Where Prediction Markets Stand, State by State

Prediction markets are legal to access in most of the US: they run on federally designated CFTC exchanges, and as of our last verification 34 of 51 states and DC have taken no documented action against them. The fight is concentrated in the other 17 states, where regulators and courts are contesting sports event contracts specifically: 4 states currently have court orders blocking Kalshi’s sports contracts, one state has enacted an outright ban that is not yet effective, and the rest sit in active litigation or under cease-and-desist letters.

This page is the section’s living map of that fight. Every state’s row is a documented public action attributed to a named court or regulator with dates and sources, verified July 23, 2026, and the interactive finder below answers for your state in one tap. Last tested September 2026.

Check Your State

Pick a state and the finder shows what is on the public record there: the strongest current action, the sports-contracts posture, dated key events, and the authority doing the acting. It runs on the same verified dataset as the rest of this page.

The 2026 Map at a Glance

Seventeen states have something on the record; 34 do not. The table below is the contested side of the map, ranked nowhere and ordered alphabetically: this is a status report, not a leaderboard. Every row’s dates and sources live in the dataset behind this page.

How to Read the Tiers

The strongest-action column uses four tiers, and the order matters. A cease-and-desist is a regulator’s demand letter with no court behind it yet. In litigation means someone sued: sometimes the state suing the platform, sometimes the platform suing first, as Kalshi did preemptively in Iowa. A court order in force is the serious tier: a judge has entered an injunction and the platform must comply while it appeals. State law enacted means the legislature wrote prediction markets into statute, the newest and rarest move. The sports-contracts column tracks the practical effect of all that on the product actually being fought over.

Everywhere else, prediction markets operate under the federal framework with no documented state action. That does not mean those states endorse the products; it means nothing is on the public record yet.

How We Got Here: Eighteen Months in Six Beats

The state fight escalated in distinct waves, and knowing the sequence makes today’s map legible:

• 2025, the letter wave. State regulators from Ohio (March) through Connecticut (December) sent cease-and-desist letters treating sports event contracts as unlicensed wagering; Kalshi answered most of them with federal preemption lawsuits.
• January 2026, the first order. Massachusetts converted its AG lawsuit into a preliminary injunction, the first court order actually blocking Kalshi’s sports contracts.
• February and March, both directions at once. Tennessee’s federal court blocked STATE enforcement, Arizona filed criminal charges, and Nevada’s court ordered Kalshi off sports, election, and entertainment contracts.
• April, the federal counterattack. The Third Circuit affirmed Kalshi’s New Jersey injunction, and the CFTC began suing states directly while Wisconsin sued five platforms at once.
• May and June, the statutes arrive. Utah’s prop-bet ban took effect, Minnesota enacted the first outright prediction-market ban, Illinois folded exchange wagers into its licensing law, and Michigan’s courtroom turned hostile.
• July, the split hardens. New York’s federal court refused to shield Kalshi (July 7), Michigan extended its order (July 13), and Washington entered the newest state injunction (July 21). Then the federal side answered: a judge enjoined Minnesota’s ban on July 27, four days before it was to take effect.

The Federal Framework (and Why States Are Fighting It)

Prediction-market exchanges are designated contract markets regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under the Commodity Exchange Act. That federal designation is why the platforms can offer event contracts nationwide without holding fifty state gambling licenses, and it is precisely what the states are contesting: whether a yes/no contract on a game is a federally regulated swap or a sports bet in a financial costume.

The federal government has picked its side. The CFTC has sued six states (New York, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) to stop them from applying gambling laws to federally registered exchanges, and it has intervened elsewhere, including the pause it forced on Arizona’s criminal case against Kalshi. The states argue gambling regulation is a core state power the Commodity Exchange Act never displaced.

For how the products themselves work while the lawyers fight, start with our event-contract trading guide and the settlement guide; both are unaffected by which court wins.

Where Sports Contracts Are Blocked Right Now

Four states currently have court orders in force against Kalshi’s sports event contracts. These are the hard edges of the map: orders with geofencing requirements and, in two states, daily fines or contempt proceedings attached.

