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Discussed in this piece:

Written and researched by Omar El Safy, edited by Pet Berisha.

Parlays print money for sportsbooks. And they’ve become the fastest-growing product by notional volume offered by prediction markets, this time dubbed ‘combos’.

But are they lucrative for prediction markets? As we covered on Predicted in May 2026, the answer was not as lucrative as they are for sportsbooks, because of the market architecture and who holds the risk.

A sportsbook takes the other side of your bet, so when you lose, it keeps everything. If you win, the entire time the parlay/combo has run, the sportsbook has held that liability in the form of cash + netting + hedging. On Kalshi, market makers price your combo and carry the risk, and Kalshi charges a fee on top. Market makers do this via a request for quote (RFQ).

In June 2026 we looked at Kalshi's parlay data and found three things.

At the time, Kalshi was the only venue with parlay data we could look at. Since then, both Polymarket’s US and international exchanges and Novig have launched the same product.

Since launch, Kalshi's combos account for $46.56B of notional volume. The handle (cash traded) that creates that volume is $3.97B.

Every contract settles at $1 no matter what you paid for it, so a parlay bought at 1¢ counts as a full dollar of notional volume.

Across the whole product, $1 of cash is roughly $11.70 of reported notional volume. On the rest of Kalshi, it is $2.30.

The gap is wider on parlays because of the legs. Every leg you add lengthens the odds and lowers the price of the parlays. So people stake small amounts chasing large payouts, and a $1 stake buys a lot more contracts. Each of those contracts is recorded as a full dollar of volume.

Most of it is recent, with $40.50B of notional on $3.52B of handle in the last eight months alone.

In our last article, the data we collected only went up to May 2026, when the market recorded $4.9B of notional volume and $463M of handle. In July 2026 alone, activity reached $15B of notional volume and $1.2B of handle, 3.1x and 2.7x the May 2026 levels.

Polymarket International's parlays are growing too, from a much smaller starting point.

For the first time, we can compare venues side by side, because four of them have published trade data for the same 14 days in August 2026.

Novig relaunched as a CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) regulated exchange on 4 August 2026, so its numbers cover its first fortnight, and Polymarket US only began testing parlays on 5 August 2026.

Across the four, parlays accounted for $7.25B of notional volume on $529M of handle in those 14 days, and Kalshi accounts for 98% of it.

For Kalshi, parlays were 42.3% of its notional over the period, against $512M of handle. The daily share moved between 36% and 47% across the fortnight.

For Novig, 34.7% of notional, on $6.0M of handle, in its first 14 days as a prediction market.

For Polymarket International, 1.9% of notional, on $9.9M of handle.

For Polymarket US, parlays are just coming out of beta and had no volume until 12 August 2026, then reached 2.8% of its notional by 17 August 2026, on $0.4M of handle.

Why does the parlay share of notional volume differ by venue?

All four venues price parlays the same way. The user builds a ticket and it goes out to market makers through an RFQ.

Three things could explain the gap.

Kalshi and Novig both run parlays above a third of notional, at 42.3% and 34.7%.

Polymarket US is the sports-heavy half of Polymarket's business. Its parlays launched on 5 August 2026, and within 12 days their share of notional had passed the international exchange's, at 2.8% against 1.9%.

Four venues now sell parlays. Three of them, Kalshi, Novig and Polymarket US, are built for US customers. The fourth, Polymarket International, is onchain and targets a global user base.

Every contract pays $1 if it wins, so what you pay is what the market thinks your chances are.

Two numbers describe what people are buying. The median trade a customer makes is what the typical user buys, and the volume-weighted average price is the handle divided by notional, which is the average price across every contract traded. When the average sits below the median, longshot tickets are producing most of the volume, because a dollar buys far more contracts at 2¢ than at 30¢.

The typical Kalshi parlay is 8.8¢, about 10/1 in traditional odds. Polymarket International's is 29.3¢, about 5/2.

In sportsbook terms, at standard odds, a two-leg parlay comes in 27.4% of the time and a four-leg 7.5%. Polymarket International's median customer is buying roughly a double. Kalshi's median customer is buying something between a treble and a four-fold.

Novig has the widest gap between the two measures. Its typical ticket is 12.3¢, about 7/1, but its volume-weighted average is 6.3¢, about 15/1.

Kalshi's parlays keep getting longer. In June 2026, we flagged buyers reaching for longer odds, and the typical parlay now prices at 8.6¢, down about a fifth since October 2025 and 44% off its March 2026 peak.

Tickets under 2¢ have gone from 42.6% of parlay notional in October 2025 to 62.3% in August 2026.

Polymarket International is moving the other way. Its typical parlay was 16.6¢ when combos went live and is 29.7¢ now.

The economics for the exchange still work, with the ceiling we described in May 2026.

Sportsbooks in New Jersey held 24.2¢ per dollar staked. On Kalshi, the hold splits. Of the $117M retail lost on parlays between January and April 2026, $82M went to market makers and $35M to Kalshi, which is 4.5¢ per dollar staked for the exchange. A sportsbook makes about 5.4x more on the same wager.

For scale, a sportsbook parlay holds 20%-30% of stakes, compared to 4%-5% on a regular bet. Kalshi's total hold of 14.7% sits below the bottom of that range.

Kalshi takes $4.25 per $100 staked on a parlay, and Novig $2.19 for much the same bet.

That is the exchange's cut. On Kalshi, the market maker's spread takes roughly twice what the exchange does, and none of these venues publishes that spread, so this compares rate only.

The rates are not close. Kalshi charges 7% of price times one minus price, Polymarket's US exchange charges 6%, Polymarket International has charged 5% on sports since July 2026, and Novig charges 3%.

Kalshi is the biggest parlay market in the country by a distance, and the one with the highest rate card.

Combos are also sold where we cannot see the data. DraftKings launched parlays in May 2026 on Crypto.com's CDNA (Crypto.com Derivatives North America) rails and has since moved them onto its own exchange, DKeX.

It said on its Q2 2026 earnings call that more than half of its Predictions customers had used parlays and that they were approaching 20% of Predictions consumer volume, with no underlying volume disclosed.

Robinhood runs its parlays through Kalshi, so that volume is already inside our Kalshi figures. CDNA, which clears event contracts for four brands including Fanatics, Totalis on Solana and XO Market also sell them, and none publishes a number we can separate out.

Sports betting is licensed state by state, while prediction markets are regulated federally by the CFTC.

Kalshi lists sports contracts under that federal licence, so it can take a wager from someone in a state where no sportsbook is allowed.

As of August 2026, sports betting is legal in some form in 39 states plus DC and Puerto Rico, and online in 30 of them. It does not exist in Alabama, Alaska, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, or Utah.

Today, a customer in Dallas (Texas) or Los Angeles (California) cannot open the DraftKings sportsbook and bet on the NFL. But they can open Kalshi and buy the same outcome as a contract.

In May 2026 we said the growth of Kalshi combos was more about regulatory arbitrage than the product. That cannot be proven, since Kalshi does not publish volume by state.

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