The jobs report date is the easy half of the question. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Employment Situation Report on a preannounced monthly calendar at 8:30 AM ET, usually on a Friday. Anyone can look that up. The half that costs people money is what happens in the 60 seconds around it, because the market that trades this number stops trading one minute before the answer arrives.
Two facts do most of the work on this page. The first is that clock: on Kalshi's KXPAYROLLS ladder, trading closes at 8:29 AM ET and the report lands at 8:30, so whatever you hold going in is what gets graded. The second is quieter, and it is the one I keep coming back to: the number the government eventually says was true is often not the number that settled the contract. That deserves its own section, and it gets one.
The Quick Answer
The next jobs report covers August 2026 and is scheduled for Friday, September 4, 2026 at 8:30 AM ET, followed by Friday, October 2 (September data), Friday, November 6 (October data) and Friday, December 4 (November data). On Kalshi, the matching KXPAYROLLS contract stops trading at 8:29 AM ET, one minute before each release, and settles against the headline payrolls figure in the report's opening sentence. Those four dates, the ladder of strikes they settle, and the revision trap that separates the settled number from the number you will read about later are all below.
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When The Next Jobs Report Lands
The BLS owns the release calendar; the close times below come from the contracts. Each monthly KXPAYROLLS market carries a close set, in the exchange's own wording, "at 8:29 AM ET on the expected date of the data release," which makes the contract clock a direct read on when the exchange expects the BLS to publish. Treat the official BLS schedule as the source of truth and the contract close as the market's answer to it.
| Reference Month | Contract | Trading closes | Report released |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | KXPAYROLLS-26AUG | 8:29 AM ET, Fri Sep 4 | 8:30 AM ET, Fri Sep 4 |
| September 2026 | KXPAYROLLS-26SEP | 8:29 AM ET, Fri Oct 2 | 8:30 AM ET, Fri Oct 2 |
| October 2026 | KXPAYROLLS-26OCT | 8:29 AM ET, Fri Nov 6 | 8:30 AM ET, Fri Nov 6 |
| November 2026 | KXPAYROLLS-26NOV | 8:29 AM ET, Fri Dec 4 | 8:30 AM ET, Fri Dec 4 |
Notice that every row is a Friday, and then notice that the pattern breaks. The June 2026 report did not come on a Friday at all. It was published Thursday, July 2, with that month's first Friday, July 3, falling on the observed Independence Day holiday, and the contract for June closed at 8:29 that Thursday morning instead. "First Friday" is a habit the calendar usually keeps, not a rule it always does, which is why the schedule is worth checking instead of assuming, and why the contract clock is the more reliable thing to read. The exchange moves its close to wherever the BLS says the release is going.
One more scheduling note, since the report covers the month before the month it is published in: the August figure is a September release. People miss trades by looking for an "August jobs report" in August.
What The 8:29 Close Actually Means
That one-minute gap has a consequence people underestimate until it happens to them: there is no trading on the number, ever. The position is built before the answer exists and graded after it arrives, with nothing in between. The contract then expires the same morning, around 10:00 AM ET, roughly 90 minutes after the print, with a 300-second settlement timer running from there. The grade therefore lands the same morning rather than days later, and at no point is there a window in which anyone trades the release.
Anyone whose plan is "I will trade out if it goes against me" is describing an exit that does not exist here.
The run-up prices accordingly. The figure is held under embargo until 8:30, and nobody with early access to it is on the other side of your order; what moves the price in the final hours is positioning, traders trimming size and paying to shed risk they would rather not carry through the instant. Liquidity providers know exactly when that instant hits, and as it approaches they widen their quotes or pull them rather than be the last resting order on the book. Spreads get widest precisely when the market feels most urgent. Fees push the same way: Kalshi charges a trading fee on matched orders that scales with how close the price sits to 50 cents, largest on a coin-flip strike and smallest out on the tails, which works out to $1.68 on 100 contracts bought at 60 cents. The arithmetic is laid out in our guide to Kalshi's fees. A late entry through a wide spread needs the print to cooperate just to break even. Resting an order early, when the book is tight, is a structural choice rather than a personality trait; the difference between the two approaches is covered in our explainer on order types on Kalshi.
The Ladder: One Number, A Dozen-Plus Strikes
The market is not a single yes/no on the jobs report. The possible values of the payrolls change are cut into strikes, and each strike trades as its own contract on whether the headline figure lands above that level. The August 2026 contract carries 13 of them, running from "above -25,000" through zero and then in 10,000-job steps from 10,000 up to 100,000, with a top strike at 125,000. The count is not fixed month to month, so check the board rather than assuming.
That "above" is the detail to hold onto, because it means the strikes are not mutually exclusive. They are nested. If payrolls come in at 52,000, then every strike at or below that level pays: above -25,000, above 0, above 10,000, all the way up through above 50,000. Only the strikes above the print expire worthless. Prices therefore fall as you climb the ladder, and a single rung read in isolation tells you almost nothing.
Take the bottom rung, "above -25,000." It exists because the ladder is built to price outcomes in which the economy shed jobs outright, not merely added fewer than hoped. A ladder starting at zero would have nowhere to put a negative print.
