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Is Polymarket Legal in the US? The Comeback, the Rules, and the State Fights

Three years ago Polymarket paid a federal penalty and shut its doors to Americans. Today it runs a US exchange with the CFTC's blessing. Both of those things are true, and understanding the order they happened in answers most questions about whether you can use it.

Last verified: July 12, 2026.

Start with the thing most articles get wrong: there are effectively two Polymarkets.

Polymarket US is a CFTC-regulated exchange, open to Americans, that came online after the company bought a federally licensed exchange and clearinghouse and won regulatory approval to relaunch. Trading on it is legal in most states, with the same sports-contract fights that Kalshi faces in a handful of them.

Polymarket's global platform is the crypto-based market the internet knows, running on blockchain rails outside the US. Americans are excluded from it, and that exclusion is the legacy of a 2022 federal enforcement action.

If someone asks "is Polymarket legal," the answer depends on which one they mean and where they are standing. For US readers, the answer since late 2025 is yes, through the US exchange, in most states.

Exile: how Polymarket lost the US

Polymarket launched in 2020 as a crypto-native prediction market and grew fast, but it did so without registering as an exchange. In January 2022 the CFTC ordered it to stop offering unregistered event contracts to Americans and imposed a civil penalty, and Polymarket geo-blocked US users. For the next three years it operated as an offshore platform, famous during the 2024 election cycle, and officially closed to the country most of its headlines came from.

That history matters for one reason: it is why Polymarket's US legality today is built on a formal CFTC designation rather than on a promise. The company did not sneak back in. It bought a licensed exchange and got its old regulator's formal sign-off.

Return: the QCEX deal and the CFTC's sign-off

The comeback happened in three verifiable steps.

July 21, 2025: Polymarket closed its acquisition of QCX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange, together with QC Clearing, a licensed clearinghouse, for $112 million. That purchase gave Polymarket what it never had in 2022: federal licenses.

November 25, 2025: the CFTC issued an Amended Order of Designation permitting Polymarket US to operate as a fully regulated exchange, with the surveillance, supervision, clearing, and reporting obligations that apply to any US designated market.

May 12, 2026: Polymarket US dropped its waitlist and opened to US users through its iOS app.

So the federal question is settled in the most concrete way possible: the same agency that pushed Polymarket out of the US in 2022 formally authorized its return. On the federal level, Polymarket US is not in a gray area. It is a designated contract market, holding the same status Kalshi does.

The state fights: same war, different foxholes

What is not settled is the state layer, and here Polymarket inherited the war Kalshi started. A number of states contend that sports outcome contracts are unlicensed sports betting no matter what federal designation the exchange holds. The full legal argument, including the April 2026 federal appeals ruling that sided with the platforms and the July 2026 New York ruling that went the other way, is covered in the hub: Are prediction markets legal?

Polymarket-specific developments in that fight, as of the verification date:

Nevada has moved against Polymarket directly: the Gaming Control Board blocked its sports offerings alongside Kalshi's, and the cases are on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
Michigan has moved against both platforms, with different results so far: a state court ordered Kalshi to pause sports contracts on June 30, 2026, while a federal judge separately denied Polymarket's and Robinhood's bids to block Michigan enforcement. Watch this one; the litigation continues on both tracks.
Minnesota passed an outright ban on prediction market platforms, with felony provisions, effective August 1, 2026. It covers both platforms, and the CFTC is suing to block it.
Rhode Island sued both platforms in May 2026.
Washington attempted enforcement against both; emergency motions failed on both sides and the situation is unsettled.

Notice what is missing from that list: most of the country. In the large majority of states, Polymarket US operates with no pending challenge. And several of the loudest state actions (Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York) currently name Kalshi rather than Polymarket, mostly because Kalshi was first to market with sports contracts and became the test case. The legal principles at stake do not distinguish between the two exchanges, so a final ruling against Kalshi in those states would likely apply to Polymarket the same way, and vice versa.

What you can and cannot do, practically

If you are in the US: you can trade on Polymarket US wherever it is available, at 18 or older. Where a court has restricted contracts, the app simply stops offering them, so the menu you see already matches the rules where you live. And when states have gone after anyone in these fights, it has been the exchanges themselves, not the people trading on them.

What you cannot do: use a VPN to reach the global platform from the US. That violates Polymarket's terms of service, and it puts you on a venue where you have no US regulatory recourse if something goes wrong. The regulated US exchange exists; use that one.

One structural difference from Kalshi worth knowing: the US exchange operates on an intermediated model under its CFTC order, built to connect with brokerages and traditional market infrastructure. For you as a trader, the experience is an app with an order book.

Where this is heading

Polymarket's US future rides on the same three tracks as the rest of the industry. The appellate courts decide whether states can touch sports contracts on federally designated exchanges at all; a split between circuits likely sends it to the Supreme Court. The CFTC's proposed event-contract rules from June 2026 would formally bless the mainstream sports markets (game outcomes, tournament advancement, statistics) while banning contracts on injuries, officiating, and single plays. And a handful of states will keep testing bans, with Minnesota's August 1 law as the bluntest attempt yet.

None of that changes the present tense: Polymarket US is a federally regulated exchange, live in most of the country, three years after being locked out entirely. Whatever happens in the state courts, for US traders the offshore gray-zone era is over.

Educational information about the law as of the date above, not legal, financial, or tax advice. Prediction markets involve risk of loss, and their legal status varies by location and changes over time.