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 968,000 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 toward 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 17, 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, about 101,300 contracts traded on the open board.
| Justice | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Mid, cents |
|---|---|---|
| Samuel Alito | 53 / 57 | ≈55 |
| Clarence Thomas | 49 / 52 | ≈51 |
| John Roberts | 15 / 22 | ≈19 |
| Sonia Sotomayor | 8 / 8.9 | ≈8 |
| Amy Coney Barrett | 2 / 7 | ≈4.5 |
Top five of the nine markets shown. Mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, in cents, before fees. Prices move constantly.
The row worth staring at is the top one: the market prices a Samuel Alito resignation announcement at roughly 55 cents 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 and will not resolve a market to Yes, so a seat can open that way while these contracts run on to their deadline unpaid. 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 153 cents, and that number is not a probability of anything: it is the market's expected count of Yes resolutions, about one and a half 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, about 199,900 contracts on the open board.
| Rung | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Mid, cents |
|---|---|---|
| Before Oct 1, 2026 | 0 / 1 | ≈0.5 |
| Before 2027 | 9.9 / 10 | ≈10 |
| Before June 2027 | 12 / 24 | ≈18 |
| Before 2028 | 63 / 86 | ≈75† |
| Before Jan 21, 2029 | 3 / 82 | thin book† |
Mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, in cents, before fees. Prices move constantly. †The two deepest rungs trade thin right now — the wide spread means the mid is soft, and the last trade on the far rung printed near 60 cents.
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 on the liquid rungs they do: 0, 9.9, 12, 63 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 63-cent rung as "63 percent this year," has applied the wrong grammar. One rung does look out of order: the far "Before Jan 21, 2029" rung sits at a 3-bid, below the 63-bid on a rung it contains, which on paper violates the rule you just learned. There is no way to actually trade that inversion — the book behind it is 3 bid against 82 ask, with under a thousand contracts ever traded — so read it as a symptom of a thin book on a distant deadline, not as information. It is also a preview of the liquidity problem the next section makes concrete.
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" (10 cents). That 53-cent gap is the conservative, actually-tradeable read on the confirmation landing during calendar 2027 specifically — roughly a coin flip the ladder never lists as its own rung, built by subtraction. Treat it as a floor rather than a precise price: the "Before 2028" book alone is 23 cents wide, so a mid-to-mid version of the same arithmetic lands in the mid-60s. 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, then jumps hard toward the deadline rungs, and the biggest single step sits between mid-2027 and end-of-2027 — 12 cents up to 63. Read that shape as the ladder saying most of the probability lives in the back half of the window, not the front.
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 about 667,000 contracts on the open board, the highest-volume of the three.
| Candidate | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Mid, cents |
|---|---|---|
| James Ho | 14 / 15 | ≈14.5 |
| Andrew Oldham | 12 / 16 | ≈14 |
| Amul Thapar | 9.0 / 9.1 | ≈9 |
| D. John Sauer | 8 / 10 | ≈9 |
| Aileen Cannon | 6.1 / 11 | ≈8.5 |
| Patrick Bumatay | 5.0 / 5.1 | ≈5 |
Top six by mid price of the 39 names shown. Mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, in cents, before fees. Prices move constantly.
The most instructive row is not the leader. It is Aileen Cannon at a 6.1 bid against an 11 ask. That ask is nearly double the bid, which tells you how thin the book behind a single rung can be: "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 — James Ho quotes a penny wide at the top, and the spreads fan out fast underneath, Oldham's four-cent book and Cannon's included.
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 buying every one of them should cost roughly a dollar plus the overround. Live, that is exactly what you see on the ask side: pay every name's ask and you spend about 108 cents, the few cents over a dollar being the market's built-in margin. The mids sum lower, near 92 cents, and the bid side only to about 77, because the bids under the top handful of names are soft. That gap between 77 on the bid and 108 on the ask is the price of thin books, 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 one rule that ties it together: the resignation board sums to an expected count — about 153 cents, roughly one and a half departures. The date ladder is nested and must never sum to 100. The 39-name board is a partition that costs about a dollar plus overround to buy outright. Same subject, three different grammars; mix them up and the price tells you the opposite of what it means.
The ordering hands you a sanity test no single board can. The 39-name board's total, read on mids, hovers near 92 cents — the market's rough read on some listed name being the next confirmed justice. The natural thing to check it against would be the date ladder's terminal rung, "Before Jan 21, 2029," because both series run to the same deadline and that rung prices a confirmation happening at all before it. But today that rung is the thin one — a 3 bid against an 82 offer, last trade near 60 — so it is currently too illiquid to serve as the check, and no liquid cross-series version of it exists right now. 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 153-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 settlement rule in one line: confirmation ladders pay on a Senate confirmation vote, nothing earlier; the resignation board pays on an announcement of intent, and death settles it No. Every misread of these boards we have seen starts with skipping one of those three clauses.
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 60 of the board's ~92 mid-cents, which leaves about 32 cents spread across the other 33 rungs — a tail of contracts averaging under a cent apiece 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. Sell a single-digit name around 8 cents and one loss erases the premiums from about 11 wins; sell down in that penny tail, where each rung fetches under a cent, and one loss can erase the premiums from dozens of them. 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 hold positions in them, and we do not publish performance figures — no track record, no hit rate. Any such record on a book this young would be far too small a sample to prove or disprove anything, so treat this section as the lesson we keep re-learning at our own expense; our prediction-markets hub, rebuilt through the day, is where we keep our live trading log.
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. This page stays deliberately on the report-the-contract side of the line — no sides, no leans, on a board that lists sitting justices. If you want the other thing, humans publishing actual calls, that lives with our sports analysts at free expert picks today, a different discipline for a different kind of market.
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 out one dollar if the event happens. A 15-cent ask on a name means the market will sell you that outcome for 15 cents on the dollar, before fees and spread. Whether that price 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? The asks sum to about 108 cents — a dollar plus overround — while the mids land near 92 and the bids near 77, because only one person can be confirmed first; you see the partition cleanest on the ask side. 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 and will not resolve a market to Yes; only an actual resignation or an announced intent to resign before the deadline pays. 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.