Because this is an exchange rather than a sportsbook, either side of any strike is available and both sides post their money up front. Yes and no on the same strike are complementary claims on $1, which is what the winning side collects, and that is what makes a price readable as a probability. In the live book the spread means the two displayed buy prices will usually not add up quite that neatly. You can even hold both sides at once while you work out a view, though pairing them costs the spread plus fees and returns $1 either way, which makes it a parking maneuver rather than a strategy. The broader structure, if this is your first event contract, is covered in how prediction markets work; the jobs report sits alongside CPI and the Fed decision in Kalshi's economic markets family, where the same discipline applies.
A ladder over one number only works if everyone agrees, in advance and to the word, on what that number is. So the rules name it.
What Settles It: The First Sentence Of The Report
The Expiration Value is the headline payrolls figure in the report's first sentence. Not a table deep in the release, not a network chyron, not a bank's revised estimate an hour later. That opening line runs in a fixed format, on the pattern of "Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 467,000," and the stated figure is what every strike on the ladder is graded against.
Settling against one named sentence is what keeps the market honest. Nobody argues with the print, both sides' collateral is already posted, the grading is mechanical, and in the rare case where settlement itself is contested there is a formal dispute process. What the rules do not do is wait to see whether the government later changes its mind.
The Revision Trap
The contract terms state it in one line: "Revisions to the Underlying made after Expiration will not be accounted for in determining the Expiration Value."
Read that precisely, because the rule is not "the first print wins." The rule is that revisions made after expiration do not count. Those two things coincide here only because this contract expires the same morning the report lands, which makes the first print simply the last number to arrive before expiration. A contract written to run a month longer would settle on a revised figure under the very same sentence.
Here is why that line matters more in this market than almost anywhere else. The Employment Situation Report revises the prior two months at the same moment it prints the current one. Every release carries three payroll numbers: the new month, plus updated figures for the two months before it. So the print that graded a contract you held gets officially rewritten, sometimes substantially, one and two releases later. The number in a database months from now, and the number a news story quotes when it recaps the period, can both differ from the number that settled your ticket. Nothing was corrected in error and nothing is in dispute. The series moved on; your contract did not.
If you have traded weather contracts, you know this shape already. It is the economic version of the settlement station trap, where a city's temperature is not the named station's temperature. In weather the gap is spatial. In payrolls it is temporal: the revised series versus the sentence as first published. Both cost money the same way, by letting you grade a position against the wrong referee.
A Worked Example: Release Morning
Walk one release morning through the mechanics, using the real August rungs and the same 52,000 print from earlier — a number picked for the walkthrough, not a call on the release. The strike levels are published contract facts; the prices are illustrative, and nothing here is a view on where any print will land.
| Strike (Above X Jobs) | Price at 8:29 AM ET | Settlement that morning |
|---|---|---|
| Above 30,000 | 91¢ | $1 |
| Above 40,000 | 72¢ | $1 |
| Above 50,000 | 52¢ | $1 |
| Above 60,000 | 24¢ | $0 |
| Above 125,000 | 3¢ | $0 |
Three rows settle at $1, which is the nested structure doing exactly what it should: a 52,000 print cleared three of these thresholds and missed two. Prices climb as the threshold drops, and the repricing itself is a gap rather than a move. Nothing drifts while the market digests the release, because the market is shut while the release happens. There is a before-state at 8:29 and a graded outcome after it.
The row worth staring at is not any of the winners. It is the 3-cent top rung, above 125,000, which pays only on a print some 75,000 jobs clear of the middle of the ladder. Selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar: sell a tail at 8 cents and a single loss erases the premiums from about 11 wins. Sell it at 3 cents and 97 cents of risk against 3 cents of premium means it takes more than 30 wins to cover one loss. The cheaper the tail looks, the worse that ratio gets. That asymmetry, not the hit rate, is what makes position sizing the whole game, and a scheduled release sharpens it: every seller of the same tail loses on the same morning, together, with no chance to manage anything on the way down. A shock print does not walk that strike from 3 cents to 30 while you decide what to do. The market is closed. It goes to $1. We have written separately about why selling long shots breaks people, and the jobs report is that lesson on a calendar.
Grading Yourself Correctly
Everything above collapses into five things worth checking before a payrolls contract is anything other than a guess. Confirm the release date on the BLS schedule rather than assuming a Friday. Confirm the contract's close, which sits one minute earlier and moves with the release. Know which sentence and which figure settle it. Price the spread and the fee you will actually pay, especially late. And when the revisions land a month later, grade the trade against the number that settled it, not the number the series has since become.
That last one is where most of the self-deception happens, and it cuts both ways: a position that settled against you does not become a good trade because the figure was revised in your direction afterward.
What this page will not do is call the number. It makes no forecast of where any payrolls print lands and says nothing about the state of the labor market. The strike levels in the example are published contract facts and the prices attached to them are illustrative; neither is a view on the number. The division of labor is intentional: this page owns the referee and the clock, while the models' read on the payrolls print lives on its own page. Stokastic trades Kalshi event markets and holds positions in them, and keeping mechanics and calls on separate pages is how we keep that from bleeding into what you just read.
To be plain about what OddsShopper does publish: our analysts release selections in the sports markets our tools actually cover, on the free expert picks page. Not in economic-data contracts. Different market, different page.
What is left is the frame, and it runs through everything in our weather markets hub, where this same settlement discipline gets worked out day by day: a contract is a priced probability with a named referee and a scheduled clock. Here the referee is one sentence from the BLS, and the clock is a contract fact rather than a rule of thumb, which is why the June report's Thursday release moved the close with it. Look up the date, then look up what closes a minute before it.
