Kalshi's Supreme Court Markets: Who, When, And Who Leaves
The Quick Answer
Kalshi's Supreme Court coverage is not one market but three: a 39-name ladder on WHO is confirmed as the next justice, a date ladder on WHEN a confirmation happens, and a nine-justice board on WHO LEAVES the Court. Each ladder follows a different pricing grammar, and a reader who applies the wrong grammar to the wrong ladder will read a price as saying the opposite of what it says. The full boards, the settlement fine print, and the one coherence check that ties all three together are below.
Three Markets, Three Different Questions
Ask a search engine about the next Supreme Court justice and you get punditry. Ask Kalshi and you get three order books, with roughly 949,000 contracts traded across the open boards. That volume is spread across three separate series, and here is what trips people up: they are not three views of one question. They are three different questions, and the structure of each ladder changes what its prices mean.
Here is the thesis of this whole page, worth holding onto: a price only means something once you know how its ladder is built. One of these ladders sums to roughly 100 percent. One must never sum to anything. One sums to a number that is not a probability at all. We will take them in the order a vacancy actually unfolds, which turns out to be the reverse of how Kalshi's traffic finds them, and by the end you will be able to run a coherence check across all three, one worth running before any order goes in.
All prices below were read from the live order books as of August 4, 2026, quoted as bid/ask in cents. They move. Treat them as a snapshot, not a quote.
Who Leaves: The Resignation Board
Everything starts with a seat opening, so start with the series that prices it: "Which justices will resign?" Nine markets, one per sitting justice, 96,584 contracts traded on the open board.
| Justice | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Implied mid |
|---|---|---|
| Samuel Alito | 68 / 72 | ≈70% |
| Clarence Thomas | 50 / 55 | ≈53% |
| John Roberts | 15 / 23 | ≈19% |
| Amy Coney Barrett | 8 / 13 | ≈11% |
| Sonia Sotomayor | 5 / 8.8 | ≈7% |
Top five of the nine markets shown. Implied mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, before fees. Prices move constantly.
The row worth staring at is the top one: the market prices a Samuel Alito resignation announcement at roughly 70% on the mid, which makes it the closest thing to a consensus on this entire subject. That is a report on the price, not on any justice. These contracts price an event; they say nothing about anyone's reasons, health, or plans, and neither do we.
The settlement fine print here does real work. A market resolves Yes if the justice resigns or announces intent to resign before the deadline, so the announcement alone settles it, and the market closes early when that happens. Death does not count: the rules state plainly that death is not resignation, so a seat opening that way resolves these markets No even though a vacancy exists. A trader who assumes "vacancy = Yes" has misread the contract before placing a single order.
Now the structural point. These nine markets are independent binaries. More than one justice can leave, so the prices do not compete for a fixed 100 cents the way a winner-take-all board does. Add up the nine mid prices and you get roughly 175 cents, and that number is not a probability of anything: it is the market's expected count of Yes resolutions, a bit under two announced departures. Force that sum toward 100 percent, the way you would de-vig a sportsbook market, and you have inverted the board's meaning.
When: The Confirmation Date Ladder
A resignation only matters to the other two series once it produces a confirmed replacement, and that bridge is the second series: "New Supreme Court justice confirmed?" Five date rungs, 193,098 contracts on the open board.
| Rung | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Implied mid |
|---|---|---|
| Before Oct 1, 2026 | 1 / 2 | ≈2% |
| Before 2027 | 12 / 13 | ≈13% |
| Before June 2027 | 16 / 24 | ≈20% |
| Before 2028 | 63 / 69 | ≈66% |
| Before Jan 21, 2029 | 74 / 82 | ≈78% |
Implied mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, before fees. Prices move constantly.
This ladder is nested. "Before 2028" contains every world in which "Before 2027" happens, so prices must rise as you move down the rungs, and they do: 1, 12, 16, 63, 74 on the bid side. The rungs will never sum to 100, and they are not supposed to. Anyone who adds them up, or reads the 74-cent rung as "74 percent this year," has applied the wrong grammar.
A Worked Example: The 2027 Price The Ladder Never Lists
Here is the worked example that makes nested ladders click. Take the bid on "Before 2028" (63 cents) and subtract the ask on "Before 2027" (13 cents). That 50-cent gap is, to the width of the spreads, the market's price on the confirmation landing during calendar 2027 specifically — roughly a 50% shot the ladder never lists as its own rung, built by subtraction. Every nested date ladder on every exchange works this way, and once you can do it here you can do it on Kalshi's economic and election boards too.
The steepness tells its own story. The market treats a confirmation in the next few months as a long shot, prices the picture near a coin flip and better out toward the deadline rungs, and the biggest single jump sits between mid-2027 and end-of-2027. Read that shape as the ladder saying most of the probability lives in the back half of the window.
Who: The 39-Name Ladder
Only after a seat opens and a nomination survives the Senate does the flagship series pay anyone: "Who will be the next Supreme Court justice?" Thirty-nine active names and 659,496 contracts on the open board, the highest-volume of the three.
| Candidate | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Implied mid |
|---|---|---|
| Andrew Oldham | 17 / 19 | ≈18% |
| James Ho | 16 / 18 | ≈17% |
| Aileen Cannon | 9.9 / 12 | ≈11% |
| D. John Sauer | 8 / 9 | ≈8.5% |
| Amul Thapar | 5.7 / 11 | ≈8% |
| Ron DeSantis | 5 / 6 | ≈5.5% |
Top six of the 39 names shown. Implied mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, before fees. Prices move constantly.
