves 50-50. Kalshi resolves to "the last fair price as determined by the Exchange in its sole discretion" — roughly what your contract was worth before the game fell through.

For a coin-flip market those are the same thing. For a favourite they are not, and the gap is the favourite's price minus 50c. Across all 321 new-clause contracts, every single one had a favourite trading at or above 50c:

Fixture (new clause)	Favourite	Polymarket pays	Kalshi pays*	Cost per share
SAS v SAC, 6 Nov	$0.895	$0.50	~$0.895	39.5c
PHI v CHI, 8 Nov	$0.815	$0.50	~$0.815	31.5c
MIL v NYK, 10 Nov	$0.795	$0.50	~$0.795	29.5c
WAS v OKC, 7 Nov	$0.765	$0.50	~$0.765	26.5c
Median of all 321	$0.635	$0.50	~$0.635	13.5c

*Kalshi's settlement is the Exchange's determination of fair price, not the last traded price, so treat the tilde as real. The comparison is the rule, not a quoted figure.

The median case is a 13.5c haircut on a 63.5c position — a 21% loss on a market that never resolved against you. On the night's biggest price it is 39.5c, and the widest gap anywhere in the 321 was 44.5c. Nineteen contracts were trading at 80c or more.

By league the exposure follows the favourites: the NFL has the steepest median haircut at 21.5c and the NHL the mildest at 7.0c, because hockey games price closer to even. That ordering is worth knowing if you are deciding where to carry weather risk, and it lines up with the price agreement we measured across 626 matched contracts — the venues agree on the odds and then differ on what happens when the game does not.

Polymarket.com and Polymarket US do not agree

One brand, two apps, two different answers to the same cancelled game. The regulated US app documents its own settlement rules, and they are Kalshi's, not polymarket.com's.

Venue	Deadline	Payout if missed	A 90c favourite gets
polymarket.com (new clause)	11:59 PM ET, 2 days after	50-50	$0.50
polymarket.com (old clause)	none — waits for the game	50-50 only if cancelled outright	the real result
Polymarket US	the contract's expiration date	last fair market price	~$0.90
Kalshi	48.00h after scheduled start	last fair price, Exchange's discretion	~$0.90

Polymarket US puts it plainly: if the make-up game falls after expiration, "all Contracts on the original game settle at last fair market prices", and a cancellation settles "at last fair market prices as of the time the cancellation was officially announced". Its documentation also warns that last fair market price "is not the last traded price at market close" — it is the exchange's view of fair value, exactly like Kalshi's.

So the US app reserves 50c settlements for genuine ties: a tied game with no winner declared, a cricket no-result, a UFC draw, an ITF tennis walkover. On polymarket.com, 50c is also what you get for bad weather. If you can reach both, that difference is worth more than any fee on the published rate card.

Soccer is unresolved, and three sports always had deadlines

The new clause has reached four leagues. It has not reached soccer — but we are not going to tell you soccer is excluded, because the data cannot support that. All 248 open soccer markets we read carry the old clause, and all 248 were created on or before 26 October, which is before the switch. Every one of them would carry the old wording whether or not soccer is in scope. The next batch created after 29 October is what answers it.

What soccer does have is the strangest payout on the board, unchanged from our earlier read: a cancelled match pays "No" ($0) on all 165 team markets and "Yes" ($1.00) on all 83 draw markets. Back the draw and a cancellation pays in full; back either team and it pays nothing.

Meanwhile the individual sports have had calendar deadlines all along, and they are seven times longer than the new team-sport one:

Sport	Markets read	Deadline	Payout if missed
NBA / NHL / NFL / CFB	321	~2 days	50-50
Tennis	151	14 days	50-50
UFC	30	14 days	50-50
Boxing	23	14 days	50-50
Soccer	248	none yet	$0 team / $1.00 draw

Tennis is uniform to the word — 151 of 151 say the market resolves 50-50 if no winner is determined by a date "(14 days after the scheduled start)". UFC and boxing are 30 of 30 and 23 of 23 at exactly 14 days. So Polymarket did not invent the deadline in October; it took a convention that already governed 204 individual-sport markets and gave the team sports a version seven times shorter.

What to check before the next postponement

Read the Rules box, not a guide. That includes this one. Two markets in the same league a day apart currently carry different clauses, so the only authoritative text is the one on the market you are about to trade. Look for the phrase "does not start by" — if it is there, you have a deadline.

Treat a favourite as carrying weather risk. On the new clause, the thing you lose if a game is called off is not your stake, it is the distance between your price and 50c. The higher the price, the more a postponement costs, which is the opposite of the intuition that a big favourite is the safe side.

Related guides

• Kalshi vs Polymarket Rules 2026: 48 Hours — the full cross-venue rulebook census this article updates.
• Polymarket Resolution 2026: When UMA Decides — who actually settles a disputed market, and how long it takes.
• Polymarket Payout Time 2026: 37,659 Timed — how long your money is locked up after the result is in.
• Polymarket End Date 2026: 88% Close Late — why the date on the market is not the date it resolves.
• Kalshi vs Polymarket Odds 2026: 626 Prices — the two venues agree on price, then differ on everything else.
• Kalshi Payout Time 2026: 15,382 Timed — the same settlement question on the other exchange.

Polymarket postponed games FAQ

Method and sources

Read on 6 November 2026. On the Polymarket side we walked the public events endpoint for fifteen league tags, took every event whose slug ends in a fixture date, and read the full description — the binding rules text — of its moneyline contract: 627 across the four North American team leagues, 248 soccer markets including the draw leg, and 216 tennis, UFC, boxing and Formula 1 contracts, for 1,091 in total. Clause classification is a literal phrase match on "does not start by" plus "abandoned with no official result" for the new template and "remain open until the game has been completed" for the old one. Deadline windows are the parsed deadline minus the market's own gameStartTime, with ET read as UTC−5. Prices are the live outcome prices at the time of reading. On the Kalshi side we paged all 834 open contracts across its seven live game series and matched 34 NBA fixtures by date and team codes.

• Polymarket: Devils v Blue Jackets, 25 November — the first new-clause market we found, created 29 October 15:30 UTC. Its Rules box carries the deadline wording verbatim.
• Polymarket US docs: Sports FAQs — the US app's own settlement rules, including last fair market price and the definition that it is not the last traded price.
• Kalshi contract terms: basketball game winner (PDF) — the binding document, which is where "the last fair price as determined by the Exchange in its sole discretion" appears; the API field carries only the short form "a fair price".
• Kalshi docs: fee rounding — used to confirm settlement arithmetic conventions on the Kalshi side.