Search for the Trump approval rating and you get a number that describes the past: an average of polls that have already been taken. An exchange offers a different object, a set of contracts that pay $1 or $0 based on where that number lands next, which means the prices are a live forecast you can read the way you would read any probability. This page reports those prices and the machinery behind them, and it takes no side: a reader of any politics should be able to use every sentence here. One piece of that machinery matters more than all the rest, and most people who quote these markets have never checked it. Each contract settles against one specific, named polling average, and it is not the same average across the board. We will get to which one is which, because that single fact decides whether you are reading the board right.
The Quick Answer
Approval-rating markets are exchange contracts that pay $1 if a stated approval question resolves YES and $0 if it does not, and their prices read as probabilities. As of August 11, 2026, the weekly board concentrates its money on a Friday reading in the low 39s, contracts on the approval rating touching 43% at any point this year trade around 10¢ to 12¢, and contracts on it dipping below 37% trade around 65¢. The full contract menu, the exact polling averages each family settles against, and why the how-high and how-low contracts are priced so differently is all below.
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Four Different Questions, Not One
There is no single "approval market." The exchange that lists these, Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange, runs several distinct contract families on the same underlying number, and they ask very different questions:
| Contract Family | The question it asks | Settles against |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly Bands | Where is the approval average at 11:00 AM ET on Friday? | RealClearPolitics average |
| End-Of-Year | Where is the average on December 31? | RealClearPolitics average |
| How High This Year | Does the average touch a level at any point in the window? | VoteHub |
| How Low This Year | Does the average dip below a level at any point in the window? | VoteHub |
| Daily | Where is today's published reading? | VoteHub |
The first two are snapshots: only the value at one stated moment counts, and the path it took to get there is irrelevant. The daily contract is a snapshot too, just of a single day's published reading. The how-high and how-low families are the different animals: they care about the path. A how-high contract asks whether the average ever crosses a line during its window, even for a single published reading, and once it has, no later slide can un-ring the bell. That snapshot-versus-path distinction is the first thing to check before you quote any of these prices, because "approval at 43% by Friday" and "approval touches 43% sometime this year" are wildly different claims that happen to share a headline number.
The second thing to check is the column on the right, and it deserves its own section.
The Average That Settles Is Named In The Rules
An approval market does not settle against "the polls," a vibe, or a cable-news chyron. Each contract names its resolution source in the market rules, and on the current board there are two. The weekly and end-of-year families settle against the RealClearPolitics approval average as published at the stated time. The daily contracts and the annual how-high and how-low families settle against the approval rating as reported by VoteHub, a separate polling aggregator. Same president, same underlying opinion, two different referees.
That matters because polling averages are constructed objects. Aggregators differ on which pollsters they include, how they weight them, and how quickly a new survey moves the line, so two respectable averages routinely sit a point or more apart on the same day. A contract that settles on one of them can resolve differently than an identical-looking contract that settles on the other, and neither outcome is an error. Our weather coverage has a rule that carries over exactly: the settlement source is not the thing itself. A temperature contract settles on one named station, not on the city, and traders who checked the wrong thermometer paid for it. The approval version of that mistake is watching one aggregator while holding a contract that settles on another.
The referee rule.Before quoting any approval-market price, find the resolution source named in that contract's rules, watch that average and no other, and treat every other approval number you see as context. On the current board that means RealClearPolitics for the weekly and end-of-year contracts, and VoteHub for the daily, how-high, and how-low contracts.
A poll aggregator's front page will never tell you any of that; the contract rules will.
Reading The Weekly Ladder
With the referee established, the board itself reads like any band ladder: a stack of narrow ranges that together form the market's probability distribution for one Friday-morning reading. Here is the weekly board as of August 11, 2026, quoting each band's bid and ask in cents at its most recent daily close rather than a live order book, for the reading due that Friday:
| Friday Reading (RCP Average) | Bid / Ask |
|---|---|
| Above 40.5 | 4¢ / 5¢ |
| 40.3 To 40.5 | 2¢ / 3¢ |
| 40.0 To 40.2 | 5¢ / 6¢ |
| 39.7 To 39.9 | 9¢ / 10¢ |
| 39.4 To 39.6 | 23¢ / 24¢ |
| 39.1 To 39.3 | 25¢ / 26¢ |
| 38.8 To 39.0 | 17¢ / 18¢ |
| Below 38.8 | 16¢ / 17¢ |
The two middle bands, 39.1 to 39.3 and 39.4 to 39.6, carry roughly half the probability between them, which is the market saying the average moves slowly and Friday will look a lot like today. Six-tenths of a point covers the crowd's central expectation. Everything above 40 is priced in single digits, and the entire "Above 40.5" tail costs about a nickel: the market treats a half-point rally in three days as a long shot, because a slow-moving average of many polls almost never jumps that far that fast. What a price like 5¢ means as a probability, and what it does not mean, is its own small discipline, covered in what does the price mean.