The most instructive row is not the leader. It is Amul Thapar at 5.7 bid, 11 ask. That spread is nearly as wide as the price itself, which tells you how thin the book behind a single rung can be: the last trade printed at 6.2 cents, and "the price" is really a negotiation range. On rungs like this, how you enter matters as much as what you think, because crossing a spread that wide hands away more than most opinions are worth. Thin books are their own subject, and this ladder is full of them below the top handful of names.
Structurally this ladder is the opposite of the resignation board. Only one person can be the first confirmed, so the 39 names are mutually exclusive, and their mid prices should sum toward 100 percent plus the overround. Live, the mids sum to about 102 cents, right where a partition should sit, with the couple of cents above 100 being the true overround. The bid side sums to 84 and the ask side to nearly 120; that wider gap is the cost of crossing spreads on a thin board, not a statement about the race. If you want the cent prices as American odds, the conversion is mechanical.
One honest subtlety: every name on this ladder resolves No if no confirmation happens before the deadline, or if someone not listed is confirmed first. So the sum of these prices carries the "does a confirmation happen at all" question inside it, which is exactly the question the date ladder prices directly. This thread ties the three boards together, so pull on it.
The Coherence Check: Reading All Three Together
Line the three series up and the interlock is mechanical. A justice announces a departure and the resignation board settles its market. A seat is open. The date ladder now prices how fast the Senate converts the vacancy into a confirmation. The 39-name ladder prices who that confirmation names. A vacancy must happen before a confirmation can, so the resignation board is upstream of everything, the date ladder is the bridge, and the who-ladder is the destination.
The ordering hands you a sanity test no single board can. The 39-name board's total, read on mids, hovers near 102 cents while the date ladder's final rung asks 82. Perfect reconciliation is not the point; spreads this wide on books this thin mean the mids are soft. The point is that the three boards are pricing overlapping pieces of one event, so when one of them lurches, the other two tell you whether it was information or just a thin book getting pushed. A reader who checks one ladder against the others is doing something most of the volume on these boards never does.
And remember the callback from the resignation board: its 175-cent sum is an expected count, not a probability, so it can never be reconciled against the other two by addition. Each ladder keeps its own grammar even when they share a story.
What Settles These, Exactly
Settlement language is where casual readers lose money, so be precise. The who-ladder and the date ladder settle on confirmation by the Senate, full stop. A nomination does not settle anything. A nominee who is announced, dominates a news cycle, and then withdraws before the floor vote leaves both boards exactly where they were. The who-ladder's rules name "the first person confirmed by the Senate" before the deadline, so being nominated first and confirmed second pays nothing.
The resignation board settles on the announcement of intent, not the final day in the robe, and death resolves it No. If an outcome ever looks ambiguous, Kalshi has a documented process for disputed settlements, but the plain text of these rules is unusually clean.
The Risk Shape, Before You Touch Any Of This
These boards invite one bad trade in particular: selling the long tail. Run the numbers on the 39-name ladder itself. The six names in the table above account for roughly 68 of the board's ~102 mid-cents, which leaves about 34 cents spread across the other 33 rungs, a tail of contracts priced in pennies that looks like free premium to a seller. Understand the asymmetry before touching it: selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar, and roughly speaking one loss erases the premiums from about 16 wins. The arithmetic, not anyone's hit rate, is what makes position sizing the whole game, and on a subject where a single announcement can reprice every rung of all three boards at once, the tail is where that lesson gets taught. What a price does and does not promise is worth internalizing before the first order, and so is what trading actually costs.
We trade prediction markets ourselves and we do not publish performance claims, so take this section as the lesson we keep re-learning at our own expense.
Where You Can Trade These
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange, and these contracts carry broad, state-specific availability under federal oversight. Regulated status is the reason a market listing sitting justices by name can exist at all in the United States; the legal landscape for prediction markets and what Kalshi's regulation actually means are both covered in depth elsewhere on this site. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi, so none of the above is a sales pitch; it is a description of the most interesting three-board structure currently listed anywhere.
If the way these ladders interlock is the part that grabbed you, the same mechanics run through every market class on the exchange, and our standing guide to how these markets work walks the machinery with a live board attached. And if you came here from the sports side and want humans making actual calls, our free expert picks today are where our analysts do publish sides.
FAQ: Kalshi Supreme Court Markets
What does a Kalshi Supreme Court price mean? A price is the cost in cents of a contract that pays $1 if the event happens. A 17-cent ask on a name means the market will sell you that outcome at an implied 17%, before fees and spread. Whether that reads as a probability depends on the ladder's structure, which is the subject of this page.
Do the next-justice prices sum to 100 percent? Roughly, on mid prices, because only one person can be confirmed first. The date ladder does not and must not sum to 100, because its rungs contain each other. The resignation board's sum is an expected count of departures, not a probability.
Does a nomination settle the market? No. Both the who-ladder and the date ladder settle only on confirmation by the Senate. A withdrawn or failed nomination settles nothing.
Does a death open the resignation market? No. The rules state death is not resignation, so those markets resolve No even though the seat is vacant. The confirmation ladders, meanwhile, do not care how the seat opened.
Is any of this a recommendation? No. We publish the market, not picks. These ladders list real people in live public roles; the prices are reportable facts, and nothing here speculates about any individual's conduct, intentions, health, or fitness.
Disclosure
Stokastic trades prediction markets and holds positions in them; assume we may have an interest in any market we cover. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi. Kalshi event contracts are CFTC-regulated event derivatives traded on a designated contract market, not sportsbook wagers, and they can lose their full value. 18+. Availability is broad, state-specific, and subject to federal oversight; eligibility requirements apply. Nothing on this page is trading, legal, or financial advice.
