PredictIt Review

PredictIt fits traders who want to trade a single Senate seat or House district. It lists 35 Senate races, 24 House districts, more than 20 governor's races and the 2028 nominations, and each trader can invest up to $3,500 in any one contract. Trading runs in dollars from a browser with no crypto wallet or brokerage account, and U.S. citizens living abroad can open an account.

It fits badly if you want sports or economics markets, which its CFTC relief doesn't allow. Anyone trading more than a few hundred dollars at a time, or needing to withdraw within a month of a first deposit, should also look elsewhere. Kalshi's election and sports markets trade on a registered exchange with far more depth, and Polymarket covers politics alongside crypto and world events.

PredictIt is a political prediction market operated by the Prediction Market Research Consortium, a not-for-profit. Aristotle International, Inc. verifies identities, processes trades and holds customer cash for it. PredictIt runs its own order book, and traders buy and sell shares from each other. A share costs between 1¢ and 99¢ and pays $1 if its outcome happens, so a 40¢ share implies a 40% probability.

1. Open an account and upload a driver's license or passport
2. Deposit at least $10 by bank transfer or credit card
3. Buy Yes or No shares at a price you set or by matching an offer
4. Sell early to another trader, or wait for PredictIt to settle the market
5. Withdraw by bank transfer or check

A single-contract market asks one yes-or-no question. A multiple-contract market, such as a Senate race or a seat-count range, lists several outcomes, and at most one resolves Yes. In those markets PredictIt debits only your worst-case loss across the whole market. Buying one No share on each outcome of a four-way market, at 75¢ each when every Yes trades at 25¢, costs $3. At least three of those shares pay $1 each, so PredictIt debits nothing before fees.

PredictIt holds CFTC staff no-action relief, and it isn't a registered exchange. The relief is Letter 14-130 from the CFTC's Division of Market Oversight, dated October 29, 2014, and amended by Letter 25-20 on July 14, 2025. The letter means CFTC staff won't recommend enforcement for running the market without registering. PredictIt isn't regulated by the CFTC or any other regulator, and neither the consortium nor Aristotle is CFTC-registered.

Under the relief, markets must be political and can't involve war, terrorism or assassination. Each trader's investment in a contract is capped at the federal limit on individual campaign contributions, $3,500 for the 2025–2026 cycle, and that figure is next adjusted in 2027. CFTC staff can modify or end the relief, and it doesn't pass to a buyer if the consortium sells the market.

CFTC staff withdrew the relief on August 4, 2022 and ordered its markets wound down. Traders and Aristotle sued, and the courts kept the market open while the case ran. PredictIt relaunched on July 15, 2025 under the amended letter, with the $3,500 cap in place of the old $850 and no limit on traders per contract. A week later, on July 22, a federal court in Texas overturned the 2022 withdrawal and blocked the CFTC from closing PredictIt over anything it knew by that date. Aristotle's own registered exchange was sold in March 2026, and PredictIt stays on the no-action letter.

States are fighting other markets over whether election and sports contracts count as gambling under state law, but none has sued PredictIt or ordered it to stop. One state law does cover the kind of markets PredictIt lists. Minnesota made operating an election market a felony from August 1, 2026, and the federal order pausing that law, from July 27, 2026, protects only CFTC-registered exchanges. For a trader, PredictIt won its fight with the CFTC, but it has none of the customer-fund rules a registered exchange must follow.

PredictIt accepts individuals who are 18 or older and are U.S. Persons, which its terms define as U.S. citizens living anywhere in the world plus resident aliens. Sign-up takes a name, street address, date of birth and a driver's license or passport, which Aristotle verifies. Changing your address later means verifying again. Each person may hold one account, and anyone whose account PredictIt has closed can't open another. Once your profit passes the IRS reporting limit, you must add a Social Security number or ITIN, and PredictIt can freeze an account that doesn't.

U.S. Availability as of September 2026

PredictIt's terms list no state exclusions. It asks for no brokerage account and no questions about income or trading experience, but the ID review and the 30-day wait before a first withdrawal slow things down, so setup friction is moderate. PredictIt doesn't publish how long verification takes, and the minimum balance to start trading is $10.

PredictIt listed 197 open markets and 613 contracts on September 24, 2026, all political. The busiest are U.S. midterm races, and our live political markets track many of the same contests.

Contract Design Notes

• Binary Yes/No: single-contract markets such as “Will Trump leave office early?”
• Multi-outcome: candidate fields and seat-count ranges, such as Republican House seats in bands of five.
• Short-dated: weekly markets on approval-rating averages and Truth Social post counts.
• Long-dated: the 2028 nominations and presidential winner, open since July 2025.
• Minimum holdings: some contracts require owning at least a set number of shares, such as 100, shown under the share box.
• Ties: unless the rules say otherwise, a tie resolves to the contract whose name comes first alphabetically or numerically.

In the 12 markets with the most trading on September 24, 2026, taking one contract from each, the median spread was 2¢, and a median of $227 sat in the book within 2¢ of the mid price. Only South Carolina's Senate race had more than $1,000 near the price. Across all 273 contracts priced between 10¢ and 90¢ that morning, the median spread was 13¢.

A $50 sale in the Senate-control market fills at the 63¢ bid, but a $50 buy climbs from 64¢ to 66¢. Nine of the 12 contracts had less than $500 within 2¢ of the mid price. On the same measure, Kalshi's busiest markets held a median of $72,580 near the price on September 23, 2026. The $3,500 cap limits what any one trader can have invested in a contract at one time, so no account can post more than $3,500 of buy orders in it.

