Ask most people what you can bet on Kalshi and you get the two answers that made the headlines: elections and sports. Both are on the board, but they are a fraction of it. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange that lists event contracts on almost any public number that gets measured and published, which means you can take a position on tomorrow's high temperature in New York, this week's national average gas price, how many people the TSA screens in a week, and the price of a dozen eggs.
The useful way to sort all of that is not by subject. It is by clock. Every Kalshi contract settles against a specific reading on a specific schedule, and how often a market settles changes what trading it feels like: a daily market tells you whether you were right by tomorrow morning, an annual market makes you wait most of a year to find out. So this page organizes the whole catalog by settlement cadence, from daily to one-off. Two habits matter more than which category you pick — checking whether a market has actually traded, and knowing what a resting order does and does not promise — and both get their own sections before the close.
The Quick Answer
You can bet on far more than elections and sports on Kalshi: the exchange lists event contracts on weather, economic data like inflation and jobs numbers, gas and grocery prices, TSA passenger counts, crypto prices, entertainment outcomes like the Oscars and streaming charts, tech events like product releases and IPOs, and politics beyond the ballot box. Every contract settles to $1 or $0 against a published number on a known schedule, and every price reads roughly as a probability: a 75-cent contract is the crowd pricing about a 75% chance. The full category-by-category board, sorted by how often each one settles, is below.
One note before the tour, because this whole page is about reading prices, and reading prices is OddsShopper's entire job. New here? OddsShopper shows you every major sportsbook's odds side by side and flags where the price sits in your favor — free for your first 7 days, with the code EVERYMARKET20 good for 20% off your first payment of OS Pro if you subscribe.
The Categories Nobody Expects
Start with the part that surprises people, because it reframes what the platform is. Kalshi runs markets on the national average price of gas, settled against the AAA reading that updates every day. It runs a weekly market on how many travelers the TSA screens at airport checkpoints, settled against the agency's own published counts. It runs markets on grocery-level economic data, including the price of eggs, settled against official price readings named in each contract's terms. None of that is a novelty sideshow; these are ordinary contracts on the same exchange, priced in cents and settled the same way as everything else.
The pattern behind the surprise is the thing to keep: if a credible institution publishes a number on a schedule, that number can carry a market. The government publishes inflation and payrolls, AAA publishes pump prices, the TSA publishes checkpoint counts, Netflix publishes a weekly chart, a weather station publishes a daily high. Kalshi's catalog is best understood as a directory of published numbers, and that is why it keeps growing sideways into places sportsbooks never go. It is also why the count of markets on any given day is not worth memorizing; series get added and retired constantly, so the shape of the board matters more than its size.
The Fastest Clocks: Daily Weather And Hourly Crypto
The fast end of the exchange is the daily-and-under tier, and weather is its anchor tenant. Kalshi lists the daily high and low temperature in a set of major cities, each settled against one named weather station's official reading. A contract on "NYC high above 90°" priced at 30 cents is the market saying roughly a 30% chance, and by the next morning, once the station's official reading is in, it is worth $1 or nothing. Our standing Kalshi weather markets hub covers how those contracts work in detail, and the temperature ladder explainer shows why a city's bands are really one probability distribution wearing several prices.
Crypto runs on a clock even faster: Kalshi lists hourly above/below and range markets on where Bitcoin and Ethereum trade, settled against crypto price feeds. The appeal of the daily cadence is honest feedback; you find out quickly, cheaply and repeatedly whether your read of a number is any good. The cost is that the same speed compounds mistakes just as efficiently, a point the risk section below makes concrete.
The Weekly Series: Gas, TSA Lines And The Netflix Chart
One step slower and you hit the weekly series, which is where the everyday-life markets live. The weekly gas contract settles against the AAA national average on a set date. The TSA market settles against a week of checkpoint screening counts. Entertainment joins here too: Kalshi has listed weekly markets on streaming charts, such as which show tops Netflix's ranking, and in season, reality-TV eliminations have settled week by week as episodes air.
Weekly markets share a useful property: the underlying number drifts in public view all week. Gas prices update daily on the way to the weekly settlement date, and TSA counts post daily on the way to a weekly total, so the market's price moves as the evidence accumulates rather than jumping once at the end. Watching one weekly series for a few cycles, without trading it, is about the best free education the platform offers. That logic extends to reading a practiced handicapper's reasoning before you risk anything of your own — our free expert picks post real, argued reads every day at no cost.
