New Hampshire Prediction Markets: The One Bet DraftKings’ Monopoly Does Not Control

Yes. As of this update on August 2, 2026, a New Hampshire resident can legally fund an account with a CFTC-registered event-contract exchange and trade, and no state law or court order stands in the way. New Hampshire is not one of the nine states the CFTC has brought suit against to defend the exchanges (those are Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin), it has issued no cease-and-desist letters that have surfaced publicly, its attorney general has filed nothing, and its legislature has passed no bill aimed at these products. The state’s silence is the whole answer.

The reason the silence matters comes down to who has authority. Event contracts on a federally designated exchange are treated by their operators as swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act, a category Congress placed under the CFTC’s exclusive control. Where that framing holds, a state’s gambling code simply does not reach the product, because Concord never had a seat at that table to begin with. New Hampshire has never tested whether it disagrees. Unlike Massachusetts next door, which dragged Kalshi into its highest court, or Rhode Island, which the CFTC had to sue, New Hampshire has let the federal lane run without interference. Availability here is not the product of a New Hampshire victory in court — it is the product of New Hampshire never picking the fight.

To explain why event contracts feel like an escape hatch in this state, you have to see the wall they route around. New Hampshire legalized sports wagering in 2019 through House Bill 480, which created Chapter 287-I of the Revised Statutes Annotated and dropped the entire operation into the lap of the New Hampshire Lottery Commission. Rather than license a field of competing books the way New Jersey or Pennsylvania did, the Lottery ran a competitive procurement and awarded a single statewide mobile contract. DraftKings won it with an aggressive bid: 51 percent of mobile gross gaming revenue to the state, far above the 20-something percent operators pay in open markets. Retail sportsbooks pay the state 50 percent.

Mobile betting went live on December 30, 2019, and it has been a DraftKings-only affair ever since. The original agreement ran through mid-2026 with options to extend, and on February 11, 2026, the Lottery and DraftKings announced a renewal that keeps the arrangement going. In the company’s own words, it was “proud to have secured a contract extension with the New Hampshire Lottery.” The monopoly, in other words, is not a temporary quirk. It is settled policy.

Chapter 287-I also fixed the terms most bettors feel directly. The legal age to wager is 18, unusually low — most states set 21 for mobile sports betting — and betting on New Hampshire college teams, or on any college event physically played inside the state, is prohibited. Everything a New Hampshire resident does at a licensed sportsbook happens inside that one statutory box, run by one company, taxed at one very high rate. Event contracts sit entirely outside the box.

Nothing in Chapter 287-I contemplated a Kalshi or a Polymarket, and that is precisely why those platforms operate here untroubled. The Lottery’s authority runs to “sports betting” as the statute defines it — a wager placed with a licensed operator on the outcome of a sporting event. A CFTC exchange does not present itself as a sportsbook. It lists a binary contract, matches a buyer against a seller, and settles the position when the underlying event resolves. Whether that distinction is honest or a dodge is the national argument, but New Hampshire has never asked a court to rule on it.

The contrast with the state’s own federal circuit is stark. New Hampshire sits in the First Circuit, alongside Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico, and two of those neighbors are among the loudest voices against the exchanges. A federal judge granted Massachusetts authority to act against Kalshi’s sports contracts in January 2026, and the dispute climbed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as Commonwealth v. KalshiEx LLC, docket SJC-13906, with the CFTC weighing in as a friend of the court. Rhode Island drew a federal lawsuit from the CFTC itself on April 2, 2026, after moving to enforce its gambling law against the platforms. New Hampshire shares a courthouse system with both and has done none of it.

The broader legal weather still matters here even though New Hampshire is not making it. The Third Circuit, covering New Jersey, ruled 2-1 on April 6, 2026, in KalshiEX LLC v. Flaherty, No. 25-1922, that sports event contracts are swaps and that federal law preempts state gambling rules as applied to them on a registered exchange. The Ninth Circuit heard the opposite argument out of Nevada on April 16, 2026, and a ruling for Nevada would split the circuits and push the whole question toward the Supreme Court. New Hampshire is a spectator to all of it. If the platforms ultimately lose nationally, the Granite State’s hands-off posture will not save them; if they win, New Hampshire never had to lift a finger.

Here is the detail that no other state’s prediction-market story can claim. DraftKings launched DraftKings Predictions in December 2025, a CFTC-framework event-contract product now live across roughly three dozen states. New Hampshire is one of the handful where it is not offered. Reporting on the product’s footprint as of mid-2026 lists Maine, New Hampshire, Nevada and Ohio among the states left off, and the reason traces straight back to the monopoly. DraftKings already holds the exclusive state sportsbook contract here; layering a competing national event-contract product on top would put the company in tension with the very arrangement that gives it the market. The same compliance-first instinct that keeps FanDuel from offering sports contracts where it runs a sportsbook keeps DraftKings from selling predictions where it runs New Hampshire’s only book.