• Massachusetts: Suffolk County Superior Court granted Massachusetts a preliminary injunction on January 20, 2026 (effective January 23), barring Kalshi from offering sports event contracts without a state sports wagering license. The AG’s underlying lawsuit, filed September 2025, continues.
• Nevada: Nevada’s First Judicial District Court granted the Gaming Control Board a preliminary injunction on April 3, 2026 covering Kalshi’s sports, election, and entertainment event contracts, and confirmed a geofencing requirement on May 18. The Board has since asked the court to hold Kalshi in contempt after investigators bought prohibited contracts in-state on eight occasions in late May and early June.
• Michigan: Michigan’s AG sued Kalshi in March 2026, and the Ingham County Circuit Court issued a temporary restraining order on June 29 barring its sports event contracts, with third-party geolocation required and fines of $120,000 per day for noncompliance. After the July 13 hearing the court extended the restrictions, ordering suspension and geofencing by August 12, 2026.
• Washington: King County Superior Court granted Washington a preliminary injunction on July 21, 2026, finding Kalshi’s sports offerings likely constitute illegal gambling under state law and rejecting federal preemption. Kalshi has said it will appeal.

Court orders bind the named operator, and platforms then adjust their own eligibility screens, sometimes more broadly than the order requires. That is why the finder above reports the documented action rather than promising what any given app will show you today.

The First State Statutes

2026 brought the first laws written specifically for prediction markets, and they take three different shapes:

• Minnesota (ban): Minnesota passed the first state law to criminalize prediction markets: SF4760, signed May 18, 2026, banned wagers on sports, elections, and popular culture effective August 1, 2026. On July 27, 2026, a federal judge granted the CFTC, Kalshi, and Polymarket a preliminary injunction blocking the ban days before it took effect, finding it likely preempted by federal law. The venues remain available to Minnesotans while the case is litigated.
• Utah (prohibition by definition): Utah’s HB243, effective May 6, 2026, adds proposition bets to the definition of illegal gambling, aimed squarely at prediction markets and pick’em products. Kalshi sued Utah in federal court while the bill was moving, and the fight over enforcement continues.
• Illinois (license-or-leave): Illinois signed SB 3019 on June 16, 2026 (effective July 1), folding exchange wagers on prediction markets into its sports wagering licensing law. Kalshi sued in the Northern District of Illinois days before the effective date, and the CFTC had already sued Illinois in April 2026 over the Gaming Board’s earlier cease-and-desist letters.

Iowa is drafting a fourth shape: a license-and-tax framework that would regulate prediction markets rather than ban them, the first state to move that direction. However these four resolve, they are the templates other legislatures will copy.

Courts Are Split, and That Is the Whole Story

The same legal question is getting opposite answers in different courtrooms. On the federal-preemption side: the Third Circuit affirmed Kalshi’s New Jersey preliminary injunction in April 2026, reasoning that sports event contracts are likely swaps under exclusive CFTC jurisdiction, and the Middle District of Tennessee blocked that state’s enforcement on similar grounds in February. On the state-power side: the Southern District of New York declined to shield Kalshi’s sports contracts from New York gambling law on July 7, 2026 (now on appeal to the Second Circuit), New York’s attorney general escalated with a state-court suit against Kalshi on July 31, 2026 seeking to bar its New York contracts, the District of Maryland denied Kalshi’s injunction back in August 2025, and state courts in Massachusetts, Nevada, Michigan, and Washington have all entered orders against the company.

Two honest cautions when reading this page. A preliminary injunction is not a final ruling on the merits: it is a court’s early read while the case continues, and several of the orders above are under appeal. And the map moves fast: this page’s dataset carries a 30-day re-verification schedule for every contested state. The freshest example is Minnesota, where a federal judge enjoined the state’s first-in-the-nation ban on July 27, 2026, four days before it was to take effect; the venues stay live there while that case is litigated.

For a maintained day-by-day view between our verification passes, CBS Sports runs a 50-state tracker, and our 50-state loophole explainer covers how this patchwork got so strange in the first place.

What This Means If You Want to Trade

Practically: open the app, and its eligibility screen tells you what you can trade where you stand, because the platforms update those screens as orders land. Non-sports markets (politics, economics, weather, culture) remain broadly available even in most states fighting over sports contracts; the orders above are overwhelmingly about sports.

Three Habits for Trading Through the Fight

• Let the app answer the legality question. Eligibility screens update faster than any article, tracker, or lawyer blog, because the platforms implement orders within days of losing.
• Watch effective dates, not headlines. A signed law is not a live law (Minnesota’s ban was enjoined four days before its start date), and an injunction under appeal can dissolve. The dates in the table above are the load-bearing facts.
• Assume sports is the contested lane. Politics, economics, weather, and culture markets have stayed broadly available even in states actively fighting sports contracts.

If you are choosing where to trade, our Kalshi vs. Polymarket head-to-head compares the two CFTC-regulated venues on verified facts and live prices, and the prediction markets hub is the front door to the rest of this section. Whatever you trade, size it like entertainment money: contested legality is a risk layer on top of ordinary market risk, not a substitute for it.

State Legality FAQ

The questions readers actually ask about the state fight, answered from the same dataset as the rest of this page.