War Odds & Conflict Prediction Markets
Live prediction market odds on the world's major conflicts: ceasefires, peace deals, escalation, and regime change. Prices are aggregated from Polymarket and Kalshi and updated twice daily. Conflict contracts are now among the highest-volume markets on these platforms. Traders wagered more than $2 billion on Iran war questions alone in the first four months of 2026. A quick view of every tracked conflict is below. Even though wars are not election odds, they do effect the outcome of elections in certain situations. And with billions of dollars bet on them, they are clearly popular. Tap any card to jump to the full breakdown.
Why People Bet on War, and Why the Odds Are Worth Watching
Until recently, there was no real-time, money-backed number for how likely a ceasefire was, or whether one country was about to strike another. You had analysts, polls, and pundits, all of them slow and most of them hedged. Prediction markets changed that. On Polymarket and Kalshi, traders now put real money on the timing of ceasefires, the survival of leaders, the reopening of shipping lanes, and the next country the United States might hit. The resulting prices move within minutes of breaking news.
The scale is hard to overstate. The prediction market industry processed roughly $40 billion in trading volume in 2025, and 2026 opened with geopolitics, not sports or crypto, driving the growth. When U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran in late February 2026, Polymarket recorded a single-day record of around $478 million in volume, with the politics category alone accounting for $220 million of it. One contract, "Will the US strike Iran by...?", pulled more than $500 million in total volume on its own, making it one of the largest geopolitical markets ever created. (Figures as of early-to-mid 2026.)
This page pulls those live odds into one place, organized by conflict, with the context you need to read them honestly. We do not run the markets and we do not take bets. We aggregate the public prices from Polymarket and Kalshi and present them for free. Below is a quick-view strip of the top market in each conflict, then a full section per conflict with a fact box, the live odds, and a plain-English read on what is moving them.
These are real-money prediction markets, and the outcomes they price are human tragedies, not games. We list them because the odds are a genuinely useful, fast-moving signal of what informed traders expect, the same way they are for elections. But wagering on the timing of a ceasefire or whether a country gets invaded is ethically fraught, a point lawmakers have raised loudly, and the prices can move violently on a single headline. Treat what follows as information, not encouragement. If you do trade, understand that the large majority of prediction market accounts lose money over time, and that low-volume conflict markets can be moved by a single participant and should not be read as forecasts.
Russia vs. Ukraine War Odds & Ceasefire Prediction Markets
The market's attention is on whether a durable ceasefire or peace framework lands before year-end. A U.S.-brokered three-day truce around Russia's May Victory Day, paired with a roughly 1,000-per-side prisoner exchange, briefly lifted hopes. But the Kremlin signaled within days that a comprehensive peace remained "a very long way off" absent its core demands on territory and security guarantees. That tension, real diplomatic motion on one hand and hard Russian conditions on the other, is exactly what keeps the ceasefire markets priced well below even money.
These contracts are also a good lesson in reading the fine print. The major Russia vs. Ukraine ceasefire markets only resolve "yes" on a general pause in fighting. Partial deals limited to energy infrastructure, the Black Sea, or humanitarian corridors explicitly do not count. That distinction matters, because several of the short truces announced over the past year would not have satisfied the resolution criteria even though they made headlines. When you see a ceasefire market sitting low, part of what it is pricing is skepticism that any near-term deal will be comprehensive enough to qualify. See our Russia Vs Ukraine Odds And Prediction Markets page.
Iran & Middle East War Odds & Prediction Markets
This is the most heavily traded conflict on the board, by a wide margin. According to an NBC News analysis, traders placed more than $2 billion in Iran war wagers on Polymarket in just the first four months of 2026. The single "US strikes Iran by...?" contract, live since late December 2025, drew over $500 million on its own. On the day of the joint U.S. and Israeli strikes, the platform set an all-time record of roughly $478 million in volume in 24 hours.
The markets here are strikingly specific. Beyond the headline peace-deal questions, traders have priced the exact week a conflict might end, whether U.S. ground forces would enter Iran, whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens to normal traffic, and who would succeed the Supreme Leader. Polymarket's largest completed market in this conflict, "Khamenei out as Supreme Leader by March 31?", swung from the 25 to 50 percent range up to a vertical 100 percent the moment Iranian state television confirmed his death, a $45 million contract resolving in real time as history happened. The current live markets ask whether the U.S. and Iran, and separately Israel and Iran, reach a permanent peace deal by various dates, whether officials meet diplomatically, and whether the U.S. ends up invading Iran before 2027.
Because of that volume and specificity, this is also the conflict that drew the most scrutiny, including allegations of suspiciously well-timed trades around the strikes. We cover that controversy in its own section further down, because it is central to understanding what these markets are and are not. See all of the current Iran war odds here.