Monthly Markets: The Economic Calendar
Slower again, and you reach the cadence built around government statistics. The inflation markets settle against the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly CPI release. The jobs markets settle against the monthly payrolls report. Gas has a monthly series alongside its weekly one. The grocery-level markets are the exception that proves the rule: the egg-price contracts settle against official price readings on their own custom schedule, set by each contract's terms rather than a tidy monthly slot, which is a reminder that cadence is a property of the contract, not the subject. This is also the neighborhood of the Federal Reserve markets, which settle on the Fed's own schedule of eight meetings a year, plus season-long contracts like how many rate cuts happen in a year.
So yes, you can bet on the economy in a direct, literal sense, and this cadence is where the exchange looks least like a sportsbook and most like a financial market. The people on the other side of a CPI contract are often hedging or expressing a macro view, not sweating a parlay. If you want to understand why a federally regulated derivatives exchange is allowed to list markets a sportsbook never could, the regulation explainer covers what CFTC oversight actually means; the short version is one federal registration instead of 50 separate state licenses — though a handful of states are actively contesting how far that reaches, so check that Kalshi is live where you are.
Annual And Season-Long Markets: The Slow Burn
The annual cadence is where the famous categories live. Elections settle when votes are counted. The Oscars settle on one envelope. Sports championships settle when a season ends, and Kalshi lists those alongside win totals and playoff races; the mechanics of trading sports on an exchange differ enough from a sportsbook that they earn their own guide, how sports contracts work on Kalshi, and this page will not duplicate it. One habit transfers in both directions, though: never accept the first price you see. On the sportsbook side that means shopping the number across every major book on the live odds screen; on the exchange side, as the second half of this page argues, it means treating the posted quote as an opening offer, not a verdict. The same slow clock carries the year-defined economic questions: whether a recession starts by year-end, how high Bitcoin gets within the year, the highest gas price of the year.
Annual markets trade differently because the wait is the point. A contract might sit near 60 cents, a 60% read, for months, drift on news, and only converge to $1 or $0 at the deadline. You are not just betting on the outcome; you are choosing to have money parked in a question for a long time, and plenty of traders enter and exit in the middle without ever holding to settlement.
Questions That Settle Once And Disappear
Finally there are contracts with no cadence at all, written on single events: whether GTA 6 ships by its announced date, what counts as an OpenAI IPO, whether MLB locks out its players in 2027. These markets exist, settle once, and disappear. They are also where reading the fine print matters most, because a one-off question lives or dies on its exact settlement definition; "IPO" or "delay" means whatever the contract terms say it means, not what a headline says.
Here is the whole board in one view:
| Cadence | Example markets | What settles them |
|---|---|---|
| Daily / Intraday | City high/low temperatures, hourly crypto prices | A named weather station's reading; crypto price feeds |
| Weekly | National average gas price, TSA passenger counts, Netflix's top show | AAA's daily average; TSA checkpoint data; the published chart |
| Monthly | CPI inflation, jobs report, the monthly gas average | Government and industry releases on their calendars |
| Annual / Season | Elections, Oscars, sports titles, recession-by-year-end, Bitcoin's yearly high | Vote counts, the envelope, final standings, official data |
| Custom | Egg and grocery prices | Official price readings on each contract's own schedule |
| One-Off | GTA 6 release, OpenAI IPO, an MLB lockout | The exact event defined in that contract's terms |
The row worth rereading is the weekly one. Nothing on it requires expertise a normal person lacks: everyone who drives past a gas station or stands in an airport line has intuitions about those numbers, and the settlement source is public either way. That is precisely why the rest of this page matters, because the categories are the easy part. What follows is the part that costs newcomers money.
A Listed Market Is Not A Traded Market
Every category above mixes markets of very different ages, and age shows up right on the screen. The same contract behaves differently in its first hours than it does months in: early, it can be quoted tens of cents wide with almost nothing traded yet; seasoned, it trades a few cents wide with thousands of contracts already traded. Both look like markets. Only one of them has a crowd in it yet. For a sense of what seasoned looks like, when we checked the NFL "will this team make the playoffs" series in mid-August 2026, all 32 team markets were quoted one to three cents wide, with lifetime volume running from about 2,200 contracts on the quietest team to 45,300 on the busiest.
