Clarity Act Odds: Will It Become Law? Kalshi Ladder

The White House offered Senate Democrats new ethics language on Sunday night, September 13, 2026, and Kalshi's Clarity Act ladder repriced every rung overnight. The contract on the crypto market structure bill becoming law before 2027 ran from 23 cents to 47 in three hours, then gave back most of the move by Monday lunch. Tuesday's 2:15 p.m. ET cloture vote decides which of those two prices was right.

The Quick Answer

Kalshi prices the Clarity Act at 31 cents to become law before January 1, 2027 (30/31 book at 3:30 p.m. ET on September 14, 2026), up from 24 on Sunday afternoon. A yes on before December 1, 2026 costs 27 cents, before July 2027 costs 54, and before 2028 costs 65. The September 15 vote is cloture on the motion to proceed, and with two Republicans against the bill it needs nine Democrats. Whether the ethics deal buys those nine, and what each rung pays if cloture clears or fails, is below.

These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

What The White House Gave Up On Sunday

The ethics fight is the one that stalled this bill all summer. Democrats wanted a rule that stops elected officials and their families from profiting off crypto while they write crypto policy, and Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks conditioned their floor votes on it because the Trump family has earned billions from ventures like World Liberty Financial. The White House signed off on an ethics package on July 21, and the next day seven Democrats criticized the Republican text that carried it as falling short. The bill went into the August recess without a vote.

On Sunday the White House agreed to new language that requires officials with significant crypto holdings to divest them or place them in a blind trust, enforceable by state attorneys general as well as the Justice Department. Cynthia Lummis called the restrictions among the toughest ever applied to federal officials. The same evening Senate Republicans, through Banking Chair Tim Scott, Agriculture Chair John Boozman and digital-assets subcommittee chair Cynthia Lummis, released a 635-page draft carrying 126 changes Democratic negotiators had requested, with the ethics text worked out between Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego. A Republican aide described the offer as "last, best and final."

The ladder did nothing on the afternoon reports that a deal was close and everything once the text landed. The January 2027 rung was 23 cents at 10 p.m. ET Sunday and 31 an hour later. Chuck Schumer called his caucus into a closed-door meeting Sunday evening to decide what to do with the offer. As of Monday afternoon no Democratic leader had announced a position, and that silence is the gap the market has been trading all day.

Does It Get Nine Democrats To 60

Cloture on the motion to proceed takes 60 votes, so a bill with 53 Republican seats behind it needs seven Democrats on paper. It needs more than that in practice. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley have both said they oppose the bill, and the whip estimate going into Tuesday has at least two Republicans voting no, which puts the real ask at nine Democrats or independents. Winning the vote does not pass anything; it buys floor time for a bill that still faces amendments, a second cloture vote, final passage, and a House that passed its own version in July 2025.

The Democrats who matter are the seven who criticized the Republican text in a July 22 statement: it "falls short," and "key provisions including those addressing ethics for elected officials, consumer protection, illicit finance, conflicts of interest and market integrity must be strengthened": Angela Alsobrooks, Cory Booker, Catherine Cortez Masto, Gallego, John Hickenlooper, Mark Warner and Raphael Warnock. Those are the negotiators. The 126 changes in Sunday's draft are addressed to them, and Gallego co-wrote the ethics section, so this is the group the deal was built to move.

Kalshi runs a separate board on whether each of these senators votes for the bill this year, and it is the sharpest read I have on whether the deal worked. Gallego's contract went from 15 cents on Sunday afternoon to 47 by Monday afternoon, the biggest move on the board. Alsobrooks is bid 25 from 17. Cortez Masto sits at 28, Warnock at 22, Warner at 21, and none of those three moved more than a cent. The market bought the man who wrote the deal, moved Alsobrooks some, and left the three others Kalshi lists flat. Add up the five signers Kalshi lists and you get about one and a half expected yes votes out of the seven negotiators, on thin books. These contracts settle on the vote for the bill itself, not on Tuesday's cloture, but a Democrat who will not vote for the bill is not going to vote to start debating it either.

Two other reads frame that number, and neither prices Tuesday's roll call directly. No Kalshi contract does, so the coin flip is an inference. Kalshi's contract titled "Above 60" pays if 61 or more senators vote yes on the bill before January 1, 2027. It was 31 cents on Sunday afternoon and traded at a 49/52 book on Monday. The "Above 50" rung of the same board sits at 59/60. Read together, the market gives roughly 60 percent to the Senate passing the bill this year, and given that, expects the count to clear 60 most of the time. TD Cowen's Jaret Seiberg is well under that. He held his passage odds at 25 percent on Monday: "We are not convinced the updated ethics language Senate Republicans released last night is substantive enough for moderate Democrats." So the senator board and Cowen are bearish, the vote-count board is closer to even, and the ladder below is where the money actually sits.

