Where Kalshi Settlement Numbers Actually Come From
A contract is only as good as the source that settles it. What Kalshi names as its sources, how revisions are handled, and what happens when data goes missing.
Every binary contract is a bet on a number that someone else publishes. The contract terms are mostly a specification of whose number counts, when it is read, and what happens if it never arrives.
This is the least glamorous part of an event market and the part that most often turns a correct forecast into a losing position.
What a settlement clause names
A publisher. A named statistical agency, election authority, exchange, league or data provider. Not "the consensus" and not "the news".
A specific series. Agencies publish many numbers that sound alike. Headline versus core. Seasonally adjusted versus not. Advance versus final. The contract names one.
A vintage. Almost always the first published figure, not the revised one. This surprises people. If a figure comes out at 2.4 and is revised a month later to 2.6, the contract settles on 2.4, because 2.4 is what was published at the named moment.
A timestamp. A date and a time in a stated zone. For market-close contracts this is precise to the minute, and the difference between an official close and a last print on some feed you are watching is a real difference.
A rounding convention. How many decimals, and what happens on an exact tie with the strike.
A fallback. What the exchange does if the publisher does not publish: extend, use a named alternative, or void.
Why the vintage clause matters most
Revisions are routine in economic data. Payrolls, GDP and many other series are revised substantially, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes years later. A contract that settled on the first print is not reopened when the number changes.
That is the correct design — a contract needs a determinate answer at a determinate time — but it means "the true value of the economy" is not what you are trading. You are trading a specific agency's specific first estimate. Those are different things and the gap between them is occasionally large.
Election and official-result sources
Political contracts name an official certifying body or a specified reporting standard, with a deadline. The deadline is doing a lot of work. A result that is obvious to everyone on election night may not be official for weeks, and a contract that requires officialness will not settle until it arrives, regardless of how confident the world is.
This is one of the places where two venues covering "the same" election can genuinely differ, because their sources and deadlines differ even when the question sounds identical. Resolution differences between venues is the catalogue.
Missing and delayed data
Government shutdowns, publication suspensions, methodology changes and outright discontinuation all happen. The fallback clause says what the exchange does. Options include extending the settlement window, switching to a named substitute, or voiding and returning capital.
Voiding is not a disaster but it is not neutral either. Your capital was locked for the life of the contract and produced nothing. Capital lockup is the cost that does not show up in any fee table.
How to check before you trade
Open the contract rules. Find four things: the publisher, the exact series name, the timestamp, and the tie-at-strike rule. It takes under a minute and it is the highest-value minute in the whole process.
If a comparison tool — this one included — pairs a Kalshi market with one elsewhere, check that those four things line up before you treat the pair as equivalent. The equivalence grade on this site exists to flag exactly these mismatches, but a grade is a summary and the rules are the source of truth.
Next
What Kalshi actually lists is a tour of the market list, and of the categories that regulation keeps off it.
Educational content only. Nothing here is financial advice, a solicitation, or an offer to trade. Prediction markets can move against you and a position can lose its entire value. Where this guide describes a difference between venues it describes a theoretical cross-market edge in observed prices, which is not a profit: fees, spreads, capital lockup, transfer time and differing settlement rules all come out of it first.
Keep reading
Kalshi · 3 min readHow Kalshi Fees Work, and Where They Hurt MostKalshi's trading fee is not a flat percentage. It is shaped like a curve that peaks at fifty cents, and that shape changes which trades are worth doing.
Kalshi · 3 min readWhat Kalshi Lists, and What It Does NotA tour of the categories a regulated event exchange carries, why the list looks the way it does, and which questions are structurally absent from it.
Kalshi · 3 min readHow a Kalshi Contract Is Put TogetherSeries, event, strike and settlement rule. Taking apart a single Kalshi market so the ticker stops looking like noise and starts reading as a sentence.
Prediction Market Basics · 3 min readPrediction Markets vs Sportsbooks: Odds, Vig and PriceA sportsbook sets a price and takes the other side. An exchange matches you against other participants. That structural difference shows up in every number on screen.