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, a contract on free buses, 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 18, 2026), the rent-freeze contract is the highest-priced policy question on the board, trading around 90 cents ahead of the grocery-store pledge in the high 70s, while every contract that requires a new law or an agency announcement before 2027, from the tax proposals to free buses, 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 Kalshi's live board through its public market data on the date above, and the main contracts are named by ticker so you can pull the same quote yourself. 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 18, 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 | 89¢ | 92¢ | ~90% |
| Does A City-Owned Grocery Store Open To The Public? | Before 2028 | 74¢ | 79¢ | ~77% |
| Is A Department Of Community Safety Law? | Before 2027 | 10¢ | 14¢ | ~12% |
| Is A Property Tax Increase Law? | Before 2027 | 10¢ | 14¢ | ~12% |
| Is A Law Funding Universal Child Care In Effect? | Before 2027 | 7¢ | 13¢ | ~10% |
| Is A Tax On Incomes Over $1 Million Law? | Before 2027 | 5¢ | 10¢ | ~8% |
| Is A New Surcharge On Incomes Over $1 Billion Law? | Before 2027 | 4¢ | 10¢ | ~7% |
| Is A Corporate Tax Increase Law? | Before 2027 | 5¢ | 9¢ | ~7% |
| Is A $30 Minimum Wage Law? | Before 2027 | 5¢ | 9¢ | ~7% |
| Does The MTA Set The Base Bus Fare To $0? | Before 2027 | 4¢ | 9¢ | ~7% |
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, or an agency makes a specific announcement, by a deadline, and the market prices all of those in single digits or teens.
The one-line read on the whole policy boardpledges 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.
The bus pledge shows how the exchange handles a slogan. "Fast and free" is not a checkable event, so the contract does not ask about it. It asks whether the MTA announces a $0 base fare for all New York City buses before 2027, and that narrower question trades at 4 to 9 cents. A neighboring contract asks whether Manhattan congestion pricing ends before 2027 and quotes 3 to 8 cents. Around the pledge contracts sits a second tier of city-statistics markets, on weekday bus speed, the shelter census, housing permits, subway ridership, affordable homes financed, and the efficiency-savings ladder covered below, that price the numbers his administration will be judged on rather than the promises themselves. One tax pledge is missing from the table for a different reason: the exchange's catalog lists a contract on whether he taxes luxury second homes before 2027, but it shows no tradable market as of this read, so there is no price to quote. The catalog is limited to what its rules can grade, and every listing on it is written to be graded.
The Rent Freeze Is The Highest-Priced Pledge
The rent-freeze contract (ticker KXRENTFREEZEEFFECT) 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. The vote itself is already on the record: the Rent Guidelines Board adopted the 0% adjustment for both lease lengths on June 25, 2026, by a 7-1 vote, as amNewYork reported. So at 89 to 92 cents, the 8 to 11 cents of doubt the market still carries is not about whether the board votes yes. It is about the gap between an adopted adjustment and an adjustment in legal effect on October 1, and before buying the last 10 cents the question to ask is what, specifically, could sit in that gap. That is a different risk to hold than the one the headline suggests. 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 (KXNYCGROCERY) 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 74 to 79 cents it trades a rung below 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 (KXNYCCORPORATETAX) 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 9 cents, before 2028 at 21 to 28, before 2029 at 31 to 37, and before 2030 at 36 to 43. Same question, four dates, and the price grows more than fivefold 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 millionaire-income tax before 2027 trades at 5 to 10 cents, and the contract on a new bracket or surcharge for incomes over $1 billion at 4 to 10. 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. The property-tax row, on legislation raising the city's rate, sits at 10 to 14 with the community-safety contract. Look at that billion-dollar-income quote again, though: 4 bid, 10 ask, on a contract whose midpoint is 7. A quote 6 cents wide on a 7-cent contract means you cannot buy near 7 and you cannot sell near 7, so 7 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 the low tax rows are the cleanest live examples on the board.
A ladder on the city's reported efficiency savings for fiscal 2027, rung by dollar threshold, rounds out the fiscal section for readers who want the budget-wonk version of the same exercise. It runs the way a ladder should: above $400 million at 73 to 79 cents, above $600 million at 57 to 63, above $800 million at 42 to 48, above $1 billion at 27 to 33, and above $1.2 billion at 12 to 18. Every rung is quoted 6 cents wide, which is the tell that a market maker is holding the whole ladder rather than a crowd trading each rung, so read the midpoints as rough. The row worth sitting with is the $800 million rung, the closest thing to a coin flip on the fiscal board, and the spread, not the bid, is what tells you how much to trust it.
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 (KXMAMDANIOUT) ask whether Mamdani leaves the mayoralty before each of four dates:
| He Leaves Office | Yes Bid | Yes Ask |
|---|---|---|
| Before 2027 | 0¢ | 1¢ |
| Before 2028 | 3¢ | 8¢ |
| Before 2029 | 12¢ | 18¢ |
| Before 2030 | 34¢ | 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 74 to 79 cents. And the board on the next mayoral election is already live: Mamdani trades at 58 to 64 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 ever looks out of order, the spread is the first place to look, as the six-cent rungs on the efficiency-savings board a few sections back already showed. 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 7 to 11 cents. A market on whether he steps into a primary fight outside his own state in the four weeks before September 15 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 (KXPERSONPRESMAM) trades at 9 to 10 cents, quoted a single cent wide: 9 bid, 10 offered. Meanwhile, on the 2028 Democratic nominee board, his contract is quoted at fractions of a cent, a tenth of a cent bid and two-tenths ask, on one of the few boards on the exchange that ticks in tenths of a cent rather than whole cents. Nearly two decades of runway is priced at roughly 9 to 10%; 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. Nine to 10 cents is the market's combined price on all of it, politics and constitutional law in one number.
Remember the grocery-store lessona 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 10 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 the 10-cent ask and the outlay is $10; a yes settlement returns $100 before trading fees, and a no settlement returns nothing. Now flip it. Sell those contracts at the 9-cent bid, and the sale collects $9 against $91 of risk, so a single losing settlement erases the premiums from 10 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 August 16 to 22 edition trades at 1 to 2 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, "affordable" is the highest-priced word at 75 to 78 cents, with "safe," "five borough," and "Trump" all in the mid-60s and quoted a cent or two wide, a live, tradeable map of what the market expects the office to talk about; "free bus" and "billionaire" sit at 7 to 8. 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 64%," trades at 52 to 58 cents; the rungs beneath it are bid progressively higher, with "at least 56%" at 88 to 94 at the bottom of the ladder, and the rungs above it fall away through the 30s and teens to a 3-cent bid on "at least 72%" 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 trades at 28 to 29 cents as of this read, the top-priced name on the field, ahead of contracts on Pope Leo XIV at 17 to 18 and the sitting president at 13 to 14; we broke down that full field here. He carries a contract on the board for the year's most-searched person on Google, quoted at 1 to 2 cents, and another on the August market asking who the sitting president will talk to, quoted 47 bid against a 48 offer, a coin flip priced a single cent wide. The books themselves rank these markets for you: the Person of the Year and the meeting contracts are each quoted a cent wide, which tells you real two-sided trading is happening in both, while the most-searched contract barely registers. 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.
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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 a 10-cent price. The promise from the top of the page pays off here: the board's priciest pledge is the rent freeze around 90, 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. The practical read is the one this page keeps returning to: on this board the cheap contracts are cheap because of deadlines and preconditions, the wide quotes are wide because one side of the book is empty, and the rules text, not the headline, decides what a yes means. 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.
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