The practical result is that every exchange a New Hampshire resident can actually use is a DraftKings competitor. Kalshi, the largest of the pure-play exchanges, takes New Hampshire accounts. Polymarket, back onshore in the United States after its 2025 domestic relaunch, is available. Robinhood and Crypto.com distribute event contracts here. FanDuel Predicts, the compliance-first product built with CME Group, reaches New Hampshire as well — and because FanDuel is locked out of the New Hampshire sportsbook by DraftKings’ exclusivity, the usual reason FanDuel withholds sports contracts (it will not compete with its own book) does not obviously apply here, though its exact sports-market menu in the state is worth checking at signup because it changes. The one big name a Granite Stater cannot reach for event contracts is the one name they already know from the sportsbook.

The mechanics feel familiar to anyone who has used the DraftKings app but work differently underneath. A prediction market is a two-sided exchange. Every contract is a yes-or-no claim about a future event — will a given team win, will inflation land above a number, will a candidate carry a state — and it settles for a dollar if correct and nothing if not. The price you pay is the market’s live estimate of the odds. A contract trading at 63 cents is the crowd pricing that outcome at roughly a 63 percent chance; if you are right, each contract pays a dollar, netting 37 cents, and if you are wrong you lose the 63 you put in.

The part that separates this from the DraftKings sportsbook is who is on the other side. At a sportsbook, the house sets the line, takes your bet, and profits from the built-in margin. On an order-book exchange, you are matched against another trader who took the opposite view, and the platform earns a small transaction fee rather than a bookmaker’s edge. That structure lets a New Hampshire trader do things the sportsbook forbids: sell a position, take the “no” side of a market, or close out early at the current price instead of waiting for the event to settle. It also means liquidity, not a risk manager, sets your price — thin markets move fast and fills can slip.

Opening an account looks like opening a brokerage account, because legally it is closer to one. You verify your identity, link a funding method, and trade in dollars. There is no New Hampshire licensing check specific to these platforms, because the platforms are not New Hampshire licensees. That convenience is also the catch, and the section on safety below spells out what a resident gives up by trading outside the Lottery’s supervision.

The menu on a full exchange dwarfs anything the DraftKings sportsbook lists. Sports are the busiest category by far — moneyline-style markets on NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and basketball, soccer, tennis, golf and more, plus season-long questions like a team’s win total or a division title. Because these settle as contracts rather than bets, a New Hampshire trader can back a team in September and sell the position in November if the odds move, something no in-state sportsbook ticket allows.

Beyond sports, the exchanges list markets New Hampshire’s gambling law never imagined. Politics and elections are a core draw, and they carry a specific local flavor: New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary makes it a recurring subject of national election contracts, so residents can find themselves trading on the very races their own state helps launch. Economics markets cover Federal Reserve rate decisions, inflation prints, jobs numbers and GDP. Crypto price levels, corporate earnings, entertainment outcomes such as awards and box-office figures, and cultural events round out the board. Contract categories on individual player injuries, referee decisions and a short list of sensitive topics are the ones federal rulemaking has flagged as candidates for restriction, so the exact menu can shift.

For the wider field beyond New Hampshire, our prediction markets hub covers every CFTC exchange, pick’em app, and offshore market we track, each with a deeper review.

For a New Hampshire resident, the choice between an event contract and the licensed sportsbook is unusually clean, because there is only one sportsbook to compare against. The DraftKings app is a state-supervised product: it operates under Chapter 287-I, its disputes can be raised with the Lottery, it feeds New Hampshire’s self-exclusion tools, and its consumer protections are the ones the state wrote. An event-contract exchange offers none of that state backstop — but it offers pricing and flexibility the monopoly cannot. Two traders set the price on an exchange, so a New Hampshire user is not paying a bookmaker’s margin, and can sell or hedge a position mid-event, neither of which the DraftKings book permits.

The menu difference is just as sharp. The sportsbook is limited to sporting events and cannot, by law, take action on New Hampshire college teams or in-state college games; an exchange lists economics, politics, crypto and culture markets that the Lottery framework does not even contemplate. What the sportsbook gives up in breadth it gains in accountability, and the reverse is true for the exchanges. A resident weighing the two should read our page on New Hampshire online sportsbooks, and, for the wider picture, the guides to states with legal online sportsbooks and online sportsbooks generally.

