If you searched how to win on Kalshi, you want a straight answer. Here it is, in this order: how the exchange works, what a price means, what the fee costs, the three things every winning trade needs, and whether it pays. Updated November 6, 2026, with NFL prices pulled early that morning.
The Sims play Packers-Patriots 10,000 times, from the opening kickoff to the last snap, and keep count of every bet. Ask them how often your bet hits in the box below, for free.
The Quick Answer
You win on Kalshi by buying a contract for less than the real chance it pays out, after the fee and at the price you actually get filled. A 40-cent contract pays $1 if it settles yes, so it needs to hit more than 40% of the time plus about a cent and three-quarters of fee to make money. Nobody wins every trade; the traders who come out ahead price events better than the crowd and keep every position small enough that one loss does not erase 15 wins. The rest of this page shows each piece with real prices from the November 6 pull.
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How Does Kalshi Work?
Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange, overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where you trade yes-or-no contracts on real events: who wins a game, where a temperature lands, what the Fed does. Every contract pays $1 if the event happens and nothing if it does not. The price you pay, quoted in cents from 1 to 99, is what the market thinks the chance is. Buy New England to beat the Packers at 62 cents and you are paying $62 for 100 contracts that return $100 if the Patriots win, a $38 profit before the fee, or return nothing if they lose.
The other side of your trade is another trader or a trading firm, never the house; Kalshi makes its money on a fee. You can place a market order, which fills right now at the best price on the screen, or a limit order, which sits in the order book at your price until someone takes it. The full walkthrough of how Kalshi works covers signup, deposits and settlement. Kalshi is 18 and over, and availability depends on where you live.
Kalshi Odds: What A Price Means And How To Read It
Kalshi odds do not look like sportsbook odds. There is no -110 and no +260, just one number in cents, and that number is the chance the market is charging you for. A 62-cent contract is a 62% chance in the market's eyes. A 31-cent contract is a 31% chance.
Here is the board for three Week 9 NFL games, pulled from Kalshi's public market feed on November 6, 2026, at 1:50 AM CT, 2:50 ET. They kick off two days later, on Sunday. Thursday's game, Jacksonville's 33-10 win at Baltimore, had already settled and is not on it. Each team is its own contract, and each shows a bid, the most anyone will pay right now, and an ask, the least anyone will sell for.
| Team To Win (Week 9, Nov. 8) | Bid | Ask | What $100 at the ask returns if it hits, before the fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| New England Patriots (Vs. Green Bay) | 61¢ | 62¢ | $161 |
| Green Bay Packers (At New England) | 38¢ | 39¢ | $256 |
| Kansas City Chiefs (Vs. New York Jets) | 80¢ | 81¢ | $123 |
| Indianapolis Colts (Vs. Dallas) | 30¢ | 31¢ | $323 |
Read the New England row like this: sellers want 62 cents and buyers offer 61. A market order costs you the 62; a limit order placed at 61 might fill later or never. Now add the two asks in that game together. New England and Green Bay sum to 101 cents, not 100, and that extra cent is the spread, the exchange version of a sportsbook's juice. Prices move all day, so run this arithmetic at the price you are actually offered, not the one printed here.
If you are used to sportsbook prices, we keep a conversion chart from Kalshi cents to American odds and a note on how Kalshi's price already includes the probability. This page stays in cents, because cents are what the exchange charges you.
What Moved Since October 29
The four Week 8 rows this page carried on October 29 settled on Sunday the way the board leaned: both favorites paid and both underdogs lost. Detroit beat Minnesota 19-15, so the 63-cent Lions contract paid $1 and the 38-cent Vikings contract paid nothing. Pittsburgh beat Cleveland 27-6 at 65 cents, and the 20-cent Colts lost 42-7 at Jacksonville. The prices did not sit still on the way there. The Lions row was 63 cents at kickoff, dipped to 42 cents at 2:23 p.m. ET, and was back to 99 by 4 p.m. The Vikings row made the mirror move, up to 59 before collapsing to a penny. A 63-cent favorite that pays can be a 63-cent favorite that spent part of its afternoon as an underdog, and anyone who sold into that dip handed the win to whoever bought it.
The finding on the Week 9 rows is that the books filled in. The 62-cent New England ask holds 320,790 contracts at this pull, where the 58-cent ask held 5,687 at a November 1 pull a week out, and the two asks in the Patriots-Packers game, which summed to 102 cents then, sum to 101 now. The price moved with the depth. New England went from 58 cents to 62 and Green Bay from 44 to 39; the Patriots row was 60 by Monday night and 62 by Wednesday evening, and it has not closed an hour outside 60 to 62 since. Kansas City and Indianapolis held their bids at 80 and 30 while their asks came in, from 83 to 81 and from 32 to 31, so each of those spreads tightened to a cent. The Colts' cent is one thin price level, and the backtest check at the end of this page prices what that costs.
The biggest burst on the New England row came Tuesday at 1:10 p.m. ET, when 245,724 contracts were bought at 59 cents in a single second. It came on a dip: the row had closed Monday at 60, the burst cleared the sellers at 59, and it was back at 60 within the hour; 61 and 62 came Wednesday. The last edition of this page had a burst like that on the Pittsburgh row, and it left that price exactly where it was. Trade records show prices, not reasons; the Patriots' climb came after their burst, and I cannot say it came because of it. Kalshi's fee formula is unchanged.
