Zohran Mamdani: Every Market On The NYC Mayor, And What They Price
The Quick Answer
Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor of New York City, and regulated prediction markets currently list dozens of separately traded contracts on his mayoralty and public profile. Not one "how is he doing" question: dozens of specific ones. There is a contract on the rent freeze taking legal effect, a contract on a city-owned grocery store opening its doors, four different deadlines for a corporate tax increase, a ladder on how long he stays in office, and a contract on whether he becomes president before 2045. As of this writing (August 11, 2026), the rent-freeze contract is the highest-priced policy question on the board, trading in the mid-80-cent range just ahead of the grocery-store pledge, while every contract that requires a new law before 2027 quotes at or below 15 cents. The full board, promise by promise, and the gap between its priciest pledge and its cheapest question, are below.
Who Is Zohran Mamdani, And Why Is There A Whole Board On Him?
The biographical facts are quick. Mamdani won the November 2025 New York City mayoral election and took office at the start of 2026. Before that he was a New York State Assembly member representing Astoria, Queens, and he ran for mayor as a democratic socialist with a campaign built around a short list of specific pledges: freeze the rent, open city-owned grocery stores, make buses fast and free, deliver universal childcare, and raise taxes on high incomes.
That list is the reason the board exists. An event exchange cannot list a market on whether a politician is good at the job, because no document settles that question. It can list contracts built around specific, checkable settlement conditions with deadlines, and a campaign that runs on checkable pledges hands an exchange its catalog. So instead of one market on Mamdani, the exchange lists a separate contract on nearly every promise, each with its own settlement rules and its own deadline, each paying $1 if the thing happens and $0 if it does not. If event contracts are new to you, our live markets hub, where we track these boards day to day with the temperature markets as the worked example, covers how these markets work, and what a price actually means is the right primer before reading any number below as a probability.
One note on what this page is. Every figure here is a market price, read from the live board on the date above. Prices are claims made with money, and they move on news; none of them is our forecast, and nothing here says whether any policy is good or bad. The board prices what happens, not what should.
The Policy Board, Promise By Promise
Here is the core of it: the campaign-pledge contracts, each a separate yes/no question with its own deadline. Prices are the yes side, as of the August 11, 2026 read. The last column is the midpoint of bid and ask, read as a rough probability.
| The Contract Asks | Deadline | Yes Bid | Yes Ask | Rough Implied Chance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Does NYC's 0% Rent-Stabilized Adjustment Take Legal Effect? | Early October 2026 | 82¢ | 87¢ | ~85% |
| Does A City-Owned Grocery Store Open To The Public? | Before 2028 | 78¢ | 83¢ | ~80% |
| Is A Law Funding Universal Child Care In Effect? | Before 2027 | 12¢ | 13¢ | ~13% |
| Is A Department Of Community Safety Law? | Before 2027 | 10¢ | 14¢ | ~12% |
| Is A New Surcharge On Incomes Over $1 Billion Law? | Before 2027 | 6¢ | 12¢ | ~9% |
| Is A Corporate Tax Increase Law? | Before 2027 | 5¢ | 10¢ | ~8% |
| Is A Tax On Incomes Over $1 Million Law? | Before 2027 | 6¢ | 9¢ | ~8% |
| Is A $30 Minimum Wage Law? | Before 2027 | 5¢ | 9¢ | ~7% |
| Is A Property Tax Increase Law? | Before 2027 | 1¢ | 15¢ | no usable midpoint (14¢ wide) |
A note on the deadline column: each is the contract's own cutoff, so "before 2027" means before January 1, 2027, and "before 2028" means before January 1, 2028; the rent-freeze contract resolves on the adjustment's status at the start of October 2026.
Read the table top to bottom and the structure of the whole board falls out of it. The two contracts trading like near-favorites are not the tax fights making headlines. They are the two pledges the table's own rules define as concrete events: an adjustment taking legal effect and a store opening its doors. Everything below them asks whether a new law exists by a deadline, and the market prices all of those in single digits or teens.
The one-line read on the whole policy board: pledges that settle without a new law price high; pledges that need legislation before a near deadline price low. That gap is a statement about process and time, not about anyone's politics.
One pledge from the campaign list is conspicuously absent. There is no policy contract on fast and free buses, because no single checkable event settles a phrase like that; it survives on the board only inside the word-mention markets covered further down. The exchange's catalog is limited to what its rules can grade, and the absence teaches the same lesson the prices do.