Most prediction-market guides warn that these exchanges set an 18 minimum while state sportsbooks require 21, opening an age gap that lets younger residents onto unsupervised platforms. That warning barely applies in New Hampshire, because the DraftKings sportsbook here is also 18-and-up under Chapter 287-I. A New Hampshire 18-year-old can already bet legally, so the exchanges are not reaching a younger cohort than the licensed market does. It is one of the few states where the standard age-gap criticism loses its force.

The rest of the safety gap remains real. A CFTC exchange sits outside New Hampshire’s consumer-protection machinery entirely. There is no state self-exclusion registry that covers it, no Lottery complaint process to appeal to, no state-supervised dispute resolution, and no requirement that it honor the responsible-gambling tools the DraftKings contract mandates. If a market resolves in a way a trader disputes, the recourse is the platform’s own terms and, ultimately, federal channels — not Concord. FanDuel Predicts is the notable exception, shipping its own deposit limits, alerts and self-exclusion, but that is a voluntary corporate choice rather than a New Hampshire guarantee. A resident who relies on the Lottery’s self-exclusion program should understand it does not travel to these exchanges.

New Hampshire is one of the friendlier states on this front for a simple reason: it levies no broad personal income tax on wages, and its narrow tax on interest and dividends has been phased out, so a resident’s trading profits are not chased by a state income tax the way they would be in most states. That does not make gains tax-free. Federal tax still applies, and this is where prediction markets get murky. Exchanges such as Kalshi have not issued 1099-B forms for event contracts, the IRS has published no formal classification for these instruments, and whether a profit is gambling income, a capital gain, or a Section 1256 contract remains unsettled as of August 2, 2026. Reporting can also differ between an exchange-native product and one distributed through a brokerage, so a New Hampshire trader should keep independent records of every position rather than wait for a tidy tax form, and should treat any specific position as a question for a tax professional. None of this is tax advice.

New Hampshire’s calm is easiest to appreciate against the states it borders and shares a court system with. Massachusetts, just to the south and in the same First Circuit, went after Kalshi’s sports contracts and pushed the fight to its highest court in Commonwealth v. KalshiEx LLC, No. SJC-13906. Rhode Island, also in the First Circuit, moved to enforce its gambling law and became one of the nine states the CFTC sued in response. Maine, the neighbor to the northeast, is quiet like New Hampshire but reaches its result through a tribal-exclusivity betting law rather than a corporate monopoly. Vermont borders New Hampshire to the west and has stayed out of the litigation as well.

What makes New Hampshire distinct within that group is the structure it is protecting. Massachusetts and Rhode Island are fighting to defend licensed, competitive betting markets. New Hampshire has no competitive market to defend — it has a single-operator monopoly that already sends the state half of every dollar, so the political incentive to attack the exchanges is weaker here than in states with a field of licensees lobbying for protection. The one operator that might complain about event-contract competition, DraftKings, is the same company that chose not to sell prediction contracts in the state. That alignment helps explain why New Hampshire has felt no urgency to act.

The most likely trigger is national, not local. If the Ninth Circuit rules for Nevada and splits the circuits, or if the Supreme Court eventually takes a sports event-contract case and rules against the platforms, availability in New Hampshire could contract regardless of what Concord does or does not do. A federal loss for the exchanges would reach every state at once. Conversely, the Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act introduced in the Senate in March 2026 would, if passed, bar these exchanges from listing sports and casino-style contracts nationwide and moot the state-by-state map entirely.

The homegrown triggers are quieter. New Hampshire’s legislature could decide the DraftKings monopoly deserves protection from event-contract competition and write the exchanges into Chapter 287-I, or the attorney general could follow Massachusetts and Rhode Island’s lead with an enforcement action — neither of which has happened or been signaled as of August 2, 2026. The renewed DraftKings contract also gives the state a financial stake in the sportsbook’s health; if the Lottery ever concluded that event contracts were eating into the 51 percent it collects, that revenue interest could change the calculus. For now, the watch list is short and the needle has not moved. Readers tracking the wider legal picture can start with our guide to whether online gambling is legal in the United States.

• New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated, Chapter 287-I (Sports Betting): gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXIV/287-I/287-I-mrg.htm
• New Hampshire Lottery, DraftKings Mobile Sportsbook: nhlottery.com/sports
• Commodity Futures Trading Commission: cftc.gov
• CDC Gaming, New Hampshire DraftKings contract extension (Feb. 11, 2026): cdcgaming.com
• Paul, Weiss analysis of KalshiEX LLC v. Flaherty, No. 25-1922 (Third Circuit): paulweiss.com
• CBS Sports, prediction-market legal status by state: cbssports.com
• Main state guide: New Hampshire gambling sites | State index: all states