Robinhood Prediction Markets Review

It fits Robinhood customers who want to trade football or the 2026 midterms without moving money to another company. Cash moves between the brokerage and event-contract balances automatically, and a winning contract is withdrawable within one business day of settlement. Support chat is open around the clock, and the app's 28 category pages hold more than 4,000 events.

Traders who want a desktop screen or an API should look elsewhere, because event contracts trade only in the iOS and Android app and the website shows prices without taking orders. Nevada, Maryland and Michigan residents can't open sports positions. Anyone trading Kalshi's own contracts pays less at Kalshi directly, and sports traders who want a sportsbook-owned app can compare DraftKings Predictions.

Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, the broker behind the app's prediction markets, takes each order and passes it to the CFTC-regulated exchange that lists the contract. Kalshi lists most categories, and Rothera lists NFL and MLB game winners along with elections. Crypto.com's U.S. exchange has listed some football contracts since Sept. 8, 2026, and ForecastEx lists weather and metals markets. Robinhood first offered event contracts on the 2024 presidential election and opened its prediction markets hub in March 2025.

Every contract has a Yes side and a No side priced between 1¢ and 99¢, and a standard contract pays $1 to the winning side at settlement. Ties, cancellations and similar edge cases can pay other amounts under the exchange's rules. A Yes contract at 30¢ implies about a 30% chance, and the matching No sits near 70¢. Getting from sign-up to cash takes six steps.

1. Open an individual Robinhood brokerage account
2. Tap Yes or No on any event to apply to Robinhood Derivatives
3. Fund the account with settled cash
4. Buy Yes or No with a limit order in contracts or dollars
5. Sell before the event ends, or hold until the contract settles
6. Withdraw the payout to a bank or card

Positions are fully paid up front, so there's no margin and no call for more money while you hold one. Robinhood's crypto trading uses a separate account with its own fees.

Yes. Robinhood Derivatives is registered with the CFTC as a futures commission merchant and is a member of the National Futures Association, and each of the four exchanges it routes to is a CFTC-designated contract market with a registered clearing house.

Robinhood controls Rothera, the former LedgerX exchange renamed in January 2026, through a joint venture with Susquehanna International Group. As part of the September 2026 routing deal, Robinhood Markets is also taking equity stakes in Crypto.com and OG.com, which gives it an interest in two of the four exchanges it sends orders to.

The open disputes are with states that treat sports contracts as unlicensed betting under their gaming laws, and three of them have stopped Robinhood's sports contracts. Nevada has had no new sports contracts since Dec. 1, 2025, and after the Ninth Circuit ruled against Robinhood on Aug. 28, 2026, Robinhood asked the Supreme Court on Sept. 10 to hear the case. Maryland's gaming regulator issued a cease-and-desist order on April 7, 2025. In Michigan, an agreement announced Sept. 9, 2026 ended new sports contracts that day and closes open positions by Oct. 9.

Connecticut issued cease-and-desist orders in December 2025 and September 2026, and Missouri's attorney general sent a letter on Sept. 16, 2026 giving Robinhood 30 days to stop or get a license. Wisconsin and Kentucky have sued, as has the City of Baltimore, and customer class actions claim sports contracts are illegal gambling. All of those cases are pending. For a trader outside those three states, every market category is open, and the risk is losing access to sports contracts if another state wins its case.

You need to be a U.S. resident aged 18 or older with an individual Robinhood brokerage account. The event-contract account is a separate application to Robinhood Derivatives, started by tapping Yes or No on any event, and approval considers your trading experience and investment profile as well as your state. Repeated failed applications, or switching event contracts off and back on, can trigger a 30-day wait.

Beyond your address, the app checks where you're standing, so being in a restricted state brings up a “stricter area” error even for a resident of another state, and traders near a state line can hit it too.

U.S. State Availability as of September 2026

Robinhood's help pages disagree on Maryland, with one saying residents can't trade sports contracts and another saying they can't trade event contracts at all. An approved account holding settled cash can trade the same day, but a new customer should plan on the approval step and 1–5 business days for a bank transfer to clear.

On Sept. 24, 2026, the 28 category pages listed 4,175 unique events. Some appear on two pages, so the table below, which counts by page, adds up to slightly more. Football leads with 1,152 college games and futures and 696 NFL events, and the other live sports markets add 1,430 more, led by tennis at 366. The 2026 midterm election markets number 475, and the app gives them their own page for state and federal races.

Robinhood has no sportsbook, so sports betting on Robinhood means trading sports contracts. Each game winner, spread or prop is a Yes/No contract priced by other traders on an exchange, with no bookmaker setting odds. Multi-outcome events such as a championship winner or a Senate race list one contract per outcome, and threshold ladders cover temperatures and point totals. Preset combos pair outcomes the app chooses. Custom combos on pro football and basketball take up to 10 legs and trade as one contract that fills in full or not at all. Short-dated markets include 15-minute crypto prices and live in-game contracts.

Each order joins the book of the exchange that lists the contract, so a Kalshi-listed contract on Robinhood trades against the same orders as on Kalshi. Kalshi's 12 most active markets priced between 10¢ and 90¢ on Sept. 23, 2026 had a median spread of 1¢ between the best bid and best ask, and the median market held $72,580 of orders within 2¢ of the price.

Rothera, which lists NFL and MLB game winners, and Crypto.com's exchange, which lists many college football games, don't publish a full order book. Their contracts show only the best bid and ask on Robinhood's public event pages, with the number of contracts waiting at each price. On Sept. 24, 2026, Rothera's Green Bay contract against Atlanta showed 68¢ bid and 71¢ asked.