The Rent Freeze Is The Highest-Priced Pledge
The rent-freeze contract is precise in a way headlines are not. It asks whether New York City's 0% rent adjustment for one- and two-year rent-stabilized leases, covering leases commencing from October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027, takes legal effect. It settles on official reporting, and it closes early the moment the answer arrives. At 82 to 87 cents, the market treats it as likely but leaves a real gap below certainty, and that gap is the honest part of the price: the contract turns on one defined adjustment being in legal effect for one defined lease window, and between now and that window sits room for things to intervene. A contract this specific does not care about the debate around rent freezes. It cares about one adjustment, one lease window, one date.
A Grocery Store Has To Open, Not Be Announced
The city-owned grocery contract is the best settlement-discipline lesson on the board. It resolves yes only if a New York City owned and operated grocery store opens to the public before 2028. An announcement does not settle it. A budget line does not settle it. A ribbon-cutting scheduled for the following month does not settle it. Doors open, or the contract pays nothing. At 78 to 83 cents it trades nearly as high as the rent freeze, and the pairing at the top of the table is worth sitting with: the two pledges the market prices as probable are the two where settlement does not run through new legislation, an adjustment in legal effect and doors physically open. Keep that distinction in mind, because it comes back when we reach the contracts that price him personally.
The Tax Contracts Run On Deadlines, And The Deadline Is The Price
Now the reveal the table sets up. The corporate-tax question does not trade as one contract. It trades as four, identical except for the deadline, and the ladder looks like this: a corporate tax increase becoming law before 2027 trades at 5 to 10 cents, before 2028 at 22 to 28, before 2029 at 34 to 36, and before 2030 at 37 to 43. Same question, four dates, and the price roughly quintuples from the near deadline to the far one. That is the market saying, in the only language it has, that the binding variable is time. A tax change in New York involves more than one government body and more than one budget cycle, and the ladder prices exactly that machinery without taking any side on whether the tax should exist.
The other tax rows carry the same signature. The billionaire-income surcharge before 2027 trades at 6 to 12 cents, and the millionaire version at 6 to 9. The $30 minimum wage contract carries a rules detail worth catching: it settles on a bill becoming law before 2027, provided the wage itself takes effect by 2030. The Department of Community Safety contract has one too: it resolves yes on establishing the department or renaming an existing agency to it, and those are two very different bars. And then there is the property-tax row, quoted 1 cent bid, 15 cents ask. A quote 14 cents wide means you cannot buy near 8 and you cannot sell near 8, so 8 is not a price anyone has to honor, and the midpoint of a spread like that is closer to a shrug than a probability. Why a wide book turns a quoted number into trivia is the whole subject of our guide to prediction market liquidity, and this row is the cleanest live example on the board.
A ladder on the city's reported efficiency savings, rung by dollar threshold, rounds out the fiscal section for readers who want the budget-wonk version of the same exercise, and it carries the strangest quote on the page. The above-$800 million rung is quoted 36 cents wide while the harder above-$1 billion rung is quoted 5 wide, which leaves their bids sitting out of logical order: 12 on the easier threshold, 28 on the harder one. That is not free money. Buying the easier rung at its 48-cent ask and selling the harder one at its 28-cent bid still costs 20 cents for the privilege. An inverted-looking ladder is a symptom of one rung having almost no two-sided interest, and the spread, not the bid, is what tells you so.
How Long Does He Stay? The Tenure Ladder
The market does not only price the promises. It prices the person's hold on the office, and it does it the same way it priced the corporate tax: one question, several horizons. Contracts ask whether Mamdani leaves the mayoralty before each of four dates:
| He Leaves Office | Yes Bid | Yes Ask |
|---|---|---|
| Before 2027 | 2¢ | 3¢ |
| Before 2028 | 7¢ | 8¢ |
| Before 2029 | 17¢ | 19¢ |
| Before 2030 | 39¢ | 40¢ |
The first three rungs are a clean early-exit curve: low near, rising with time, the shape any multi-year tenure question produces. The last rung sits right at the boundary of the four-year term he was elected to, which makes it a different kind of question from the other three, and it is the one place on this board where reading the actual settlement rules before trading matters most. This ladder even hands you the concrete example: the event's public title asks whether Mamdani will announce his departure, while the settlement rules pay on him actually leaving office, and only one of those wordings decides your money. When the resolution of a contract turns on a boundary case, the dispute process is what decides it, not the headline.