The Kalshi Ladder

Kalshi's KXCRYPTOSTRUCTURE ladder as of September 14, 2026 (3:30 p.m. ET). "Yes Costs" is the ask, the price a buyer pays now; bid/ask is what buyers are offering and what sellers are asking; "Sunday Afternoon" is Kalshi's reported price 24 hours earlier, before the White House offer. Each rung asks "law before this date?", so every rung contains the ones before it and you never add them together; our prediction markets guide covers the rest.

Becomes Law Before	Yes Costs	Bid/Ask	Sunday Afternoon
Oct 1, 2026	7¢	6/7	4¢
Nov 1, 2026	14¢	13/14	8¢
Dec 1, 2026	27¢	25/27	17¢
Jan 1, 2027	31¢	30/31	24¢
Apr 1, 2027	45¢	44/45	32¢
Jul 1, 2027	54¢	50/54	37¢
Oct 1, 2027	59¢	56/59	39¢
Jan 1, 2028	65¢	62/65	48¢

The September 1 rung has settled No and is off the board. Three rungs last traded outside their current books on Monday (November, December and 2028), which is what a thin ladder looks like the afternoon after a spike, so the ask is the price to trust. The rung I keep coming back to is December 1, which went from 17 cents to 27 and was the biggest move among the 2026 rungs. The 2027 rungs moved even more, October 2027 by 20 points, and that ordering is the market saying a cloture win mostly buys time rather than a signing this year. Subtract the rungs and the window between November 1 and December 1 is worth about 13 points. That is the fattest stretch left in 2026, and about three times the December window behind it. It is the market drawing one specific path: cloture Tuesday, Senate passage before the campaign recess or early in the lame duck, and the House concurring before December 1. Every other 2026 window is priced as a longshot. Trading is still concentrated in the January 1, 2027 rung, with 641,000 contracts open. It turned over $187,000 in the last 24 hours on a one-cent book.

What Each Rung Pays If Cloture Clears Or Fails

A yes contract costs its price and pays $1 if the bill is law before that date, so the 31-cent January rung pays $1 on a signing this year and the no side, at about 70 cents, pays $1 if the calendar runs out. Tuesday does not settle any rung. What it does is move every one of them, and the market has already printed both answers.

The overnight highs are the cloture-clears price, printed by the first buyers who treated the deal as a done vote: January 2027 touched 47, December 35, and 2028 briefly 76 on a thin book. Sunday afternoon is the cloture-fails price: 24, 17 and 48. Measure Monday's asks against those two ends and the payoff map falls out. January at 31 sits 16 points under its overnight high and 7 above Sunday, the biggest upside on the ladder against the smallest give-back. December at 27 is at the midpoint of its range, 8 up and 10 down. The 2028 rung at 65 is 11 under its spike print and 17 above Sunday, the most to lose if the caucus says no. That is the weekend's ordering again. The long rungs already carry most of a cloture win, so they have the furthest to fall, while January is the rung a 60-vote count still has room to move. The October rung stays near dead at 7 cents either way. Floor debate, an amendment fight and House concurrence do not fit in the 16 days left before October 1. Kalshi's separate contract on the Senate holding any recorded vote on the bill before October 1 sits at 95 cents, so the market is not worried about the vote being pulled, only about the count.

If cloture fails, every rung gives back toward Sunday afternoon, though probably not all the way. Thune can bring a failed cloture motion back whenever the count improves, and a Democratic caucus that says no on Tuesday with 126 of its own edits in the text is negotiating, not walking away. The bear case is Cynthia Lummis's warning that a failure now means waiting until 2030, and a 65-cent 2028 rung says the market does not believe her.

What The Overnight Price History Says

The shape of Sunday night is the tell. At 10 p.m. ET the January 2027 rung was 23 cents. The 11 p.m. hour closed at 31 with a high of 36 on $55,000 of volume, the biggest hour the contract has ever printed. Midnight closed at 39, and the 1 a.m. hour on Monday closed at 44 with a high of 47. The December rung ran from 18 to 35 over the same three hours, and the 2028 rung briefly printed 76.

Then Washington woke up. By 9 a.m. the January rung was 32. It touched 27 at noon, after the Cowen note and a morning of Democrats saying nothing, and traded back to 31 by 3 p.m. The first buyers priced the ethics deal as a done cloture vote. Monday's sellers priced it as an offer the other side has not accepted. The market split the difference. A 30/31 book on the January rung is not a coin flip on Tuesday; it is roughly even odds on cloture multiplied by the odds that the rest of the calendar cooperates. Polymarket's contract on the act being signed into law in 2026 traded at 26.5 cents Monday on $16.7 million of lifetime volume, four and a half points under Kalshi's January rung, so the two crowds disagree only about how much of the overnight move to keep.

The Bottom Line

The tell to watch at 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday is the January 1, 2027 rung, not the roll call. A count of 60 or more sends it back toward the overnight high of 47 and makes November the story; a count in the 50s sends it back toward Sunday afternoon's 24 and makes the rerun the story. The senator board says the deal moved Gallego a lot, Alsobrooks some and nobody else, and that is the gap the ladder priced all Monday. This page updates with the result.

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