Kalshi is legal in New Jersey and nationwide. Here's why.
Kalshi is legal and available for trading in all 50 states, including New Jersey. Here's why.
Kalshi is currently legal in New Jersey, as well as in every other U.S. state–at least for now. Prediction market platforms like Kalshi allow ordinary people to trade event contracts that predict the outcomes of a wide range of events related to everything from elections and the economy to award winners and sports contests.
Kalshi is federally regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which enables it to operate legally nationwide. But there has been some pushback from gambling regulatory bodies in certain states (including New Jersey), who claim that sports event contract trading is too similar to the legal sports betting they oversee in their states.
Read on for more details around the current legal standing of prediction markets, including why New Jersey residents are free to use predictive platforms like Kalshi to trade event contracts.
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The short answer is yes, Kalshi is legal. Kalshi operates as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), which offers exchange-traded derivatives products, such as futures and options. That makes it much more similar to a stock market exchange than a sportsbook.
As a derivatives exchange, Kalshi is regulated by the federal CFTC rather than by state gambling regulators, which license and oversee legal sportsbooks.
Kalshi is legal and licensed as a DCM under the CFTC. However, its sports event contract offerings have been challenged by some state sports betting regulators. New Jersey, Nevada, and Maryland are the main states to lead the charge against Kalshi’s sports offerings. Kalshi has pushed back by suing those states’ regulators.
As those cases work their way through the legal system, prediction markets’ sports event contracts — and all other CFTC-approved markets — remain legal on a federal level.
Previously, the CFTC challenged whether Kalshi should be allowed to offer trading on election markets. In response, Kalshi sued the CFTC and won in court. The CFTC then appealed the ruling, but in 2025, the commission requested to drop its appeal against Kalshi’s election contracts, which was granted by the courts. That brought an end to legal challenges to Kalshi’s election betting markets, at least for now.
Kalshi is currently legal to adults 18 and older in all 50 states and Washington D.C. As a federally-regulated exchange, Kalshi is not available outside of the United States.
Prediction markets have been attracting major media attention ever since the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. Prediction market platforms like Kalshi allowed users to trade contracts related to who would win the election. The trades on those platforms favored Donald Trump to win, which turned out to be more accurate than most public polling and expert analysis.
The attention prediction markets have drawn has helped attract a wave of new traders not only to Kalshi, but also to similar platforms like Crypto.com, Polymarket, and PredictIt.
At Kalshi, NJ users have a wide selection of markets from which to choose. Some example markets include:
Within each market, users are able to buy and sell shares on the outcome. You can buy “Yes” or “No” contracts based on the outcome of the particular event. The likelihood of the outcome occurring is reflected in the number of trades, which in turn is reflected in the contract pricing in each market.
Kalshi saw increased trading with their introduction (with CFTC approval) of sports markets related to NFL and NCAA basketball futures in early 2025. Since then, sports markets have been among the most popular on prediction platforms.
Those sports markets also drew the attention of state regulators, including New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE), which issued cease-and-desist letters to Kalshi and Robinhood in late March of 2025. The letters accused the companies of offering “unauthorized sports wagers” in violation of New Jersey law and ordered them to stop offering them immediately.
Kalshi then filed a lawsuit against the DGE arguing that its markets are authorized and regulated by the CFTC, which they say supersedes state-level regulatory action. In late April, a judge granted Kalshi a preliminary injunction and suggested he believed Kalshi’s sports contracts fall within the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction. DGE has since appealed the judge’s decision.
The injunction means that Kalshi’s sports event contracts will continue to be offered in New Jersey for the foreseeable future as the case works its way through the appeals court.