The other side of the tenure question trades too. A contract on Mamdani announcing a run for re-election prices at 73 to 78 cents. And the board on the next mayoral election is already live: Mamdani trades at 58 to 63 cents to win, with every other listed name, city officials and out-of-politics entries alike, in single digits.
Notice that this page now holds three different structures, and each one prices differently. Winner-take-all boards, like the mayoral race and every election market, list mutually exclusive contracts whose settled prices should roughly sum to a dollar. Nested ladders, like the departure dates, the corporate-tax deadlines, and the poll thresholds coming up below, should run in one direction, because each rung contains the rung before it: leaving office before 2027 also means leaving before 2028. Where a quoted ladder looks out of order, as the efficiency-savings board did a few sections back, the spread has already told you why. And the standalone policy contracts, the rent freeze, the grocery store, child care, are independent questions whose prices neither sum to anything nor need to. Knowing which of the three you are looking at is most of reading a board correctly.
The Contract I Keep Coming Back To: President Before 2045
Between the mayoralty and the presidency sits a small bridge contract: whether Mamdani publicly endorses a candidate in a 2026 primary election outside New York State before September 15, trading at 12 to 13 cents. A market on whether he steps into a primary fight outside his own state in the next five weeks sits directly beneath a market on whether he ever runs the country, and the pairing frames the question this section circles: how far does the board think this career travels?
Here is the row that rewards staring. A contract on Zohran Mamdani becoming President of the United States before January 22, 2045 trades at 8 cents, with no spread at all: 8 bid, 8 offered. Meanwhile, on the 2028 Democratic nominee board, his contract is quoted at fractions of a cent: two-tenths bid, three-tenths ask. Nearly two decades of runway is priced at 8%; the next cycle is priced at almost nothing. That gap between the two clocks, not either number alone, is the reason I keep coming back to this row.
What makes the 2045 contract remarkable is everything the number has to contain. The Constitution requires a president to be a natural-born citizen, and Mamdani, born in Kampala, Uganda, became a United States citizen through naturalization in 2018. Those are settled public facts, and they mean this contract is not only pricing a political career. For it to ever settle yes, that eligibility question would have to be resolved in his favor, and no ordinary statute can do that; it would take a constitutional amendment or a court reinterpretation of the clause. Eight cents is the market's combined price on all of it, politics and constitutional law in one number.
Remember the grocery-store lesson: a contract settles on what happens, not on what is plausible. This one quietly asks the largest "what would have to happen" question on the entire board, and the price has to carry every step of it.
A Worked Example: What 8 Cents Actually Buys
This row is also the right place for the arithmetic every cheap contract deserves. Buy 100 yes contracts on the president-before-2045 question at 8 cents and the outlay is $8; a yes settlement returns $100 before trading fees, and a no settlement returns nothing. Now flip it. Sell those contracts at 8 cents, and the sale collects $8 against $92 of risk, so a single losing settlement erases the premiums from more than 11 winning sales of the same size. Selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar, which is why position sizing, not opinion, is the whole game on rungs like this. We walk through the full logic in when you sell a long shot, one loss costs many wins, and it applies to every single-digit price on this page from both directions.
The Fast Clocks: Weekly Orders, Speeches, And A Poll Ladder
Everything above runs on a clock measured in years. The board also carries markets that resolve in days, and they are where the repricing is most visible.
A recurring weekly contract asks whether Mamdani signs a non-emergency executive order that week; the current week's edition trades at 8 to 9 cents. Mention markets hang separate contracts on whether specific words appear in the next Mayor's Office announcement, and the settlement trigger is worth noting: an announcement from the office, not any moment he happens to speak. On the current board the two tightest-quoted word contracts are "affordable" in the low 70s and "five borough" in the low-to-mid 60s, a live, tradeable map of what the market expects the office to talk about; the looser word contracts on the same board quote too wide to read as probabilities. A favorability ladder tied to the next Siena poll of the city rounds out the set, priced by threshold. Its coin-flip rung, "at least 60%," trades at 45 to 50 cents; the rungs beneath it are bid progressively higher, into the 90s at the bottom of the ladder, and the rungs above it fall away through the 30s and teens to single-digit bids at the top. Approval, in other words, trades here as a whole distribution rather than a single number, and the coin-flip rung tells you where the market's real uncertainty lives.