Every market page shows a public order book, five price levels a side, without a login. Orders are limit offers: you set a maximum buy price or a minimum sell price, and unmatched offers rest in the book until filled or canceled. Clicking a price shows where your offer sits in the queue. When trading is heavy, PredictIt fills offers on each contract first come, first served, so the price on screen may be taken by offers queued ahead of yours. You can't hold Yes and No in the same contract at once, and you can sell before the market closes whenever there's a bid.

Each time a share makes money, whether you sell it above your purchase price or it pays out at $1, PredictIt keeps 10% of that profit. There's no fee on a trade that breaks even or loses, and no per-trade commission. On September 23, 2026, PredictIt dropped its 5% withdrawal fee, made bank-transfer deposits free and gave each user one fee-free credit card deposit of up to $1,000.

An account with no login for 12 straight months and a cash balance pays $2 a month from then on, and withdrawing from an inactive account costs 5% unless you log in first. Banks and card issuers may add their own charges.

Buying 100 Yes shares at 50¢ costs $50 with no fee. Selling them at 60¢ returns $60, and PredictIt takes 10% of the $10 profit, so you keep $59 and net $9. On Kalshi the same round trip with orders that fill immediately costs $3.43 in fees. Holding to a $1 win instead costs $5, and a 10¢ long shot that wins pays a 9¢ fee on every share, so the fee grows with the size of the win.

PredictIt requires a $10 minimum deposit. Bank transfers run through Aeropay, and linking a bank account opens an Aeropay account in your name.

Deposits

Withdrawals

Nothing can be withdrawn for 30 days after your first deposit, and one clause of the terms applies the 30 days to each deposit. Before releasing funds, PredictIt can ask for more ID or delay a withdrawal on suspected fraud. It can also limit how much and how often you withdraw.

When a market's outcome is known, PredictIt halts trading while it confirms the result, normally within 48 hours. Winning shares are then redeemed at $1, minus the profit fee, and the credit appears in your trade history. In a multiple-contract market no contract settles until the whole market does. If PredictIt closes your account, it can sell your positions at or around the best available price and send the balance by check.

Each market has written rules that decide it, and they override both the headline question and PredictIt's general terms. Some rules name no data source. The Senate-control market counts seats held after the 2026 elections without naming who reports them. PredictIt doesn't close a market because an outcome looks likely. For elections it weighs votes counted, recount windows, certification, lawsuits and concessions, and traders can email PredictIt links to official sources and ask it to settle a market.

Market rules state that PredictIt's decisions are made “at PredictIt's sole discretion and shall be final,” and when a situation isn't covered, PredictIt picks “the fairest and most appropriate course of action.” PredictIt can also close a market early if it judges the outcome settled. Complaints about a market aren't heard until it closes. After that the terms require 30 days of informal talks, then binding arbitration with the American Arbitration Association and no class actions. PredictIt pays the filing and arbitrator fees on claims up to $75,000 that aren't frivolous, and new users can opt out of arbitration by mail within 30 days.

PredictIt's announcements page holds a single post, the July 2025 relaunch notice, and PredictIt doesn't publish settlement disputes or rulings. Its terms say the site “is not a stock exchange, and there are no controls on market manipulation or trading on the basis of ‘inside information.'” Employees and contractors of PredictIt and Aristotle can't hold accounts. That leaves traders with far fewer protections against trading on non-public information than exchanges that publish surveillance rules and disciplinary actions.

Customer cash is kept in a pooled bank account in Aristotle's name, held on trust for you with a separate ledger per user. Interest on the account goes to Aristotle, which can pass it to the consortium. No CFTC segregation rules apply, because no registered broker or clearing house holds the funds (see the entity table above), and PredictIt doesn't mention FDIC or SIPC coverage. The terms cap what PredictIt and Aristotle would owe you at the balance in your account.

PredictIt keeps your ID documents, which some state laws class as biometric data, and deletes them within a year of no longer needing them for financial regulation. Your username, join date, trading statistics and positions can appear publicly unless you hide them in Settings, and random recent trades show on market pages. The status page lists three major outages in late 2025, on October 29, November 5 and November 18, each blamed on an outside provider, including Cloudflare.

PredictIt trades only on its website, with no app on the App Store or Google Play, so phones use the mobile browser. Market pages have line and candlestick charts over 24 hours to 90 days, the public order book and the rules, and multiple-contract markets have a downloadable payouts table.

A free market-data feed at predictit.org/api/marketdata/all/ returns the last trade and best offers for every open market, updated every 60 seconds, for non-commercial use with PredictIt credited. There's no trading API. PredictIt bans automated trading and scraping, so the feed suits price trackers and researchers.

PredictIt issues Form 1099 to U.S.-resident traders with a net profit of $600 or more in a calendar year. It calculates net profit as gross profits minus losses minus trading fees. Withdrawal fees counted against profit through tax year 2025 and don't from 2026. Trade and transaction history covers 30 days on screen, with an export for longer periods, and the history shows lifetime deposits and withdrawals plus realized gains. Reporting tax on prediction-market gains still depends on your own records.

PredictIt offers a contact form and support@predictit.org, with no live chat or phone and no stated response time. Market suggestions go to markets@predictit.org. Trading and cash transfers stop every day from 4 to 5 a.m. ET for maintenance, and PredictIt can suspend any market at any time. The status page covers trading, deposits and withdrawals separately.

Self-limits are set by email and take effect within about 24 hours. A cooling-off period of 24 hours to 90 days blocks deposits and new purchases but still allows sales and withdrawals. A daily deposit limit can be lowered at any time. Self-exclusion, from six months up to permanent, also blocks withdrawals, so withdraw first. Position limits are $3,500 per contract, and PredictIt can close any account without notice.