Orders on Robinhood are limit orders. Contract orders can be immediate-or-cancel, which fills at once or cancels, or good-til-date, which rests until 3 a.m. ET the next day. Dollar orders are always immediate-or-cancel and only open positions. Opening orders are in whole contracts, and some markets price in tenths of a cent. Traders report canceled orders on fast, short-dated contracts, which is how an immediate-or-cancel order behaves when the price moves before it reaches the book. Selling early works whenever someone bids, and custom combos can be closed only if the exchange quotes one.

Since June 1, 2026, the commission has been 10% × price × (1 − price) per contract, or 5% with a $5-a-month Robinhood Gold subscription. Each order's commission is rounded up to the next cent and capped at 1¢ per contract. The cap binds between about 12¢ and 88¢ without Gold, so any contract priced in that range pays a flat cent. Gold only lowers the bill below about 28¢ or above about 72¢. On 100 contracts at 10¢, the commission is 45¢ with Gold and 90¢ without.

The exchange fee comes on top, on both the buy and the sell. Kalshi and ForecastEx each charge 1¢ per contract on Robinhood orders. Rothera charges 2% × price × (1 − price) with a 1¢ minimum per order, which works out to 0.5¢ a contract at 50¢. No exchange on Robinhood charges more than 1¢ a contract, Crypto.com's included.

Buying 100 contracts at 50¢ and selling them at 60¢ makes $10 before fees.

On the Kalshi contract, Robinhood's 1¢ commission and Kalshi's 1¢ fee come to $2.00 each way. On Rothera the sell side costs $1.48, since Rothera's fee shrinks as the price moves away from 50¢.

Robinhood comes out cheaper on Rothera contracts near 50¢, and costs more on every Kalshi contract, most of all at long odds. At 10¢ a Kalshi contract costs 1.9¢ a side through Robinhood without Gold, or 1.45¢ with it, and about 0.6¢ on Kalshi. The app blocks any order where fees would push the cost to $1 or more, since a contract that costs $1 can't return a profit.

Deposits

Every deposit method is free, with no minimum. Instant Deposits, which let brokerage customers buy stock before a bank transfer clears, don't work for event contracts. Only settled cash buys a contract, so fund a few days before a big game or use a debit card or wire.

Withdrawals

The 1.75% fee has a $1 minimum and a $150 maximum. Withdrawing to a different bank than the one you funded from within 60 days of a deposit can require bank statements.

Event-contract cash sits in its own balance, apart from your stock and crypto cash, and Robinhood sweeps money between them automatically. Once an exchange confirms a result, the payout reaches that balance and becomes withdrawable within one business day. Most sports contracts pay out within one to two business days of the game's end, and elections can take much longer. A game that settles on a Friday night pays out as withdrawable cash on Monday.

The listing exchange writes each contract's terms, names the data source and decides the result. The exchange's result stands even when a sports app or news site shows a different score, and Robinhood has no power to change it. The terms for any contract sit under About on its event page, including whether “above 100” means more than 100 or 100 and up.

A tied pro football game or a boxing draw pays 50¢ to each side. Depending on the exchange's rules, a tennis walkover settles at the last traded price or as No for the player who withdrew, and a stat contract on a player who is ruled out can be voided or settled at a fallback such as 50¢. When a game is canceled, Rothera settles NFL game contracts at fair market value, while Crypto.com's exchange uses the volume-weighted average price before the cancellation. In a combo, a leg with a nonstandard payout multiplies through, so two legs that each settle at 50¢ cap the payout at 25¢.

An exchange can pause trading to clarify an unclear market, and a halt can stop you from selling a position. Filled trades are final even when placed by mistake. Complaints against Robinhood Derivatives itself go to arbitration under National Futures Association rules or to a CFTC reparations claim, the agency's customer-complaint process. You can open an account without signing the arbitration agreement. Claims have a one-year limit, or two years for reparations.

Each exchange sets its own insider-trading and prohibited-trader rules and keeps a list of people barred from trading, and Robinhood can restrict anyone whose job could give them inside information.

Money in the event-contract balance sits with Robinhood Derivatives, the broker in the table above, in a segregated customer account for cleared swaps. On July 31, 2026, that account held $149.0 million against $26.2 million required. The account isn't covered by SIPC or FDIC insurance, and if the broker failed, customer money would be handled under the CFTC's bankruptcy rules for commodity brokers.

Access uses the standard Robinhood login with two-factor authentication, and the account has the brokerage's full identity verification.

Trading happens only in the Robinhood mobile app for iOS and Android. The website shows prices and contract terms for every event without taking orders, and Robinhood Legend, the desktop platform, doesn't list event contracts. There's no event-contract API. Robinhood's AI-agent trading covers stocks, options and crypto only.

Inside the app, a dedicated hub filters football by week and team and shows live game data, and the midterms have their own page for state and federal races. A realized profit-and-loss view shows prediction-market results by period but leaves fees out. A toggle hides sports markets from the home screen.

Robinhood doesn't issue a 1099 for event contracts or report them to the IRS, because the IRS hasn't issued guidance on them. An event contracts annual statement arrives in late January or early February, listing every trade with its cost and its net result after fees. The statement isn't a tax form, so you enter the numbers on your return yourself, and the tax treatment of prediction-market gains is still unsettled.

Filtering account history to event contracts shows each trade and payout along with its fees.

In-app chat is open around the clock, and phone help comes as a callback, usually within 30 minutes, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET on weekdays for investing questions.

Each event caps holdings per side, generally at 50,000 contracts, and Robinhood Derivatives can set lower limits on any account. Transfer limits apply across all Robinhood accounts, with ACH withdrawals up to $250,000.

Hiding sports markets with the toggle doesn't stop you trading them. Full self-exclusion from every event contract goes through support, with open positions closed first and a support review needed to reverse it. When an exchange halts a market, open positions stay frozen until trading resumes or the contract settles under that exchange's rules.