The wide quote is not the venue misbehaving. When a contract lists, a market maker will typically post cautious prices on both sides before anyone has formed a view, which is normal and responsible; someone has to quote first, and quoting a brand-new question tightly would be reckless. Posting those first prices is literally the market maker's job. But it means the posted price of a barely-traded market carries very little information, and paying a spread that wide can mean giving up a large slice of the contract's entire one-dollar range just to get in and out. The gap closes as trading arrives: the same contract that opens wide and quiet tends to tighten steadily as volume builds, until the quote reflects a real consensus.
The defense is one glance: look at volume, not just the quote. Every Kalshi market displays how much it has traded, and that number tells you whether a price is a crowd's opinion or a placeholder. Liquidity is the thing that decides whether you can actually trade, and it varies far more across this catalog than the tidy category list above suggests.
A Price You Can See Is Not A Trade You Have Made
The second habit is the quieter one. On an exchange, you do not have to pay the posted price; you can rest a limit order at your own number and wait for someone to meet it, and on a first-hours listing quoted tens of cents wide, resting is the only sane way in. Resting is usually the disciplined choice everywhere else too, and it comes with a catch worth knowing on day one: a resting order is not a trade. It can sit unfilled for an hour, a day, or forever, and how long you leave it up changes everything about what you end up owning and at what average price. The market can move to your number and fill you exactly when the news has turned against you, or never come close and leave you flat while your read was right.
A Worked Example: Resting An Order On A New Listing
Walk one order through the kind of first-hours listing from two sections ago. Suppose it is quoted 20 cents bid, 67 cents offered — a 47-cent-wide canyon: the ask implies a 67% chance, the bid a 20% one, and the truth is somewhere in between. Say your own read sits in the lower half of that canyon, around 30 cents. Taking the 67-cent offer instantly means paying the entire width of the spread, relative to where you could sell it back, just to be filled right now; the instant fill is a cost, not a courtesy. Resting a buy at your own 30 cents is the execution alternative, and it converts your problem from price to patience: you now own a decision about how long that order stands, what news would make you cancel it, and whether a fill at your price would still be welcome after the move that produced it. None of that appears on the screen. The order types page walks through the mechanics, and the fee schedule explains the other quiet cost, which peaks near coin-flip prices and shrinks toward the extremes.
Never take the first price you're shown.That habit is the entire OddsShopper product: OS Pro compares the odds at every major sportsbook and flags the bets priced in your favor, automatically — the same shopping this page just walked you through by hand. The free week trial costs nothing, and the code EVERYMARKET20 takes 20% off your first payment.
The Shape Of The Risk, Before You Pick A Category
One more thing belongs on a catalog page, because the catalog makes every one of these trades reachable in two taps. A contract's price is roughly the market's probability: 4 cents behaves like a 4% chance, 50 cents like a 50% coin flip, 97 cents like a 97% near-certainty. That has a sharp consequence for anyone drawn to the high-priced side of the board. Selling an unlikely outcome, or holding its near-certain opposite, collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar: hold contracts priced at 92 cents, risking 92 to make 8, and one loss erases the premiums from about 11 wins — and the cheaper the premium you collect, the worse that arithmetic gets. A long green streak followed by one red day that wipes it out is that trade behaving exactly as designed, which is why position sizing, not category selection, is the whole game.
Full disclosure on our end: Stokastic trades these markets and holds positions in them, and we deliberately publish no performance figures, no positions, and no picks in pieces like this one. Nothing here is a recommendation about any market on the board.
More on this: Can You Lose More Than You Put In On Kalshi? Event Contracts Vs Perps · Can You Trust Kalshi? Fees, Spreads, And Who Actually Wins · What Can You Trade On Kalshi In California? The Live Board · Can You Take Both Sides On Kalshi? · Kalshi NOT For Dummies: Five Advanced Lessons On Prediction Markets You
The Board Is Bigger Than The Headlines
So, what can you bet on Kalshi? Nearly any public number with a publication schedule. The elections-and-sports reputation undersells it badly; the market on the price of eggs is, in structural terms, the same instrument as the market on the presidency, just on a faster clock. Sort the board by cadence, check volume before trusting any quote, and treat a resting order as a decision you are still making, and the whole catalog opens up from there.
These markets force probability-first thinking on you, and that skill transfers straight to sportsbooks, where the same number is posted at a dozen different prices every night. Finding the best of those prices is what OddsShopper Pro does all day. The first 7 days are free, and EVERYMARKET20 takes 20% off your first payment if you stay.
