Fed December hold odds fall below 4% on Polymarket as hike contracts climb
As of 6:08 p.m. ET Nov. 10, Polymarket's December Fed hold contract was 3.55%, down 15 points, and Kalshi's above-4% contract was 96 cents.
Prediction markets on the Federal Reserve’s December meeting moved sharply on Tuesday, Nov. 10, shifting almost all of the remaining weight on a hold into contracts that pay out on a rate increase.
The move came after the October consumer price index, released that morning, showed prices up 0.4% for the month against forecasts of 0.3%, with core prices up 0.3% against forecasts of 0.2%, CoinDesk reported. Overnight, Fed Governor Chris Waller had suggested a hike next month even on a soft report and raised the possibility of a 50-basis-point move if inflation came in strong.
As of 6:08 p.m. ET, Polymarket’s “Will there be no change in Fed interest rates after the December 2026 meeting?” traded at 3.55%. That is down about 15 percentage points from roughly 18.5% a day earlier, on about $2.3 million in 24-hour volume.
The quarter-point contract, “Will the Fed increase interest rates by 25 bps after the December 2026 meeting?”, stood at 85.5%, up 6 points from 79.5%, with about $1.6 million traded over the same 24 hours.
The biggest relative jump came in “Will the Fed increase interest rates by 50+ bps after the December 2026 meeting?” It rose about 10 points, from roughly half a percent to 10.75%, on about $1.9 million in 24-hour volume. The two cut brackets sat at 0.35% for 25 bps and 0.25% for 50 bps or more.
How the December contracts settle
All five Polymarket brackets share one set of rules. Each resolves on how many basis points the upper bound of the target federal funds range changes versus its level before the December meeting, using the FOMC statement issued after the Dec. 8–9 meeting as the resolution source.
A change that does not match a listed bracket is rounded up to the nearest 25 basis points, so a 12.5-point move would count as 25. The markets can resolve as soon as the statement is out. If no statement is released by the end date of the next scheduled meeting, they resolve to “No change.”
The starting point is a 4% upper bound. The FOMC raised the range to 3.75%–4% on Sept. 16, its first hike since July 2023. Kalshi’s October contracts later settled with the upper bound above 3.75% but not above 4%, consistent with a hold at the Oct. 27–28 meeting.
Kalshi shows the same shift
Kalshi lists the December meeting as a ladder of threshold contracts rather than brackets. “Will the upper bound of the federal funds rate be above 4.00% following the Fed’s Dec 9, 2026 meeting?” last traded at 96 cents at 6:08 p.m. ET, up from a previous price of 79 cents, with 57,663 contracts traded in 24 hours.
The next rung, “above 4.25%,” lines up with a hike of 50 basis points or more. It last traded at 10 cents, up from a previous 1 cent, on 175,183 contracts, the busiest December strike on the platform.
Kalshi’s rules resolve each rung to Yes if the upper bound published on the Fed’s official website is greater than the strike following the Dec. 9 meeting. Trading is scheduled to close at 1:55 p.m. ET that day. The contracts expire at the first 2:05 p.m. ET after the Fed releases its statement, or one week after the meeting ends.
The two venues are closely aligned. Polymarket’s two hike brackets add up to 96.25%, against 96 cents for Kalshi’s above-4% contract, and both price a half-point or larger move near 10%.
January odds moved further
The repricing reached the following meeting too. Polymarket’s “Will the Fed increase interest rates by 25 bps after the January 2027 meeting?” rose about 30 points, from 17.5% to 47.5%, on about $161,000 in 24-hour volume. Its January no-change contract fell 28 points to 50.5%, with about $169,000 traded.
Those January contracts settle on the FOMC statement after the Jan. 26–27, 2027 meeting and measure the change from the level just before that meeting. A December increase would not count toward them.
Taken together, the December contracts on both platforms now price the meeting less as a choice between holding and hiking and more as a question of size; the half-point contracts moved the most. The January market sits near an even split on whether a further quarter-point increase follows.
Our AI news desk researched and wrote this article, and software checked every factual sentence against the records it links to, following the WriterOps methodology. Report an error.