The short answer to when Kalshi weather markets close is that each contract stays open until after its target date has fully passed in the city's own local time, then settles against that day's official reading. The longer and more useful answer is that the closing bell is the least interesting hour on the clock. A temperature contract is not one thing you can size up at any moment; it is a different proposition at 8 a.m. than it is at 3 p.m., because the outcome starts becoming knowable long before the market lets you stop trading it. By the end of this page you will be able to look at any weather market and say which hour of its life you are actually trading. That, far more than the close time, is what decides whether the price in front of you is a real question or an answer in disguise.
The Quick Answer
Kalshi weather contracts close after their target date ends in the settlement city's local time zone, so a New York high and a Denver high on the "same" calendar day do not close at the same clock moment. But the close time is not when the market gets decided. A daily high is a running maximum that is largely locked by mid-afternoon; an overnight low is a running minimum settled before dawn. So the answer arrives hours before the market closes, and the same contract is a wide-open guess in the morning and a near-formality by late afternoon. Below: exactly when these markets open and close, when the outcome turns knowable, why that gap matters, and the risk shape you have to understand before you trade any of it.
What Actually Settles, SO The Clock Makes Sense
Start with the instrument, because the timing only means something once you know what is being timed. A Kalshi weather contract is a CFTC-regulated event derivative: a city's daily high or overnight low is split into temperature bands, each band trades as its own yes/no contract, and every one settles to $1 or $0 against the official reading from a single named weather station. You can take either side. If any of that is new, how prediction market contracts work and how a Kalshi price reads as a probability are the two pages to read first, and the full ladder of bands gets its own treatment in how to read a temperature band ladder.
The word that matters here is official. The contract does not settle on the weather, it settles on a specific station's logged number, and the settlement station is not always the airport you would guess: Houston's contracts settle on Hobby, not Bush Intercontinental. The city temperature on your phone's weather app is a different number than the one that grades the market. Hold onto that, because it is the same idea that governs the clock: the market runs on one station's official day, in that station's local time, not on your sense of when "today" is over.
When These Markets Open And Close
Now the timing itself. A weather market for a given date opens well ahead of that date and stays open through it, closing only after the target day has fully elapsed in the settlement city's local time zone and the official reading is in hand. The contract does not close at the afternoon peak or at midnight your time; it closes on the city's own clock, once its day is genuinely done.
That local-time detail is the part people get wrong, and it is the first must-know on this page: close times vary by city time zone. A Miami daily-high market and a Phoenix daily-high market for the same calendar date do not close at the same instant, because 11:59 p.m. in Miami is three hours of trading before 11:59 p.m. in Phoenix, and Phoenix does not observe daylight saving time, which quietly widens the gap for part of the year. If you trade more than one city, you are juggling several different clocks at once, and assuming they all close together is how people find a market already settled when they meant to trade it, or still open when they assumed it was graded.
The practical takeaway is simple: never reason about a weather market in your own time zone. Reason about it in the city's. The question is always "how much of that city's day is left to run," and the answer to that question is what actually prices the contract.
When The Outcome Becomes Knowable
Which brings us to the more important clock, the one that decides the trade long before the close does. This is the second must-know: the outcome becomes knowable well before the market closes. A daily high is a running maximum; as the day heats up, the observed max can only climb toward the peak and never retreat. So by late morning the day's running high is already a hard floor under the market, and by mid-afternoon, once the peak has passed, the question is largely answered while the contract still has hours left to trade. An overnight low is the mirror image: a running minimum that can only fall, settled pre-dawn, so a partial reading there is a ceiling instead of a floor. The two books resolve at opposite ends of the day, a split worth its own read in overnight lows and afternoon highs are two different games.
How fast that knowability arrives is not the same everywhere, and this is where climate does the work. A morning temperature tells you very little about where a humid Gulf Coast city's high will land, because those cities barely stray from their scripted afternoon; the answer is nearly written by lunchtime. A dry desert or mountain city can still swing hard into the evening, so its market stays genuinely live much later. Same instrument, same clock, completely different pace of resolution.
Here is the whole point of the page in one table: one contract, four moments in its life.
| Moment In The City's Day | What is observed so far | What the price is really tracking |
|---|---|---|
| Overnight / Early Morning | A running low; the high has not started | Almost pure forecast; the day is wide open |
| Late Morning | A firm floor under the daily high | Forecast, narrowed by the floor that is now locked in |
| Mid-Afternoon (Around The Peak) | The high is at or near its max | Mostly the observation, with little day left to run |
| Evening, Before Close | The official high is effectively set | The answer, with the contract still nominally open |
The row that matters most is the last one. That evening price, sitting there hours after the peak with the market still open, looks like a live quote and is really a settled outcome wearing a live quote's clothes. Reading it and admiring how "right" the market was is not analysis; the observations already arrived. Recognizing which of those four rows you are standing in is the entire skill this article is trying to hand you.