Israel & Gaza Odds & Netanyahu Prediction Markets
The most-traded political question tied to this conflict is the tenure of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, specifically whether he leaves office before 2027. The market has moved on his domestic political standing, his ongoing corruption trial, his role in the later phases of the Gaza ceasefire, and the state of his relationship with the U.S. administration. When he agreed to join a U.S.-led oversight body for the ceasefire's second phase, expectations of an imminent resignation fell and the longer-dated "out" prices declined accordingly.
It is worth understanding why a leadership market lives on a war page rather than an elections page. Netanyahu's hold on power is inseparable from the war. The conflict has repeatedly delayed his trial, reshuffled his coalition, and turned foreign policy into the central axis of Israeli politics. The "Netanyahu out" market is really a bet on the political consequences of the war itself, which is why it trades alongside the conflict odds rather than with ordinary election markets. Related markets that appear here over time include questions on ground offensives, hostage outcomes, and ceasefire durability.
China vs. Taiwan Invasion Odds & Prediction Markets
Unlike the others, this is not a shooting war. It is a tail-risk market, and that changes how to read it. Traders assign overwhelming probability to "no" on near-term invasion questions, consistent with U.S. intelligence assessments that Beijing has no fixed timeline and prefers coercion short of war. Recent purges in the PLA's senior ranks have, if anything, complicated China's readiness for a large-scale amphibious operation. So the value here is not in the headline number, which is low and stable. It is in watching that small probability twitch in response to PLA activity, leadership shake-ups, arms-sale announcements, and U.S. and China friction.
This is the clearest example on the page of a market that is more useful as a barometer than as a bet. A move from 6 percent to 9 percent looks tiny, but in probability terms it is a 50 percent jump in perceived risk, the kind of shift that is invisible in a headline but obvious in a price. For anyone tracking Taiwan Strait tensions, the market is a continuously updated thermometer that does not wait for an analyst to publish.
How Accurate Are War Prediction Markets?
The honest answer is better than you would expect, with real caveats. A large study of Polymarket spanning 2.4 million users, more than 500 million trades, and roughly $67 billion in volume between 2022 and 2026 found that prices were genuinely efficient. A contract priced at 50 cents resolved in favor of that outcome about half the time, which is exactly what a well-calibrated market should do. Separately, a Federal Reserve Board working paper found that Kalshi's markets perfectly forecast the federal funds rate on the day of each Fed meeting since 2022, outperforming professional surveys. The mechanism works because traders are risking their own capital, which punishes wishful thinking in a way that punditry never does.
The caveats matter just as much. Calibration across thousands of markets does not mean any single market is right. A 30 percent market that resolves "yes" was not wrong. It was telling you the event was a real but minority possibility. Thinly traded conflict markets can be distorted by one large trader. And markets price what is knowable, not what is hidden. A surprise attack is, by definition, something the crowd has not priced until it leaks. The signal is strongest in high-volume markets watched by many informed participants, and weakest in obscure, low-liquidity ones. Read accordingly. The prices on this page are a fast, unbiased starting point, not an oracle.
Insider Trading and the Ethics of Betting on War
The Iran conflict put a spotlight on the darkest question hanging over these markets. In late February 2026, around the U.S. and Israeli strikes, on-chain analysts flagged that several brand-new Polymarket wallets, created and funded within roughly 24 hours of the attack, had placed suspiciously well-timed bets on U.S. strikes and collectively won well over a million dollars. A separate, widely shared episode involved an anonymous trader who made around $400,000 betting on the capture of Venezuela's former leader hours before it happened.
None of this has been proven to involve actual leaked classified information. Fact-checkers who examined the wallet claims left them unrated for lack of confirmation. But the pattern was alarming enough that U.S. Senator Chris Murphy publicly called it "grossly immoral" and promised legislation to outlaw betting on questions like when the country will next strike a foreign adversary. The criticism is twofold. Profiting from the timing of a war is morally corrosive, and markets on military action could create incentives that are genuinely dangerous if participants have or seek inside information.
We think readers deserve to see that debate plainly rather than have it hidden behind a clean odds widget. The same property that makes these markets useful, that they aggregate the views and information of people with real money on the line, is exactly what makes betting on war ethically loaded. Our position is to present the prices as an information signal, note where they come from, and let you decide what weight they deserve.
Types of War Betting Markets You Will See
Conflict prediction markets tend to fall into a handful of recurring shapes. Knowing the type tells you what actually has to happen for it to resolve, and the resolution fine print is where a lot of apparent mispricing actually lives.
War Odds FAQ
How We Source These War Odds
We pull live data twice daily from the public APIs of Polymarket and Kalshi. For each market we show the implied probability, the midpoint of the live price, expressed as a percentage. We never modify the underlying numbers. When a market resolves or its deadline passes, it drops off this page automatically, and new markets appear as they list. The conflict fact boxes above are maintained by hand and dated. The odds are not. They update on their own.
We do not operate Polymarket or Kalshi and we do not take bets. We aggregate their public data and present it in one place, for free. Conflict markets, especially low-volume ones, can be moved by a single trader and are not forecasts. Betting figures and conflict facts are cited as of the dates noted and will change over time.