What States Are Prediction Markets Legal In?

North Carolina stands alone as the first — and so far only — state to formally recognize CFTC-regulated prediction markets in its own law. Everywhere else, “legal” means something narrower but still real: the markets are federally registered, they are accessible, and the state has not moved against them. That is the status in the large majority of the country.

It is worth being precise about what this bucket does and does not mean. “Operating with no active challenge” is not the same as an affirmative state blessing. In these thirty-three states, lawmakers and attorneys general have simply not acted — no lawsuit, no cease-and-desist, no ban bill signed into law. The federal registration is doing the work, and the state has stayed on the sidelines. Three of these states carry an asterisk precisely because the sidelines are getting crowded: Florida’s Attorney General has publicly targeted the sector, Montana pursued a contempt path earlier before markets became reachable again, and Utah bans all forms of gambling and is openly hostile even though the CFTC-registered products remain accessible. Treat those three as the most likely to shift out of the “available” column next.

Operating Under CFTC Oversight, No Active State Challenge (33 States)

In these states, CFTC-regulated exchanges are live and reachable, and no state authority has sued, enjoined, or moved to ban them as of August 2026. A few carry a footnote worth knowing before you play — noted inline.

Several states have tried to ban prediction markets. Not one of those attempts is currently standing as enforceable law. The single state that passed an outright statutory ban is Minnesota — and a federal judge enjoined it before it could bite. So the accurate framing is not “banned states” but “attempted bans, all currently blocked, enjoined, or on appeal.”

That does not mean the contested states are risk-free. Kentucky’s HB 904 bars licensed sportsbooks from contracting with Kalshi and Polymarket, and several states have live TROs and cease-and-desist orders aimed at sports contracts specifically. But an individual accessing a CFTC-regulated market today is not doing so in the face of an enforceable state ban anywhere. Those live enforcement efforts are catalogued in the next section.

The CFTC has taken the extraordinary step of suing nine states to stop their bans: Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, New Mexico, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. Seven more — New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Nevada, Maryland, and Massachusetts — are pressing their own enforcement or appeals. In most of them the markets remain live pending the outcome.

* Footnoted states are accessible but carry an elevated-risk note: Florida’s AG has publicly targeted the sector, Montana chased contempt earlier, and Utah bans all gambling and is hostile. Read the linked guide before relying on availability.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulates derivatives — including “swaps” — under the Commodity Exchange Act, a federal regime that claims exclusive jurisdiction over the products it covers. Prediction-market operators argue their event contracts are swaps, which would mean states cannot regulate or ban them at all. States counter that sports event contracts are functionally sports betting, a matter they have always governed under state gambling law. That single disagreement — are these federally regulated swaps, or state-regulated gambling? — is the hinge every case turns on.

Because the products are federally registered, the exchanges operate nationwide today. The CFTC has gone further, suing nine states to stop them from banning the contracts. Meanwhile the states are pushing back in their own courts. The result is a genuine circuit-level split now moving toward the Supreme Court.

Two features make this fight unusual. First, the federal regulator is suing the states, not the other way around — the CFTC is affirmatively defending the operators’ right to list these contracts. Second, the money involved is enormous: Kalshi alone reported more than $17 billion in trading volume in May 2026, and Kalshi and Polymarket together were running roughly $220 billion in monthly volume by late June. That scale is why states see lost tax revenue and lost control, and why the industry is fighting so hard to keep the federal shield intact. The outcome will not just decide whether you can trade a Super Bowl contract in Ohio; it will decide who regulates a market measured in the hundreds of billions.

Prediction markets occupy the strangest position in American gambling: federally live everywhere, formally recognized in one state, and fought tooth-and-nail in sixteen. The reason no competitor maps this cleanly is that the map keeps moving — a permanent injunction in Arizona one week, an enjoined ban in Minnesota the next, a Supreme Court cert petition after that. What stays constant is the underlying question of whether sports event contracts are federal swaps or state gambling, and until a higher court answers it, accessibility and legal certainty will not always line up.

Use this page as your index, then go one level deeper for the state that matters to you. Every state above links to a full local guide, and the hub ties the products, the operators, and the law together.