Why The Gap Between "Known" And "Closed" Matters
That gap — hours of open trading after the answer is essentially in — is the thing that makes weather markets behave unlike a game. A sporting event has a kickoff and a final whistle; the price before kickoff is a genuine forecast and the price at the whistle is the result. Weather has neither. It drifts continuously toward the answer as observations arrive, so there is no single closing line that represents a fair pre-outcome price. The close is just the last tick on a slow reveal that started at dawn.
That has a consequence most newcomers miss, and it is the same reason there is no easy way to grade yourself here. In sports betting you can check whether you beat the closing line. In a weather market the "closing" price is mostly the outcome in disguise, so beating it means nothing, because you cannot grade a forecast against the answer key. A weather approach can only be judged on realized settlement rates over a large sample, which takes far longer than people expect. It is worth saying plainly because it cuts the other way too: a careful newcomer is not structurally behind here. There is no injury report and no locker-room leak. Everyone is reading the same publicly funded forecast, built on the same public weather data these markets settle on.
Trading Across The Window: Execution Is A Clock Decision Too
If the answer arrives slowly, then when you place an order is as much a choice as what you place. In a market where the whole question is worth a few cents, crossing the spread to get filled instantly can cost more than the view is worth. An instant fill usually means you paid for it. Resting an order and waiting for someone to come to you is a structural choice in these markets, not a personality trait — which order type you use is a decision about where on the clock you are willing to transact, and the fee schedule can quietly reshape a thin edge on top of that.
The clock and the execution feed each other. Early in the day the spread is wide because the outcome is uncertain and makers demand room; late in the day it narrows because there is little left to be uncertain about, but by then you are often paying for a result that has already happened. The stretch I keep coming back to when I explain these markets is mid-morning, after the overnight low is in but before the afternoon high is decided: it is the one part of the day where a real question is still on the table and there is still room to rest an order into it. That is an observation about the clock, not a trading system, and it lands at a different clock time in every city.
The Risk Shape You Have To Understand First
None of the timing matters if you get the payoff shape wrong, so this is the part no one should skip. The tempting move in a weather market is to sell an outcome that looks nearly impossible and collect the small premium. The arithmetic is unforgiving: selling an unlikely outcome collects a few cents and risks most of a dollar, so roughly speaking, one loss erases the premiums from about 15 wins. That asymmetry — not the hit rate — is what makes position sizing the whole game, and it means a single red day that wipes out a green stretch is the shape of the strategy working as designed, not a malfunction. A reader who copies this style without understanding that math is exactly the person we worry about, which is why the asymmetric payoff gets its own page.
The clock makes that risk sneakier, not safer. Because positions in 15 different cities are not 15 independent bets if one air mass is sitting over all of them, a single heat dome can move every one of your books the same direction on the same afternoon — the correlated version of that one-loss-erases-fifteen math, all landing at once. Spreading across climate types and across both highs and lows is the only real protection; stacking more cities under the same weather system is not diversification, it is the same bet written 15 times.
What Our Own Log Says About The Clock
We say all of this from the selling side of the table. Stokastic trades these markets and holds positions in them, and where a settled position is described in this series, we were the seller. You will not find a win-loss tally or a P&L figure on this page, and that is deliberate: this URL is permanent, and any number printed here would freeze the moment it published while the real log kept moving. What we can tell you is the shape. The log is short, it sits in the red so far, and it is far too small to confirm the approach — or to rule it out. Settling a question this fine takes a very large sample, and we are nowhere near it. The Kalshi weather markets hub carries the current figures, losses included, rebuilt through the day; this page carries the reasoning, and nothing in this cluster is a pick.
More on this: Kalshi Weather Markets: The Live Hub · Kalshi Weather Trading: '100 In Phoenix' Isn't A Trade · What A Kalshi Temperature Contract Actually Is · Kalshi High Temp Vs Low Temp Markets: Two Different Games · The Settlement Station Is Not The City \u2014 And It Costs People Money
Read The Clock First, Then Decide If There's A Trade
So go back to where we started. The close time is real — after the target date ends, in the city's own time zone, on several different clocks if you trade several cities — but it is the quietest hour on the dial. The loud hours are earlier: dawn, when the market is nearly pure forecast; late morning, when a floor snaps under the daily high; mid-afternoon, when the peak passes and the question is mostly answered while the contract keeps trading. Learn to place any weather market on that clock and you will know, before you look at the price, whether you are trading a genuine question or paying for an answer that already arrived. That is the same probability-first muscle that makes any market readable, prediction or otherwise. If you would rather watch that thinking applied to games you already follow while you get comfortable with it, our free expert picks are a no-cost place to see it in action.