How Does Kalshi Make Money? The Fee Formula
Kalshi charges a trading fee, and the fee is a formula rather than a flat rate. On its published schedule, a standard trade costs 0.07 times your contract count times the price times one minus the price, rounded up to the next cent. The fee is highest at 50 cents and shrinks toward either end of the board. There is no fee to settle a winner and no fee to withdraw.
| You Buy 100 Contracts At | Fee on the trade | Chance needed to break even, after the fee |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Cents | $1.50 | about 32.5% |
| 39 Cents | $1.67 | about 40.7% |
| 50 Cents | $1.75 | about 51.8% |
| 62 Cents | $1.65 | about 63.7% |
The third column is the one that decides trades. A 39-cent contract is not a bet that needs to hit 39% of the time; after the fee it needs about 40.7%, and that is before the spread. Orders that rest in the book pay a reduced maker rate on the markets that carry one, which is why patient traders leave limit orders instead of crossing the spread. The full schedule, including when a Kalshi price beats a -110 sportsbook line, is on our Kalshi fees page.
How To Win On Kalshi: The Three Things Every Winning Trade Needs
Every trade that makes money over time has the same three parts.
1. An edge that survives the fee. Your edge is the gap between the chance you believe in and the chance the price implies, after the fee. Say you make New England a 65% team against that 62-cent ask. Your edge is 3 cents per contract before the fee, and 1.35 cents after it. Make them a 63% team instead and there is no trade. Our guide to reading a Kalshi price against a devigged sportsbook line shows the comparison step by step.
2. A fill you actually get. A backtest assumes you traded at the printed price. Real markets do not. At the November 6 pull, two days out, the 62-cent ask on New England had 320,790 contracts resting on it and the 61-cent bid 70,324. A week out, the same row had 5,687 offered at 58 and 2,180 bid at 57; books fill in as the game nears, and a week out you are trading the thin version. A limit order at 61 goes to the back of a 70,324-contract queue, and with 320,790 offered at 62 the sellers are in no hurry to come down to you; when your order does fill, it is often because news moved the price through it. "I'll just rest at 61" is a claim about the queue, not the price. The Green Bay row in the table above shows the other shape: 78,041 contracts bid at 38 and 68,534 offered at 39, deep on both sides, so a seller of almost any size really gets 38 and a buyer really pays 39. The maker and taker distinction is the mechanical side of this.
3. A size that survives a losing streak. Selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar, so one loss erases the premiums from roughly 15 wins. That arithmetic, not the hit rate, is what makes sizing the whole game. The standard sizing rule, the Kelly fraction, is your edge divided by the odds you are getting. Take a 40-cent contract you believe hits 45% of the time.
- The payout is 60 cents of profit on 40 cents risked, so the odds are 1.5 to 1.
- Full Kelly is the win chance times the odds, minus the loss chance, divided by the odds: 0.45 times 1.5, minus 0.55, over 1.5. That is about 8% of your bankroll.
- Most disciplined traders use a quarter of that, about 2%, because the 45% was a guess.
- With $1,000 set aside for Kalshi, that is a $20 position.
The number is the arithmetic, not a recommendation. The Kelly criterion for prediction markets walks through the formula with more examples.
Can You Actually Make Money On Kalshi?
Some traders do, and none of them are running a secret system. The costs are the part anyone can measure: the fee is published, the spread is on the screen, and a resting order fills only when someone else wants to trade at your price. The part you cannot see on the screen is what separates them: they price events better than the crowd, they get filled at the prices their math assumed, and they size so a losing week is survivable. Our own trading on Kalshi is a short log, negative at the last count and far too small a sample to prove or disprove anything. Is Kalshi profitable? For the disciplined few, yes. For a bettor who treats a 75-cent favorite as already won, the fee and the spread do the losing slowly and the settlement does it all at once. This week's real row prices the cost of standing still: buy the Patriots at 62, sell at the 61 bid an hour later with nothing changed, and you have paid 1 cent of spread plus 1.65 and 1.67 cents of fee, about 4.3 cents per contract. That is the bar your read of the game has to clear. The Lions row above shows the other way a favorite costs its holder money without losing the game: whoever sold the 63-cent contract at its 42-cent dip gave back 21 cents on a winner.
A Kalshi Trading Strategy Test You Can Run Yourself
Before you trust any Kalshi trading strategy, run it through four checks that take minutes.
- Subtract The Fee Before You Believe A Number. A result quoted before the fee is overstated. On the 62-cent New England ask above, the fee is 1.65 cents per contract, more than half of that three-cent edge, and on a 50-cent contract it is a cent and three-quarters.
- Ask Whether The Fill Rate Was Measured Jointly. If a strategy needs three orders to fill, the rate that matters is how often all three fill together, not the average of each.
- Haircut Any Backtest Built From Quotes. A quote says where the market stood; it cannot say whether anyone would have traded with you at that moment. Take a couple of cents off. This week's Colts row shows the size of the haircut: 888 contracts are offered at 31 cents before the price is 32, so a $1,000 order gets 3,152 contracts, not the 3,225 the printed price suggests.
- Rank Ideas By How Far The Result Sits From Zero, Not By The Result. A best week is the noisiest week, and the noisiest idea always posts the best week.
For the moves that come next, our Kalshi trading strategy guide covers resting limit orders, trading where the liquidity lives, and selling before settlement instead of hedging, and the position limits explain how big a market will let you get.
More on this: Kalshi Fees Explained · Kalshi Odds: Cents To American Odds · Kalshi Trading Strategy: Five Moves · Kalshi Maker Vs. Taker · How Much Money Should You Put On Kalshi?
The prices on this page are Kalshi's book on the day stated and the edges are estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice; contracts can lose their full value. We have no commercial relationship with Kalshi.
Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.