These short-cycle markets are the part of the board most likely to have moved by the time you read this, which is the point of quoting them with a date attached. An announcement, an order, a poll: each one settles a contract and spins up the next.
The Crossover Boards: One Mayor, Everywhere At Once
The breadth is the last thing to price in. Mamdani is not just a subject of his own markets; he appears as a contract inside other boards entirely. On the Time Person of the Year board he currently trades at 29 to 30 cents, the top-priced name on the field, ahead of contracts on the Pope and the sitting president; we broke down that full field here. He carries a contract on the board for the year's most-searched person on Google, quoted in the low single digits, and another on the monthly market asking who the sitting president will talk to, quoted 49 bid against a 59 offer, wide enough that the midpoint is decoration. The books themselves rank these markets for you: the Person of the Year contract is quoted a single cent wide while the meeting contract is ten wide, and that difference tells you which attention market people are actually trading. Breadth of listings measures attention, not approval, and by that measure the board treats the NYC mayor as one of the most attention-priced figures in American public life.
Where These Markets Trade
Every contract on this page trades on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange, with broad, state-specific availability under federal oversight. You must be 18 or older, prices are quoted in cents on the dollar, and a position can lose its full value. What a fill actually costs at each price level is covered in our breakdown of how Kalshi's fees work, and what the regulation actually means is its own subject. Political event contracts are one category among many; the same exchange runs the government-shutdown market we cover on its own live page.
Reading a board this way, prices as claims, rules as the fine print, spreads as honesty, is what OddsShopper's analysts do all day on the sports side, where our tools price every major book against fair odds. Their work is collected at our free expert picks hub, and the full toolkit comes with a free week trial of OddsShopper Pro; code NYCMAYOR20 takes 20% off your first payment if you stay.
FAQ
What are Zohran Mamdani's policies, according to the markets?
The markets do not rate his policies; they price whether specific pledges happen by specific dates. As of the August 11, 2026 read, the rent freeze taking legal effect trades in the mid-80-cent range and a city-owned grocery store opening before 2028 trades around 80 cents, while every contract requiring a new law before 2027, on childcare, the $30 minimum wage, a Department of Community Safety, and each of the tax proposals, quotes at or below 15 cents.
What is the Mamdani rent freeze market?
It is a contract asking whether New York City's 0% rent adjustment for one- and two-year rent-stabilized leases, for leases commencing October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027, takes legal effect. It settles on official reporting, closes early if the answer arrives early, and trades at 82 to 87 cents as of this writing.
Can Mamdani legally become president?
The Constitution requires a president to be a natural-born citizen, and Mamdani is a naturalized citizen, born in Uganda. The market listing a contract on him becoming president before 2045 does not contradict that fact; the 8-cent price is the market's combined estimate of everything that would have to change, legally and politically, for a yes.
Where do these markets trade, and are they legal?
They trade on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange, with broad, state-specific availability under federal oversight. Contracts are event derivatives, not sportsbook wagers: 18+, and a position can lose its full value.
The Board Is The Profile
So, who is Zohran Mamdani, priced? A mayor whose two most concrete pledges trade like near-favorites while every before-2027 legislative promise trades cheap, and whose two-decade presidential contract quietly carries a constitutional question inside an 8-cent price. The promise from the top of the page pays off here: the board's priciest pledge is the rent freeze in the mid-80s, its cheapest question is the 2028 nomination in fractions of a cent, and what separates them is not ideology but settlement design. Events that settle without new legislation trade rich; distant questions stacked with preconditions trade for pennies or less. No profile written in prose could hold all of that at once without picking a side. The board holds it effortlessly, because each contract only ever answers its own narrow question. That is the real product here: not a verdict on the mayor, but a price for every version of the question, updated every time someone disagrees with money.
Prices move daily; the numbers above are a snapshot, not a standing quote.
Disclosure: Stokastic trades prediction markets and may hold positions in markets discussed here. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi. Kalshi contracts are CFTC-regulated event derivatives traded on a designated contract market, not sportsbook wagers, and they can lose their full value; selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar. 18+, available where Kalshi operates. Nothing in this article is a pick, a recommendation, or trading advice.