A Worked Example: One Band, End To End
Take the 25¢ band and run the trade to settlement, ignoring exchange fees for clarity (the fee schedule shaves a little from each side):
| The Trade | The numbers |
|---|---|
| Buy 100 YES At 26¢ (The Ask) On "39.1 To 39.3" | Cost: $26 |
| Friday's Published Average Lands At 39.2 | Settles at $1: collect $100, a $74 profit |
| It Lands At 39.4, One Tick Outside | Settles at $0: the $26 is gone |
| Break-Even Rate | 26%, which is why the price reads as a probability |
Notice what the near-miss row is really saying: this contract is a claim about a three-tenths-wide window on one named average at one named minute. It is not a general opinion about the presidency, and holding it does not require one. The band either catches the number or it does not.
The Ceiling And The Floor Are Different Machines
The annual how-high and how-low families look like mirror images, and mechanically they are: one asks whether the window's running maximum crosses a line, the other whether the running minimum does, both judged against VoteHub's reported number, touch-at-any-point. The current window is stated in the rules as December 11, 2025 through December 31, 2026, slightly longer than the calendar year the "this year" branding suggests. And as of August 11, 2026, the two families are not priced like mirror images:
| Contract (Any Point This Year) | Bid / Ask |
|---|---|
| Approval Above 43% | 10¢ / 12¢ |
| Approval Above 45% | 5.6¢ / 5.7¢ |
| Approval Above 50% | 1.6¢ / 2.5¢ |
| Approval Below 37% | 65¢ / 66¢ |
| Approval Below 35% | 28¢ / 36¢ |
| Approval Below 33% | 16¢ / 17¢ |
Compare across the two halves of that table, because it holds the single most informative pairing on the whole board. With the average sitting in the low 39s, a rally above 43%, a move of less than four points up, trades around 11¢. A slide below 35%, a move of more than four points down, trades around three times that. The market is pricing the larger move down as considerably more likely than the smaller move up. That is not this page's opinion of the presidency, and it is not the exchange's either. The number is the aggregate read of everyone with money in the market on how an approval average behaves from this level: which direction has more room, how sticky public opinion is, and what the calendar between now and December might do to it. If you think that shape is wrong in either direction, these contracts are precisely the instrument for disagreeing, which is what separates a market price from a poll: you can argue with it for money. What actually moves such a price when news lands is a subject of its own, covered in what moves a prediction market.
Two cautions before anyone reads that table too confidently. First, the spreads tell you how firm each number is: the below-35 contract shows a bid of 28¢ against an ask of 36¢, and a gap that wide means the printed level is soft, the book is thin, and a modest order could move it without any news arriving. Second, remember the referee section: these annual contracts settle on VoteHub, so tracking the RealClearPolitics average to handicap them is watching the wrong thermometer.
The Trade Everyone Wants To Make, And What It Risks
Every ladder like this tempts the same play: sell the cheap tail. With approval above 50% priced around 2¢, selling that YES side collects a couple of cents of premium up front, and a trade that wins whenever a long shot stays a long shot can start to feel like the safest thing on the board. The arithmetic says otherwise. Selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar; at the premiums typical in this style of trading, a single loss erases the winnings from about 11 successful trades, and down at a 2¢ tail the ratio is far crueler than that. That asymmetry, not any view on politics, is what makes position sizing the entire game in this style of trading, and it is unforgiving enough that we wrote it up separately in when you sell a long shot, one loss costs many wins. A year is long, news does not schedule itself, and a touch contract only has to be wrong once.
The same honesty is the frame for the whole page: these prices are probabilities, and probabilities are graded on samples, not on single outcomes. A 65¢ contract failing does not prove the market was broken any more than a 2¢ contract cashing proves it was smart, a discipline covered properly in are prediction markets actually accurate.
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Where These Markets Run, And Where We Stand
Approval contracts trade on Kalshi under CFTC oversight, with broad, state-specific availability under federal oversight; the same shelf carries the rest of the Trump-markets universe, several of which we have covered the same way we covered this one: the impeachment markets, the resignation contract, the early-departure board, the $250 bill market, and the Nobel Peace Prize field. Approval prices also show up as an input elsewhere, because election markets lean on approval as one of their base rates.
Disclosure belongs here in the text, not in a footer: Stokastic trades event markets on Kalshi and holds positions in them, we have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi, and we do carry sign-up offers for some other prediction-market and betting platforms. Nothing on this page is a pick, a play, or a lean; we report the board, and the mechanics behind our approach live at our hub on how these markets work. Where our analysts do publish selections is the sports markets we cover every day, on the free expert picks page.
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